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

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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 70
that to all felony offenses, as Alabama and Virginia have done. The Legislature is also considering eliminating the statute of limitations in cases of rape. Someday, prosecutors hope, a man will leave a cigarette behind at another rape. Or cut himself on broken glass at a burglary. His saliva or blood will be tested, its DNA catalogued and entered in the F.B.I. databank. And he will be charged with raping and kidnapping a woman in Milwaukee on Nov. 9, 1993. 71
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Investigating CSI - Background mate
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A forensic scientists needs a honou
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Matching DNA Proving that a suspect
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Creating a DNA Profile: The Basics
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Page 19 and 20: of DNA profile comparisons done by
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