SO MUCH FOR INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY
The Assembly Judiciary Committee has voted to send to the floor Senate Bill 243, the Guilty-Until-Proven-Innocent bill.
What this bill allows the government to do is take a sample of your DNA upon any arrest for an alleged felony offense. That’s ARREST, not conviction. In other words, a gross infringement upon your Fourth Amendment rights.
Disappointingly not one Republican had the cojones to vote against this feel-good/slippery-slope bill in committee. On the other hand, kudos to the max to two Democrats who had the stones to defend your Fourth Amendment rights: AssemblymanJames Ohrenschall (my Assemblyman!) and Assemblyman Richard Carrillo.
In explaining his vote to apply a little white-out (ask your mom) to the U.S. Constitution, columnist Steve Sebelius writes that Republican Assemblyman Wes Duncan (R-Las Vegas) “said the federal government and other states take DNA from people arrested prior to conviction,” so why shouldn’t we?
Ah, the ol’ “everybody else is doing it” defense…which worked so well for us as children, didn’t it?
Indeed, if the federal government and other states decided to make it illegal to gamble, then Nevada should make it illegal to gamble, too?
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that Duncan also “said the proposal would help capture criminals.”