Your Mother's DNA Can Land You in Prison

1989, this reporter was just a 16 year old barely into his senior year of High School. That's when a scathing story broke wide open about a school favorite that graduated just two years prior. He and two friends, planning to steal a woman's stereo, broke into her home when they knew she'd be away. They were prepared with tools, gloves, and a logistical strategy. Only, this day was different. She was there and the three were already inside and suddenly confronted by the challenge of needing to choose what to do with her. The events would play out to prodigiously belie the almost axiomatic and ubiquitous notion that the school's favorite son was a good boy. His popularity and the expectation that he, among all, would surely go far, only made the truth impact with an even more resounding thud! These three young men chose to rape and sodomize this defenseless young woman and mother. It seemed that no depravity was too great for them. They unleashed their total group brutality directly in sight of the woman's 2 year old daughter. All three were shortly captured via good detective work.

The hot and burgeoning scientific art of Forensic DNA was called into play to sure up the case. The school hero had produced semen. One of the others had shed some pubic hair. While, the third left no physical evidence able to be directly tied to rape at all. With the incredibly powerful and damning insight provided by the DNA evidence, prosecutors were able to nail two of the three with the rape portion of the crimes committed. That was once the extent of DNA's role in case. DNA could include or exclude. DNA could corroborate. DNA could provide some undeterminable piece of a greater puzzle that could only be understood with the placement of different surrounding pieces of evidence. As all of this remains available to law enforcement today, these days, DNA is stepping out of the passive and into the aggressive role. IF you commit a crime, it is now possible for your mother's, your son's, or even your sibling's DNA to implicate you. Your family's DNA can shine the light on you even if the only evidence investigators have of your existence is just one drop of your blood. It use to be that, before DNA evidence could be useful in pinning a person to a given crime, a suspect had to be identified. That is not the case any longer.

A great bridge in DNA technology that has brought us to where we are today was exercised in the infamous BTK serial killer case. While many readers may be aware that Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, was captured with assistance from his daughter, it is likely that few are aware that she was totally oblivious of her involvement or the use of her DNA. In the BTK case, investigators did have a suspect before resorting to attempting a new trick with DNA. Investigators legally obtained a sample of the daughter's DNA from an old pap smear test. They compared her DNA profile to that of their suspect in order to be able to provide greater surety that they had the right man in association with extremely old suspect DNA samples.

Today, if you commit a crime and leave DNA behind, it is possible for investigators to actually identify you via a DNA profile test. First, they will look to see if they have your personal profile in any database. If that fails, they'll go for the next best thing. They will look at all of the near misses that show up in hopes of nailing down a family group and making a smaller pool of individuals to search. The odds are actually quite good that anyone reading this article could be identified this way. A 2006 U.S. Department of Justice survey discovered that 46 % of inmates in jail revealed that they had at least one close relative who had been incarcerated. Incarcerated is the active ingredient in this new DNA recipe. States are getting more comfortable with this technology as they begin to catalog, not only the DNA of the convicted, but the DNA of the simply jailed as well. The Boston Globe has reported that one computer simulation using this type of technology showed an increase of 40% in the number of times DNA would point to a suspect. Currently, states find that they are mostly limited by manpower in the use of this technique and are not heavily burdened by legal resistance to this practice. To make a match, forensic scientists are looking for information found at 13 locations on the human genome. They look at specific points at each location for parental genetic markers. A 26 point match is a match for the suspect. A match of 16 or better is likely to be a close family member and is more greatly re-enforced if there is a rare genetic marker that is matched. Currently, only the state of Maryland, has banned familial DNA database searching in a newly passed law.

This technique is not limited the only the United States. Great Britain, for instance, has well over 4 million in its DNA database. The Boston Globe reports that Britain has been using the technique for over 5 years.

More controversially, some are attempting to use this technology to be able to drill down to certain racial and physical characteristics of a suspect as an additional method of filtering out those unnecessary to include in an investigation. Currently, there is no conclusive evidence of genetic race identification being made use of by any law enforcement agency.

References:
1. Harvard University Gazette
2. The Boston Globe