DNA Bill Assaults our Liberties in R.I.
By Steven Brown and Mary McElroy,
Providence Journal
| 05. 22. 2014
The presumption of innocence lies at the heart of our system of criminal justice, but a bill that will soon be voted on by the Rhode Island House of Representatives deeply undercuts that presumption. The bill, H-7304, requires DNA samples to be taken from individuals who are merely arrested, but never convicted, for a wide array of crimes so that the samples can be placed in a national DNA database.
Even more troubling, the bill contains few protections for the many innocent people who will have their DNA samples taken. (The law already requires that a DNA sample be taken from any person convicted of a felony.) In some states with such laws, DNA samples are automatically expunged if the person is found innocent or the charges are dismissed. H-7304, however, requires the innocent person to go through numerous hoops to expunge a sample that really didn’t deserve to be taken in the first place.
Specifically, the aggrieved person must go to the trouble and expense of filing a formal court petition for expungement, serving notice of the petition upon...
Related Articles
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major focus of news recently, as it should have been, under the appropriately ridiculous name of Hugging Face, “a leading collaboration platform and community hub for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.” In July, Hugging Face was hacked. The platform itself responded:
Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way...
By Gay Pasley, Essence | 09.04.2026
That is what makes the unfolding case of McKenna West so important. It is more than a disagreement about abortion or a dispute over a surrogacy contract. It asks whether an agreement signed before a pregnancy can become authority...
By Anna L. Philippe, Pop Panic | 09.17.2026
What does it mean when education is considered a threat to population? As an education student, I am interested in the ways population panics are essentialized and circulated in formal education settings. Schools can play a major role in shaping...
By Ava Kofman, The New Yorker | 09.15.2026
A WOMAN WHO ACTS AS A SURROGATE, carrying a child for someone else, is said to be going on a “journey.”
Kayla Elliott started her surrogacy journey at the age of twenty-six. She gave birth to a baby girl for...
