Public Safety committee  Good morning. I'm here this morning on behalf of the Criminal Lawyers Association. I'll give you a bit of a background. Our organization is comprised of about 1,000 defence lawyers across Canada. One of our mandates is to provide some missions to committees such as this, and als

Public Safety committee  Firstly, there's no doubt that DNA has gone tremendous ways in getting exonerations. In the U.S., they're now past 200 wrongful convictions exonerated by DNA, apart from other cases they've had that didn't deal with DNA. Just with DNA, they've had over 200 exonerated. In Canada

Public Safety committee  There is no doubt that DNA plays a big role now, even in terms of files that come across your desk. Five or ten years ago, when it was very expensive to test, you wouldn't get many DNA cases except in murders and very serious sexual offences. I think now our members understand. W

Public Safety committee  There are a number of parts to that question. I don't think the data bank alone does all of the suggestions you've made. One of the reasons I mentioned the U.K. was that they do have a longer history, and obviously a larger database. That's why the experience and statistics com

Public Safety committee  Yes, I'd like to see a scenario of how that would happen.

Public Safety committee  Again I ask, how can the data bank be used for that right now? You get a crime scene index sample, or you get a crime scene sample, you upload it to Ottawa, and you don't know who's in the convicted offenders index unless it comes back as a match. You don't know I'm in there unle

Public Safety committee  No, that's not how it would work. Let's say that I am in the convicted offenders index, that I have been uploaded. There's also a crime scene sample that the police find. And they upload it to Ottawa in the crime scene index. Say it doesn't come back as a match. How do they know

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  How?

Public Safety committee  But they don't know I'm in the convicted offenders index.

Public Safety committee  Speaking about the upon-arrest issue, this isn't a new issue before Parliament. When this whole scheme was first developed, there was a big topic that was for obvious reasons on the table as well. And if you recall, there were opinions gathered from three former chief justices of

Public Safety committee  The flip side is the comment I made that the more you increase it, the greater the chances of false positives and false matches. And this isn't science fiction. You're seeing a new wave of cases in the States and challenges coming to databases. They want to get their independent

Public Safety committee  It's a bit of a combination of both the science being not able to test the whole DNA strand, and that's why...because 99.9% of all our DNA is the same, it's only that 0.1% that differentiates us all. And on the strand they look at—and you've probably had this presented by other s

Public Safety committee  In the U.S. there's a lot more movement in terms of calling experts on databases. I haven't seen it in Canada yet, but again, as more evidence comes out from the U.S., I'm sure those challenges will come. DNA in a case really is fact-based. Depending on what the issue is, someti

Public Safety committee  I think you know my view.