TACOMA, WA - A controversial new forensic/judicial crossover has taken its first step toward acceptance. The system -- called Clonevict -- allows police to take DNA evidence from a crime scene, then clone the perpetrator. The clone can then be handed over to the prosecutor's office for trial.

"I didn't do anything wrong. I've only been alive for a little over a month, for goodness sake," said John Clone, the clone of a man who robbed a liquor store and critically wounded the owner, "you've made a copy of the criminal, but you don't have the original."

"Any port in a storm," said the lead prosecutor, Emil Stone, "We have to show the public that we're putting people like this behind bars. Even if it's not the same guy, it's at least a guy exactly like him. If I can either have 'pretty close' or 'not at all', I'll take pretty close every day of the week."

"What the prosecutor isn't telling you," responded Barry Skoda, president of Rights Of Prisoners In Danger, "is that when John Clone, or whatever they're calling him, gets out of jail for the crime his DNA donor committed, there will now be two of these guys on the streets. What if they both do it again, and both get away? Are we going to manufacture two more scape-clones? Then four?"

"I saw the man what shot me," said Wendell Larmell, victim, and owner of the liquor store, "and that John Clone looks just like him. They put him in a line up and I picked him out just fine. I say lock him up."
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