Police get creative to catch murderer

Richard Smith points to a story (via Politech) from 2003 where a judge has said Seattle police did not violate a murder suspect's privacy rights when they tricked him into sending his dna to them. The suspect responded to a false letter saying he was eligible for some money and left his dna on the envelope when he licked it. The news report says the judge agreed the police broke the law by pretending to be lawyers. It would be interesting to get a look at the judgement to see precisely what she said.

(Richard Smith was also the person who identified the four UK officials who had worked on the now infamous, mostly-plagiarised Downing Sreet dossier that Colin Powell cited at the United Nations in his efforts to get support for the war on Iraq.)