Originally posted by Thequ1ckI see what you're saying the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 is a shocking piece of legislation. It does, on a daily basis get abused.
Yeah, right LOL. You been to London recently??
The boys here have free reign thanks to TB and the terrorist bill.
I know I look like a schmuck but I've been stopped and searched
for the most trivial of reasons, ie
once under the terrorist bill for smoking a rolled up cigarette
and another time for looking confused.
http://gizmonaut.net/bits/suspect.html
To be honest I had not thought of this and only looked at guidelines that the police are bound by, but it appears prima facie that under the PTA the police can and do infringe on our human rights.
Originally posted by sangfroidThat was in 1984, now we are living in Orwell's 1984. Every offence in arrestable.
Sorry, but no the police cannot arrest you and charge you with anything they want. That statement is absurd. The PACE Act 1984 Strictly governs this, especially S.28
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/12/29/narrest29.xml
Including girls drawing flowers on the pavement with chalk, or possessing an egg with intention to throw.
Originally posted by joneschrUnfortunately, in the UK, the police do have the right to arrest people on the flimsiest of evidence. A common problem is malicious allegations by one person against another. It is an abuse of human rights as is the forcible taking of DNA and fingerprinting of innocent people.
Under what conditions can they place you under arrest in the UK without filing charges? My feeling is that, if there is a case strong enough against you to arrest you, then the police need to gather evidence, including your DNA.
At the same time, I'm of the opinion that you should only be placed under arrest if there is a very very strong case for yo ...[text shortened]... . If that's not the case in the UK, I'd say no, they shouldn't be able to collect your DNA.
DNA fingerprinting evidence is misunderstood by the Police, Judges and Juries. All assume that a 1:1,000,000 chance of a match is virtually indicative of guilt. Wrong. Probability theory has been misunderstood. With present day data bases, the chances of any particular DNA sample matching AT LEAST one DNA sample from a crime scene in the data base is far, far higher. About 5 years ago it was 1:2000. These days, the probability must surely be in the 100s. Innocnet people are being wrongly arrested and their lifes ruined for the simple reason that their DNA fingerprint just happened to match a DNA sample from a crime scene from years ago.
Originally posted by joneschrI suggest yiou read my post and learn a bit more about DNA fingerprinting and probability theory.
Why not? If people are going to commit crimes in the future, I'd like to have DNA evidence be used against them. I have no sympathy for criminals. I have sympathy for innocent, law-abiding people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dna_fingerprinting#Considerations_when_evaluating_DNA_evidence
"In the early days of the use of genetic fingerprinting as criminal evidence, juries were often swayed by spurious statistical arguments by defense lawyers along these lines: given a match that had a 1 in 5 million probability of occurring by chance, the lawyer would argue that this meant that in a country of say 60 million people there were 12 people who would also match the profile. This was then translated to a 1 in 12 chance of the suspect being the guilty one. This argument is not sound unless the suspect was drawn at random from the population of the country. In fact, a jury should consider how likely it is that an individual matching the genetic profile would also have been a suspect in the case for other reasons. Another spurious statistical argument is based on the false assumption that a 1 in 5 million probability of a match automatically translates into a 1 in 5 million probability of innocence and is known as the prosecutor's fallacy.
...
STRs do not suffer from such subjectivity and provide much better powers of discrimination, for unrelated individuals (of the order of 1 in 10^29 if using a full profile) It should be noted that figures of this magnitude are not considered to be statistically suportable by scientists in the UK, for unrelated individuals with full matching DNA profiles a match probability of 1 in a billion (one thousand million) is considered statistically supportable (Since 1998 the DNA profiling system supported by The National DNA Database in the UK is the SGM+ DNA profiling system which includes 10 STR regions and a sex indicating test, this test updated the SGM DNA profiling system on which the National DNA Database was founded in 1995. The SGM system included 6 out of the 10 STR regions used in the SGM+ system and the same sex indicating test, however the discriminating power of the SGM system was only considered to be supportable at 1 in a million) . However, with any DNA technique, the cautious juror should not convict on genetic fingerprint evidence alone if other factors raise doubt. Contamination with other evidence (secondary transfer) is a key source of incorrect DNA profiles and raising doubts as to whether a sample has been adulterated is a favorite defense technique. More rarely, Chimerism is one such instance where the lack of a genetic match may unfairly exclude a suspect.
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