There’s a 0.00002% Chance You’ve Got the Wrong Man

Guest Post by Ann Coulter

The use of DNA to arrest Bryan Kohberger for the murder of four college students in Idaho reminds me that it’s time to bring the death penalty back in a big way.

Notwithstanding the absence of a single example, the possibility of executing the “wrong man” has been the left’s main line against the death penalty for decades. It’s the only argument that has ever lessened Americans’ support for capital punishment.

Well, guess what? Thanks to the miracle of DNA, now there’s no risk! The murderer can usually be identified with greater than 99.99% accuracy.

Good news, right? Nope! As we now know (also with 99.99% accuracy), liberals never cared about executing the innocent. They just want to spring killers.

Until fairly recently, DNA was a one-way ratchet, used to free criminals, but rarely to catch and convict them.

Recall that DNA fingerprinting was only invented in 1984. The first time DNA was ever used as evidence in a U.S. court was in 1987. Courts weren’t sure what to make of this “novel” technology, and of course, it was treated like witchcraft by the O.J. jury in 1995.

Back then, genetic evidence was used primarily to overturn jury verdicts from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s by poking holes in the prosecution’s theory of the crime.

The media whooped about every overturned conviction, falsely claiming the prisoner had been PROVED INNOCENT.

Hardly.

Suppose a child molester/murderer was convicted in 1998 based on the following evidence:

— Witnesses saw him abduct the child;

— Tire tracks by the body matched those on the defendant’s truck;

— His knife blade corresponded to the victim’s wounds;

— The child’s teddy bear was found in the defendant’s truck bed;

— When arrested, the accused had a written suicide note in his pocket, confessing to the crime;

— A strand of hair found on the defendant’s shoe was “consistent with” the victim’s hair.

If DNA testing later proved that the hair was not, in fact, the child’s, the conviction could be overturned. Who knows? The jury might have put a lot of stock in that strand of hair! Throw in allegations of “prosecutorial misconduct” or “ineffective assistance of counsel,” and stand back for the celebrities and nuns holding candlelight vigils!

The DNA didn’t prove “innocence”: It proved a strand of hair “consistent with” the victim’s did not belong to the victim after all. An overturned conviction may be “legal innocence” — like a Bronx jury refusing to convict — but it’s not “factual innocence.” Least of all did it warrant the words “proved innocent.”

The party ended when DNA began being used against criminals.

In 2018, investigators finally caught the Golden State Killer, who’d terrorized women across California in the 1970s and ’80s, murdering at least 13 people and raping dozens of women. Law enforcement ID’ed him by putting his DNA into two genealogy databases, GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. It turned out to be Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a former cop.

Normal people: Hurray! We got him!

Liberals: WE MUST PREVENT THE POLICE FROM USING DNA TO CATCH MURDERERS!

Wait a second! Weren’t you the ones worrying yourselves sick about the possibility of executing the innocent?

Until very recently, The New York Times op-ed page fairly bristled with columns insisting — in defiance of the evidence — that there were innocents on death row.

GUESS WHAT, NEW YORK TIMES? You can relax! There’s no danger of an innocent person being “strapped into an electric chair, or walked into a gas chamber, or injected with poison,” as Bob Herbert put it in 1994.

Forget human fallibility: We’ve got scientific infallibility. Trust the science, liberals!

Of course, as soon as DNA started being used to catch criminals rather than release them, the ACLU threw a fit, demanding that genealogy websites like Ancestry.com cease cooperating with law enforcement. No fair locking up killers!

As the Times explained: “Privacy advocates … have been worried about genetic genealogy since 2018.” Since 2018 … hmmm, why … oh, I see. That’s the year DNA was used to catch the Golden State Killer. Yeah, that sucked.

Google and Facebook know when we’re menstruating, we’re forced to undergo proctological exams at the airport, self-driving cars are careening onto sidewalks and killing pedestrians, but WE MUST PROTECT THE SERIAL KILLER’S PRIVACY!

This is the left’s specialty: Coming up with new ways to make life worse without enriching it. So now law enforcement has to face another pointless hurdle to solve heinous murders.

What possible explanation is there for this mentality other than that liberals want murderers on the streets? (Just not their streets.)

Genealogical websites merely allow forensic scientists to identify distant relatives of the person who left DNA at a crime scene — such as on the knife sheath lying next to one of the four murdered students in Idaho — in order to put some people in the ballpark and take others out. There’s no danger of getting the wrong man. To the contrary, DNA steers investigators away from the wrong man.

True, it will make life much harder for rapists, child molesters and murderers. It will put an end to “serial killers,” who will now get caught after their first kill. I’m trying to fathom who else would have a problem with it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democratic Party.