Supreme Court DNA Decision.

A DEVASTATING dissent from Scalia. I had assumed an agreement with the majority but Scalia's dissent is devastating in it's statement of facts and logic.

In fact, if anything was “identified” at the moment that the DNA database returned a match, it was not King—his identity was already known. (The docket for the original criminal charges lists his full name, his race, his sex, his height, his weight, his date of birth, and his address.) Rather, what the August 4 match “identified” was the previously-taken sample from the earlier crime. That sample was genuinely mysterious to Maryland; the State knew that it had probably been left by the victim’s attack- er, but nothing else. King was not identified by his associ- ation with the sample; rather, the sample was identified by its association with King. The Court effectively de- stroys its own “identification” theory when it acknowledges that the object of this search was “to see what [was] al- ready known about [King].” King was who he was, and volumes of his biography could not make him any more or any less King. No minimally competent speaker of Eng- lish would say, upon noticing a known arrestee’s similarity “to a wanted poster of a previously unidentified suspect,” ante, at 13, that the arrestee had thereby been identified. It was the previously unidentified suspect who had been identified—just as, here, it was the previously unidentified rapist.

My position is that this statement here kills the central "identification" argument used by the majority. I am partial to DNA evidence as a means of determining whether a crime has happened. I am partial to DNA evidence as a means of making sure the right person is tried and convicted, but it is laughable to say that such DNA evidence is meant to "identify" the arrested person.