Investigating CSI – Background material Table of Contents I ...

The samples sat in the police evidence room, along with 2,300 other unexamined
rape kits, for almost six years. To test them all would have swamped the state
crime laboratory.
So Detective Lori Gaglione and her colleagues in Milwaukee's Sensitive Crimes
Unit narrowed down the 2,300 cases to 53 based on such factors as the
availability of victims and witnesses.
From the 53 samples that were tested, one case matched a convicted rapist in
Minnesota. Another matched a convicted rapist elsewhere in Wisconsin, allowing
charges to be filed only eight hours before the statute of limitations expired. And
the three samples from 1993 matched each other. The other 47 remain in the
national databank.
The Wisconsin state law, as in other states, requires that a warrant identify the
accused. If the name is not known, the law allows identification ''by any
description by which the person to be arrested can be identified with reasonable
certainty.''
''My argument is going to be that genetic code goes well beyond reasonable
certainty,'' said Mr. Gahn, who is a member of the Federal DNA Commission.
''We're pushing the envelope as far as we can. It does something for the victim of
the sexual assault, to know that someone cares and to know that we're out there
working on the case.''
The forensic science supervisor in the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory, Dirk
Janssen, said the probability of randomly selecting an unrelated individual who
would have a DNA profile matching the three samples would be about 1 in 7.25
billion -- more than the world's population -- in the United States Caucasian
population, and 1 in 1.96 billion in the African-American population.
Such a John Doe warrant based on DNA evidence has been used at least one
other time, in Kansas in 1991. No one was arrested, so the issue has not been
tested.
The warrant, which was signed by a judge last month, appeared to have merit,
said Myrna Raeder, a professor of law at Southwestern University in Los Angeles
and the former head of the criminal section of the American Bar Association.
''It's clearly novel and therefore courts are really going to have to struggle with
the intention of the statute and whether the clear meaning of the statute would
cover this,'' Professor Raeder said.
In Wisconsin, as in most states, only people convicted of sexual offenses are
required to give samples for DNA testing. The Legislature is close to expanding
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