A Denver rapist pummeled a woman so ruthlessly that doctors later had to surgically remove her eye.
Crime scene investigators fed the suspect’s DNA profile into the FBI’s national database and came so close to a match with a convict somewhere in the U.S. that he probably was related to the rapist.
At the time, familial DNA tracking was unexplored territory in the U.S. and the FBI wouldn’t release the location of people on partial DNA matches, only on exact matches.
Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey made his case directly to FBI Director Robert Mueller, convincing him that kinship DNA analysis – already successfully used in England – could be a valuable tool.
“It could save a lot of investigative time,” said Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman. “We need to do as much as we can to take them off the street as quickly as we can.”
Morrissey will appear tonight on CBS’s “60 Minutes” to tout the groundbreaking DNA approach British authorities employ.
Using the FBI database to track crime suspects, however, raises civil rights concerns, said David Lazer, a Harvard University associate professor and editor of the book “DNA and the Criminal Justice System.”
The issue is that there are a disproportionate number of minorities in the criminal justice system, Lazer said.
“It really amplifies existing inequalities in the criminal justice system,” he said.
The FBI database was created to target people who lost some of their civil rights by violating laws, and relatives of criminals don’t always qualify, Lazer said.
Morrissey said police already follow clues provided through family links. The DNA is only one tool, he said.
Investigators must eventually collect DNA from relatives to get an exact match and build a case through traditional methods. The strategy won’t always work, Morrissey said.
The case of the battered Denver woman is an example.
After changing its DNA policy in July, the FBI notified Denver detectives that the convict with a partial DNA match lived in Oregon.
The detectives discovered that he had a brother whom they could place in Denver at about the time of the rape and who had been convicted of a crime in California.
California authorities sent Denver the convict’s DNA profile but it did not match DNA taken from the victim’s body, clearing the man as a suspect in the brutal Denver rape, Morrissey said.
Denver has found possible familial DNA links in two other rape cases, he said. One is linked to an Arizona convict, the other to a California convict.
California has a policy similar to the one the FBI used to have, and officials there have refused to release the name of a possible relative. Arizona is cooperating, Morrissey said.
Whitman said law enforcement agencies have divergent policies related to DNA. They need to work out a consensus in dealing with the genetic material to help solve crimes, he said.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
