Outraged? Go back to bed.

It is clearly the silly season (and here, and here etc) and the trainees are on the Bank Holiday shift. And, with respect to Tom and Justin, not worthy of their time.

Let me see. Large government IT project fails. Nope, not news.

Illiberal Authoritarian Fascist nu-Labour initiative fails the Ronseal test. Nope, not news.

However, back on Planet Blog, where we never tire of stating the obvious, let's bully our tired brains into some activity and do an early morning probability calculation. Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that the "crimes we couldn't spare the resource to solve because we were too busy harassing bloggers, attending diversity training and completing paperwork" database has the same cock-up rate in its data.

So the chance of a false match, even assuming the DNA magi-quackery works perfectly, is:

1 - (1 - ^550k/_4m)² = 25.6%

Over a quarter. I know it has changed from "beyond reasonable doubt" to something slightly less emphatic but that seems a reasonable kite to fly for any defence barrister (or, in the civilised world, advocate :).