Not up to 'CSI' standards - Nashville, Tennessee - Monday, 04/02/07 - Tennessean.com: "The state General Assembly is considering whether to allow law enforcement officers in Tennessee to collect DNA samples from anyone who is arrested on violent felony charges and check them against evidence from other crimes.

Currently, only those who are convicted of a felony in Tennessee must submit a blood sample to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

Widening the net at first sounds like good, aggressive crimefighting, but there are some worrisome issues.

Tennessee collects DNA samples in its own crime database, as do other state, local and the federal governments. But to check the DNA samples against other crimes, law officers would tap into a growing number of private crime labs, known as 'linkage databases,' that are creating their own databases of DNA samples from people who may not have even been charged with a crime. These labs often operate outside of state or federal laws, according to a recent report by USA Today.

Throw in the federal government's 2005 decision to collect DNA from anyone charged with a federal offense (felony or misdemeanor) and from all foreign detainees, and the result is a crazy quilt of laws that poses an unnecessary risk to privacy rights and opens up law enforcement agencies to error.

This should not take away from the benefits of genetic databases that are supervised and used properly. The FBI's CODIS system has matched suspects to crimes in more than 35,000 cases since 1990, the report noted.

However, other labs have sprung up that gather samples government databases do not, such as from suspects who aren't charged or from people who want to show police they are innocent. These labs are not regulated by any government entity, despite the role they may play in individuals' innocence or guilt."