A STAUNCH CIVIL LIBERTARIAN GIVES A THUMBS-UP

There surely are people more passionately committed to the
ever-besieged principles of civil liberties, but I don't think I know
any of them.

It's hard to say which I loathe more -- the endless assaults on those
principles, or the clueless apologists for the assaulters. I'm talking
about the people who can always be relied on to sneer at fundamental
rights when that pesky Constitution thing gets in the way of some
fast-track version of what they think of as justice. And I always get
amused/annoyed every time the Supreme Court's "conservative" wing
hands down another decision enhancing government powers at the expense
of the individual.

Unlike Michael Douglas in "The American President," I can't say I'm a
card-carrying member of the ACLU (does the ACLU actually have a
"card"?), but it's an organization I admire even though I deplore some
of the people and organizations whose rights it defends. I also like
the ACLU -- and I freely admit this -- because it so infuriates so
many of the people who infuriate me.

I have despised the so-called War on Drugs from the outset. It's a
useless black hole into which we've poured billions, with precious
little to show for it. We're still refusing to learn the lesson we
refused to learn almost a century ago, when we blamed booze for the
criminal empire a stupid law against booze created.

Those are more than good enough reasons for despising the War on
Drugs, but for me not the main one. That would be the breathtakingly
cavalier way the Bill of Rights was tossed by the roadside like so
much litter from a car window. I remain convinced that the
constitutional recklessness of the drug obsession of the '80s and '90s
set the stage for the worst abuses of the Patriot Act, and nothing has
yet convinced me otherwise.

I share the above as preface to this: I have looked at the DNA testing
legislation of Sen. Josh McKoon, R-Columbus, as closely as my
non-legal mind can process it, and I have to say it doesn't bother
this civil libertarian's consciousness or conscience even a little
bit.

McKoon offered his own detailed rationale for it in these pages a week
ago. But the short version is that people arrested on felony charges
in Georgia would have their DNA collected via the non-invasive
procedure of an oral swab, provided a judge or magistrate determines
probable cause. About half the states have similar laws already, as
does the federal government. Somebody who has provided a DNA sample
and is later acquitted could have that sample removed from the database.

The bill has already been passed by the Senate, but is unlikely to get
through the House this year. That leaves plenty of time for debating
and fine-tuning. If somebody can make a compelling case for how DNA
testing differs in anything other than scientific precision from
fingerprinting -- which, by the way, does not require a judge's order
- -- I might be convinced I'm wrong.

Barring that, it looks like a common-sense tool for ensuring more
convictions of real criminals, which is probably what appeals to most
of the bill's supporters. It appeals to me, too.

What appeals to me even more would be reading fewer of these
atrociously commonplace stories of guys sprung by DNA evidence after
10, 15, 20 years of correctional hell for crimes they didn't commit.
If the frequency of such accounts -- and the fact that only outfits
like the Innocence Project seem to give a damn -- doesn't make us
sick, we're collectively losing our capacity for shame.

If you want to search my home, my car or my person, get a warrant. If
you arrest me for a felony I didn't commit, get a swab. Wrongful
imprisonment is a pretty serious civil liberties violation.