Solving Cold Cases or Presuming Guilt?
When someone fatally shot an 82-year-old man who was checking his mailbox in the Indianapolis suburb of Zionsville one afternoon in September, police had few leads to go on. When someone shot at police stations in Indianapolis a few weeks later, police again were unable to identify a suspect.
Police connected the two crimes because shell casings showed the same rifle was used in both. But their big break came when they were able to match DNA left on the casings and on a note left at one of the police stations with a DNA sample taken from a burglary suspect in Ohio in 2015. The match led to the arrest of Damoine Wilcoxson, 21, of Indianapolis, for the crimes.
Wilcoxson was never convicted of burglary in Ohio. But because Ohio is one of at least 32 states that allow police to take DNA samples from people as soon as they are arrested for a felony and enter them into a national database, Indiana authorities were able to crack the case.
“We had no leads,” said Todd Meyer, prosecutor for Boone County, Indiana, where the murder occurred. “Without the DNA we were able to obtain from his felony arrest in another state, I believe the case would continue to be unsolved. We had nothing to lead us in that direction.”
Advocates for swabbing people as soon as they’re arrested, like Meyer, say it helps solve hard-to-crack cases when other leads grow cold. And, prosecutors and law enforcement officials say, it can help prevent crime by catching repeat offenders earlier in their criminal careers.
“We started back in old days with mug shots, then people’s fingerprints,” Meyer said. “Now in the 21st century, we need to start using DNA to the fullest extent.”
But opponents, including defense attorneys and civil rights groups, say that when people are swabbed for a DNA sample when they’re arrested, they are being treated as if they’re suspects in other crimes or even implicating themselves in crimes they may not be suspected of. And in cases in which a person is never charged, it can be expensive to get the record of their DNA expunged.
“You can always collect DNA from someone convicted of a crime, so why do you need to front load that and collect DNA from someone presumed innocent?” said Barry Pollack, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
States have been passing and expanding DNA collection programs over the past decade. In 2013, President Barack Obama signed a law that set aside $10 million a year for three years in federal funds that states could tap to launch or expand their DNA programs.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the practice, saying taking samples at the time of arrest doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. “Taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee's DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure,” the court wrote in a 2013 decision in a case from Maryland ...