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MountainLaurel Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-21-08 08:56 AM
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From DNA of Family, A Tool to Make Arrests
He was a church-going father of two, and for more than 30 years Dennis Rader eluded police in the Wichita area, killing 10 people and signing taunting letters with a self-styled monogram: BTK, for Bind Torture Kill. In the end, it was a DNA sample that tied BTK to his crimes. Not his own DNA. But his daughter's.

Investigators obtained a court order without the daughter's knowledge for a Pap smear specimen she had given five years earlier at a university medical clinic in Kansas. A DNA profile of the specimen almost perfectly matched the DNA evidence taken from several BTK crime scenes, leading detectives to conclude she was the child of the killer. That allowed police to secure an arrest warrant in February 2005 and end BTK's murderous career.

The BTK case was an early use of an emerging tool in law enforcement: analyzing the DNA of a suspect's relatives. In the BTK example, police had a suspect and were looking to tie him to the crime. But now, states are moving to conduct familial searches of criminal databases, looking for close-to-perfect matches with DNA from crime scenes. A partial match with a convicted criminal could implicate a brother or daughter or father of the convict. Such searches, advocates say, constitute a powerful law enforcement tool that, experts say, could increase by 40 percent the number of suspects identified through DNA.

As things stand in some states, lab analysts who discover a potential suspect in this way may not be permitted to share that information with investigators. Such a policy, said William Fitzpatrick, a New York state district attorney, "is insanity. It's disgraceful. If I've got something of scientific value that I can't share because of imaginary privacy concerns, it's crazy. That's how we solve crimes."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/20/AR2008042002388.html?hpid=topnews
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flashl Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-21-08 08:59 AM
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1. K&R
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TechBear_Seattle Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-21-08 09:00 AM
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2. It will be interesting to see how the courts will consider this trend
I suspect a close male relative is a serial rapist. I submit a DNA sample, which shows a very close but not identical match to the DNA of a serial rapist. Would the match be sufficient evidence to get a warrant for my relative's DNA against the relative's wishes?
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flashl Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-21-08 09:13 AM
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3. Some opinions from a previous post ...
Lawyers Fight DNA Samples Gained on Sly

The United States Supreme Court has yet to address whether there are constitutional limits on the covert collection of DNA. But with a few exceptions, lower court judges in over a dozen recent cases have ruled that DNA clinging to water bottles left in interrogation rooms, on restaurant glassware and on those ubiquitous cigarette butts are fair game for police inspection.

“There is no subjective expectation of privacy in discarded genetic material, just as there is no subjective expectation of privacy in fingerprints or footprints left in a public place,” Washington State’s Supreme Court wrote last year in denying an appeal by John N. Athan, whose murder conviction was based on surreptitiously collected DNA.
...
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Mary E. Fairhurst argued that the fingerprint analogy was inappropriate, because Mr. Athan’s DNA “provided the government with vast amounts of intimate information beyond mere identity” including race, gender, predisposition to disease and, perhaps, forms of conduct.
...
In Los Angeles, a Superior Court judge last year rejected a motion by attorneys for a suspected serial killer, Adolph Laudenberg, to suppress DNA evidence that the police had acquired by inviting him to a doughnut shop to discuss an unrelated case.
...
Several court opinions on surreptitious sampling cite the United States Supreme Court decision in California v. Greenwood, which held that the Fourth Amendment did not apply when the police searched trash bags left on the curb by a suspected narcotics dealer.
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MountainLaurel Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-21-08 09:21 AM
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4. The family angle adds a strange twist
Since it's not the criminal him- or herself who is leaving genetic material about to be tested.
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flashl Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Apr-21-08 09:31 AM
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5. Understood. In the article, claims of surreptitious sampling in the Gallego case arose from ...
...the sheriff’s cold case unit had extracted a DNA profile from blood on a towel found 15 years earlier at the scene of the murder of Mr. Gallego’s aunt.
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