Protection of Freedoms Bill

Debate between Lord Macdonald of River Glaven and Earl of Erroll

Tuesday 29th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, I associate myself with the comments of my noble friend Lord Dear and the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury. Certain things can go wrong all too easily. DNA is not a straight yes/no; at the end of the day, if something is done in a laboratory, you are talking about an analogue match that is reduced to certain points. We have seen sometimes the misinterpretation of fingerprints. When a computer has reduced it to X points, it is not necessarily a true match. There have been miscarriages of justice as a result. People have refused to admit mistakes later because of the tendency of the system to try to cover up its mistakes for the greater good, in order not to discredit something that is widely accepted as evidence.

I am also worried that, if DNA exists and is associated with a case, you use it to try to prove some guilt. You do not know how it got there. I might have tried on a jersey in a department store and left a couple of hairs on it. It might later have been bought by someone else and the knife that went into the person might have carried one of my hairs inside the wound. With our DNA techniques, it could be deduced that I was the person who was at the place in question—you do not know

The trouble is that, because we have an adversarial system, we do not seek to find the truth in our courts; we see who has got the best lawyers to discredit the evidence on the other side. That can be dangerous sometimes with things such as DNA, which is fairly new. We have widely different quoted figures for what an exact match is and for the probability of a match that do not take into account laboratory accuracy. We need to think about exactly how accurate it really is. You also get criminal seeding of sites, which has been going on for a long time—taking ashtrays from pubs and leaving DNA evidence elsewhere to sow false things.

What worries me, finally, is what we saw happen with RIPA—that is, function creep. This will start off in the serious crime arena and then get extended, because it is an easy way to find who was where when or who handled what. We have to be very careful about making sure that that does not happen if we are going to retain DNA as evidence. That is why I approve of the Government’s stand and of what the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said.

We seem to treat very lightly the fact that someone should be arrested. Actually, that goes on your record and it stays there even if you are never then prosecuted or a charge is not laid properly. The fact that you have been arrested will disbar you from all sorts of things. A simple example is the American visa waiver scheme. I am fairly certain that you cannot get a US visa waiver if you have been arrested. For some people, there is no smoke without fire. We have to be very careful before thinking that just an arrest is okay and that it is all forgotten in the wash—it is not.

[Lord Macdonald of River Glaven]

My Lords, this is a difficult and sensitive issue, and I have great sympathy with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said a moment ago. When he was Attorney-General and I was Director of Public Prosecutions, we often saw the result of DNA evidence in successful prosecutions. Nobody for one moment would underestimate, in spite of what has been said recently, the importance and the potency of that evidence, particularly in cold-case reviews.

Nevertheless, I am driven to support the Government’s position on this amendment, largely because of the sentiment that was expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. The rational and honest conclusion of the previous Government’s policy was a national DNA database. The policy was discriminatory in a sense that has not been addressed so far in this debate. Everybody knows that more young black men than young white men are arrested on the streets of our cities by proportion of population, and therefore more are swabbed. Therefore, a database that was growing as that one was, uncontrolled by any process of anti-discrimination, was inherently dangerous.

The safe process, if the Government had wanted to go down that road, as was once explained very eloquently by Lord Justice Sedley on the “Today” programme, was to institute a national DNA database. That was the logical and only fair extension of the previous Government’s policy. I cannot support the concept of a national DNA database. It seems an inherently totalitarian concept. The idea that newborn babies would be separated from their mothers in our hospitals to be swabbed before being returned for suckling, or however the process is conducted, seems deeply totalitarian and unacceptable.

The Scots have got it about right. These are questions of balance. Of course the position of victims is critical, but we also have to develop a system which achieves a balance between justice for victims and justice for defendants in a free society in which the Government play an appropriate and not overly intrusive role in people’s lives.