Tami Abdollah
LA Times
Thursday, Sept 17th, 2009
Guilty or not, people arrested can avoid the hassle of court if they give their DNA sample to the district attorney. The program raises privacy and equity concerns among legal scholars.
Orange County, which already has one of the nation’s most aggressive programs for taking DNA samples from convicts, has quietly begun offering a deal to some people who have only been arrested: give a DNA sample and have your charges dropped.
The district attorney’s office, which runs its own database, has started expanding its program by handling some cases “informally,” Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas told the Board of Supervisors this week. In those cases, if a person who has been arrested agrees to give a DNA sample, “we would not even file” charges.
“There’d be no necessity for a guilty plea, and a dismissal, or anything like that,” he said. “It’s advantageous to the defense, and it’s advantageous to us, because we’re able to handle more cases with fewer resources.”
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November 7th, 2009 at 12:32 am
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When NMMC started
the work on Thane Belapur Road
Conceived by Thane Guardian Minister Ganesh Naik and completed under the
headship of Sandeep Naik as Standing Committee Chairman of NMMC, the Thane
Belapur today has made the nightmarish commute full of potholes and craters a
thing of the past.
When NMMC started the work on Thane Belapur Road, commuters had little trust
whether the NMMC would live upto the picture it had painted of a smooth drive
to Thane for the next 25 years at a stretch. NMMC allocated Rs. 111 Crores for
the work and so far Rs. 130 Crores have been spent on the project. Unanimous
opinion is that the drive to and fro from this stretch especially for Navi
Mumbaikars and Thaneites was never this smooth, no traffic congestion and time
saving. With the media keeping a close watch on the work, the NMMC ensured that
the work lived up to the promises made to citizens. The six-lane road is so
wide enough that many vehicles can pass at a time from either side. And the
concretization work has also ensured that motorists do not have to spend extra
on maintenance. And there’s more, the authorities are planning to ensure a
non-stop drive on this road after averting all the chances of road crossing by
the pedestrians. Necessary provisions have been made in the plan of the
flyovers so as to facilitate road crossing by vehicles and pedestrians as well,
without obstructing the traffic flow on the Thane-Belapur road.