Illegal Alien

Dale made a grim little smile. "If they try that, I’ll be all over them like ugly on an ape." He took a bite of his sandwich.

"What? Why?"

The lawyer swallowed, and took a swig of Pepsi. "You know how DNA testing got started?"

Frank shook his head.

"It started in Leicester, England. In 1983, someone there raped and strangled a fifteen-year-old girl. The police couldn’t come up with a single suspect. Three years later, in ’86, the same damned thing happened again: another fifteen-year-old, raped and choked to death. This time, the police arrested a guy named — what was it now? — Buckley, Buckland, something like that. He confessed to the recent murder, but not the one three years before.

"Coincidentally, a British geneticist working right there at the University of Leicester had recently been in the news, because he’d invented a technique for finding genetic markers for disease. He called his technique restriction fragment-length polymorphism; that’s the RFLP they kept talking about in the Simpson criminal trial. One of its incidental uses was that it could distinguish one person’s DNA from another, so the cops called him up and said, look, we’ve got the guy who killed one of the girls, but we want to prove he killed both of them. If we send you semen samples collected from both bodies, can you prove that the DNA in them came from the same guy?

The scientist — Jeffreys, his name was — said, sure thing, send them over."

Frank nodded, and took a sip of coffee.

"Well, guess what?" said Dale. "Jeffreys proved the semen samples both came from the same man — but that man was not the guy who had confessed. The police were furious, but they had to let Buckland go. Now, what to do? How to catch the real murderer? Well, the cops decided they’d ask all male residents of the area between seventeen and thirty-four to submit a blood specimen so that they could be ‘eliminated from the inquiries.’ " Dale shook his head. "Genteel Brits! Anyway, four thousand men came forward, but none of them matched the killer. Eventually, though, they found that a coworker of a man named Colin Pitchfork — the name should have tipped them off, don’t you think? — had donated a sample in Pitchfork’s place. The police took a sample from Pitchfork, who, of course, was the murderer. That was the first case in which DNA fingerprinting was ever used."

"Terrific," said Frank.

"No," said Dale. "No, it stank to high heaven. Don’t you see? A whole population of people were treated like suspects solely because they were rales in a likely age group. They weren’t forced to donate blood, but ~r idea caught on like wildfire in the community — and anyone who didn’t make a donation was suspect. See? It was a gross violation of civil rights. Suddenly people were being compelled to prove themselves innocent, instead of being assumed to be so. If a cop came up to me and said, look, you’re black and we think our criminal is black, so you prove to me you’re not the criminal, I’d have that person busted off the force. Well, asking the Tosoks to give up blood specimens is the same thing: you belong to this group, therefore prove to us that you’re innocent. No, we can prevent that from happening, I’m sure."

"But they’re only seven of them!"

"It’s still a civil-rights issue," said Dale. "Trust me."

"So the prosecution won’t try to introduce the blood evidence?"

"On the contrary, I’m sure they will. It’ll be a fight, but we’ll win — at least on that point."

"You’re sure?"

Rice took another bite of his sandwich. "Well — nothing’s ever completely certain."

Frank frowned. "I was afraid of that."

Pretrial motions were supervised by the same judge who would preside over the actual trial: Drucilla Pringle. Pringle was forty-nine years old. She was the kind of woman usually referred to as "handsome" rather than "beautiful," with smooth, cold features. Her skin was white; her hair chestnut brown, cut short. She wore wire-frame glasses and little makeup.

The biggest fight at this stage was over whether the trial should be televised. Judge Pringle ultimately ruled that it would be, given the extraordinary interest the peoples of the entire world had in the outcome of the case. But there were dozens of other motions as well:

"Your Honor," said Dale, "we move that the jury be sequestered. The media interest in this trial will be huge, and there’s no way to keep the jury from being exposed to possibly biased coverage."

"Your Honor," said Ziegler, "I think we’ve all been conscious ever since Simpson of the incredible hardship sequestration poses. Surely with a trial that may go on at great length, we can’t make prisoners out of all the jurors and alternates."

"I’ve read your brief on this, Mr. Rice," said Drucilla Pringle, "but I agree with Ms. Ziegler. The jurors will be instructed to avoid media coverage, but they will get to go home and sleep in their own beds each night."