Rachel Harmon is a forensic scientist who lives in Lawrence, Kansas, and works for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. Her work involves the state's DNA databank, a library of DNA profiles from both convicted offenders and arrestees in Kansas, as well as the forensic casework samples for suspects whose identities are still unknown, like the man responsible for the crime detailed in this week's feature story, "The Aftermath."
Juliette Jones (not her real name) was attacked by that rapist 10 years ago, and he is still unidentified, though his DNA was uploaded into the CODIS database by KBI technicians in 2001. Still, she felt as though law enforcement had forgotten about her.
"That's the best thing about the KBI databank," Harmon says. "Whether or not the case is in the news, that's irrelevant to the databank. It doesn't forget, it
just keeps on working. That's what I hope (Juliette) understands, too.
Her case is certainly not forgotten."
Kansas' databank was established in 1991 to catalog the DNA profiles of those convicted for violent and sexual crimes -- mainly murder, rape and kidnapping. In 2002, Harmon says, the databank expanded significantly when the state passed a law mandating that the DNA profiles of all jailed Kansas felons are subject to inclusion in the databank.
"That's
when we had to go back to the prisons and collect all of those
samples," Harmon says. Prisoners doing time for drug possession or
sales, DUIs, burglary, and other felonies had to submit to a buccal swab, which sweeps cheek cells from inside the mouth.
The second big expansion of the Kansas DUI databank was in 2007, when Kansas passed House Bill 2554, requiring anyone arrested in the state to submit a DNA sample. Like Missouri's law, which passed this year, the DNA profiles of anyone found not guilty will be destroyed. (Critics raise privacy issues. Interestingly, the UK's DNA databank is the subject of much more controversy than ours in the U.S.)
Prosecutors like Ted Hunt in Jackson County, Missouri, argue that the
more samples there are in the databank, the merrier. "I think I'm in
our lab's database," he says. "If through contamination, my profile
shows up in some sample, they can rule me out immediately because
they've got my profile."
There's little need for a law-abiding citizen to worry about
DNA evidence being used against them, Hunt says. "Semen doesn't just land
everywhere. Blood doesn't just land everywhere, haphazardly. If you get
a profile from a probative substance, so to speak, like blood or semen,
you pretty much know that it got there in a specific context, and that
it means something."
As for the privacy issue, Hunt says, "The profiles that get developed
in forensic DNA testing can tell you absolutely nothing about someone
other than their identity. Nothing except who they are. It's just like
a genetic social security number ... they don't even have names attached
to these profiles at the lab level."
Hunt heads up a section of Jackson County prosecutors working under a
$400,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice to undertake an
18-month examination of cold cases. The KCPD crime lab held onto trace
DNA evidence from the unsolved cases. Now that advances in DNA
technology have made very small samples viable, Hunt's team is
re-opening files and cracking old cases.
"I prosecuted a 1980 murder case where the evidence was fingernail
scrapings from underneath the victim's fingernails," Hunt says. "We got
a full profile of the defendant, and that scraping had been in the
property room since 1980."
Which is good news for the families and victims of unsolved crime, and bad news for those who may think they've gotten away with it.
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"Semen doesn't just land everywhere."- Hmm I`m not sure what to say about this comment, is he really serious! Well in truth DNA can be planted by some clever criminal - here`s a hypothetical scenario a criminal could pick up a "used" condom from a seedy area and spill its contents at a crime scene I think the scientist should be carefull about his comments!
Wow! I'm so amazed at the investigative work done on behalf of the "Juliette" story! On the other hand, it's disappointing that the NIJ special funds are for KCMO. If the funds are only working on KCPD cold cases, it doesn't appear it will help catch Juliette's attacker, whose DNA is in a Kansas database. I wonder if Kansas & Missouri can share DNA information, if it's even legal?????
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