Orin Kerr asks whether new technology will lead to more crimes being solved.
(Maybe a better question is, will it lead to more crimes being solved correctly?)
Penn lawprof Paul Robinson, one of the best crimlaw professors in the country, has a very short essay up on SSRN entitled Criminal Justice in the Information Age: A Punishment Theory Paradox. The essay is a thought experiment about a possible future of criminal law, in which "most crimes are solved and most perpetrators caught and punished." Robinson doesn't claim that the future will look this way, only that it might... I don't think that's right, though. Technology almost never works in a straight line like that. For every technology that makes it easier for the police to catch criminals, there are countertechnologies that make it harder for police to catch them. As DNA testing becomes more common, defendants will learn to control the DNA they leave at crime scenes – intentionally leaving the DNA of others behind, for example...
Hmmmm... GATTACA, anyone?
I was leafing through an old Science magazine and saw an article showing that bite mark evidence is nowhere near as conclusive as it had been presented. At least one person, convicted on the basis of bite-mark comparisons, has been freed because someone else's DNA was in the bite mark.
And if the person who uses your password or your fingerprint to gain access to a computer is presumed to be you, how do you deal with password thieves or tricks that allow people to fake fingerprints?
Maybe people who object to pervasive changes in law enforcement techniques aren't all people trying to hide their criminal activities after all. Maybe there are legitimate concerns.
No comments:
Post a Comment