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February 19, 1998
DNA Databanks Giving Police Powerful Weapon: The Instant Hit
Related Article
DNA Tests Free Two Men Convicted of Rape in '83 (Dec. 4, 1997)
By CAREY GOLDBERG
OSTON -- Of all the new thrills that DNA analysis offers forensic scientists, nothing seems to beat what they call a "cold hit": when a computer discovers the identity of a killer or rapist by matching DNA from blood, semen or saliva left at a crime scene with a DNA profile in a database. A criminal is fingered by his own genes.
Until now, cold hits have come sporadically, mainly in several states where DNA forensic work is most advanced, totaling about 200 nationwide. But federal and state experts say they will soon be cropping up much more often.
In the last several weeks, they say, two DNA logjams have been broken. The FBI and state laboratories have finally set new technical standards for testing DNA strands, allowing the development of a national system of quicker, cheaper testing to steam ahead. And the links of that system are starting to be hooked up: In December, eight states in the DNA vanguard began using FBI software that lets them pool their data on line for the first time, enabling them to identify criminals across their borders. Within minutes, they scored their first hit, linking a convicted sex offender in Illinois to a 1989 rape and attempted murder in Wisconsin, the bureau said.
"It's starting to grow geometrically," said David Coffman, the DNA database administrator for Florida, which has chalked up nearly half the country's hits. "For the first time, DNA labs are leading the investigators to the right person," as opposed to testing the DNA of known suspects.
The largest hurdle to establishing an American DNA database like the pioneering one in Britain, which holds hundreds of thousands of samples and has scored thousands of hits, is money -- for adding equipment and personnel, gathering hundreds of thousands of samples, analyzing and entering them, plowing through current backlogs and converting existing databases to new technology.
"It comes down to a cost-benefit analysis," said Christopher Asplen, an assistant U.S. attorney who is executive director of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, which Attorney General Janet Reno recently created. "How much money are we willing to put into the system to reduce the backlog so that we can use DNA more quickly and more effectively to solve and prevent crimes?"
The mounting momentum behind DNA databases, however, is also pushing forward objections to DNA evidence. Last week in Massachusetts, for example, a judge halted the gathering of blood samples for DNA profiling from thousands of prison inmates, probationers and parolees after several sued the state, arguing that it was an illegal search and seizure performed without proper safeguards.
Although similar challenges in other states have failed, civil liberties questions continue to come up as states move ahead, including issues of who, exactly, must submit to testing, and who can have access to the data.
In the aftermath of the DNA debacle at the O.J. Simpson murder trial, in which the defense accused the Los Angeles Police Department of contaminating DNA evidence, concerns also linger over whether the police and laboratory workers are being properly trained to handle such potentially damning evidence.
Still, financing is a burning question for DNA overseers like Dr. Paul Ferrara of Virginia's Division of Forensic Science, whose groundbreaking DNA program has been given a $10 million budget for the next three years and who believes it will take $500 million to establish a full-fledged national databank.
"We still have backlogs of six months or more before we can get to every case," Ferrara said. "How many crimes that we took a year to solve could have been solved in a week? And how many further offenses, rapes or murders, were committed by that individual in the meantime?"
In Florida, Coffman recalled, a convicted rapist was just eight days away from being paroled in 1995 when his DNA sample was finally entered into the databank. It was found to match evidence left at the horrific rape, mutilation and murder of another woman more than three years earlier.
That is the difference DNA databanks can make, said Walter Rowe, a professor of forensic sciences at George Washington University who has advised the federal government on dispensing some of the $25 million that Congress allotted to DNA databases in 1994.
A national database, "God knows, may turn out to have an enormous impact," Rowe said, "if you reflect that rapists tend to be repeaters and studies have shown that most of the violent crime is committed by a very small number of criminals. If we're able to identify these guys and send them away, or if, instead of convicting the guy for one sexual assault we get him for 10 and he goes away for the rest of his life, think about the impact that will have on the safety of citizens."
Indeed, no one, not even those who have challenged DNA sample-gathering in court, deny that the databases can be heaven-sent crime-fighting tools. And DNA can work on prisoners' behalf as well. Already, 53 convicts have been exonerated after DNA testing was applied to the evidence in their cases, said Barry C. Scheck, whose Innocence Project at Yeshiva University's Benjamin Cardozo School of Law helped many of them gain freedom.
Rather, the main lingering questions about DNA testing and databases concern who should have to give samples and how those samples are handled.
The very existence of a DNA database smacks more of a Big Brother-ish assault on privacy than the existence of the national computerized network of fingerprints, civil libertarians say. Taking blood is much more invasive than fingerprints, they point out, and DNA carries so much more information -- information subject to abuse by insurance companies or even geneticists seeking the gene for something like pedophilia.
Furthermore, said Benjamin Keehn, a Boston public defender representing some of the inmates who have challenged the DNA collection here, "It's a very dangerous slippery slope" to round up thousands of convicts, probationers and parolees, as Massachusetts was doing, on the argument that they are likelier to commit a crime.
"Why not round up poor people?" Keehn asked. "Poor people are more likely to commit a crime, so shouldn't we have their DNA on file? Of course, there are benefits every time you get a cold hit. There are going to be dramatic success stories. But where does it stop? Why not take DNA samples at birth?"
In South Dakota, DNA samples are taken upon arrest, like fingerprints. Virginia, which has the most comprehensive database nationwide, with 160,000 samples gathered though only 10,000 have been analyzed, now gathers samples from all convicted felons, and even some juveniles.
And that, Ferrara argued, is the way to go. More than half of his cold hits from the crime scenes of rapes and murders came from felons who had previously been convicted only of breaking and entering or burglary, he said.
Scheck, who helped defend O.J. Simpson, advocates that states write into their DNA database laws that the data can be used by law enforcement agencies "for identification purposes only" to avoid abuses. Many states, like Massachusetts, have left their language more vague.
Two states, in fact, have not even passed database laws. But the two, Vermont and Rhode Island, are expected to finally join the other 48 this legislative session. Many other states have simply not allocated much money to their DNA databases, so large backlogs of unanalyzed samples have developed.
Even those that have kept up, however, will now have to start converting their samples from the old technique, known as Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism, to a new method, Short Tandem Repeat, or STR. That faster, less expensive method looks at areas of the DNA strand that are generally considered something like "junk" DNA and do not determine an individual's traits.
It is a giant conversion task, experts say, but promises a great payoff. Technology has so advanced from the days when testing each DNA sample took weeks and cost several hundred dollars, they say, that in the near future, sample analysis will be largely automated, take only hours and eventually cost as little as $10.
The technology has also advanced in that it can analyze far tinier quantities of biological evidence -- even the saliva from a cigarette butt or envelope flap and the sweat from a hatband, said Terry Laber, supervisor of the DNA unit of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
In some ways, he said, DNA evidence has already surpassed fingerprints in usefulness, and Minnesota's state crime laboratory now does DNA testing at all crime scenes, including mere burglaries.
Whether or not it beats fingerprinting, DNA evidence is especially valuable because of the types of crime scenes where it is usually found, said Harlan Levy, a former New York City prosecutor who wrote "And the Blood Cried Out" (Avon 1997) about the power of DNA evidence.
"They're murder cases and sexual violence cases," he said. "The kinds of cases where people care very dramatically about identifying the people who committed them and getting them off the street. And DNA databanks make that possible."
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