Crime Fighters’ Party Raises Money for a DNA Lab

At first glance, it looked like any other cocktail party.

But there on the linen-covered tables alongside the fresh fruit, flowers, wine and molten brie was something labeled “Blood Examination Table.” And on that, next to the three microscopes, lay a swatch of white paper splashed with blood.

Some party. But the purpose of this particular bash, held Wednesday evening in Santa Ana, was to launch fund-raising efforts for the new crime-fighting weapon that Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates calls “a Star Wars product.”

Gates, his chief criminalist, Larry Ragle, and the Orange County Sheriff’s Advisory Council were asking 150 business leaders and county officials to contribute money to set up a lab in Orange County to do the procedure known as genetic fingerprinting.

Genetic Codes Determined

There are now four labs in the United States that can, using the procedure, take a tiny sample of blood, hair or semen and break it down into the cell fragments that contain deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which carries the genetic code unique to each individual.

Gates and Ragle want Orange County’s to be the first crime lab in California with the new DNA-typing technology. Aware that the county budget is tight, however, they decided to seek the $200,000 they need from private donors.

The DNA-typing technique was invented in England in 1985 by geneticist Alec Jeffreys and his colleagues at the University of Leicester. Jeffreys found that DNA contains many short segments unique in composition and size for each human or set of identical siblings. Jeffreys developed a technique that involves extracting the DNA from a specimen of blood or tissue and chemically dividing it into short fragments. When separated by a process called electrophoresis, the fragments form a unique pattern that can serve as an identity profile.

Besides matching physical evidence of a crime to a suspect, the technique has been used to prove kinship in paternity suits and recently to establish better differentiation among condors in the captive breeding program at the San Diego Zoo.

20 States Use It

Although genetic typing is now used in 20 states, California has not yet embraced the technology. Recently, however, State Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp said its use would augur “a new era of crime fighting in California.” Van de Kamp now supports legislation to establish a database of DNA codes for every registered sex offender in the state. And earlier this year, he approved the use of DNA-typing as legal evidence. A case involving an Orange County man accused of serial rape is expected to be one of the first in the state in which genetic typing will figure as evidence.

Without the DNA match checked by a New York gene-typing lab in the Orange County case, Gates said Thursday, “we’d have a very difficult case--maybe impossible.”

Danny Harris, 37, charged with 63 counts of rape, is to be tried in June. Harris is suspected of having raped at least 18 women in Anaheim, Fullerton, Santa Ana and Garden Grove in a series of assaults that date back to December, 1985.

In describing the difficulty in prosecuting the case, Assistant Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi said that the victims “couldn’t have provided evidence in court.” But with the DNA tests, Gates said, “I think we got him cold turkey.”

Genetic typing has figured in two other Orange County cases, Ragle said. In one, a man charged with statutory rape pleaded guilty when the prosecutor threatened to send specimens for genetic typing. In the other, Ragle said, an Orange County judge refused to admit DNA data as evidence in a rape case because the defense attorney had not receive the data in time to challenge its admission.

Reliability Questioned

For all the excitement about DNA typing, two UC Irvine professors, microbiologist Simon Ford and social scientist William Thompson, are concerned that the new technology is not as reliable as some have made it out to be. Both have testified as defense witnesses in cases that relied on DNA typing, Thompson said.

Cautioning that Orange County should not rush into DNA typing, Thompson said: “A lot is at stake here. If the test is inaccurate, there’s a possibility that we will be falsely exculpating guilty people and falsely convicting innocent people in a serious crime.”

Thompson expressed concern about the results of an exercise performed by three private DNA-typing labs for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department last year. In that exercise, labs made mistakes.

For the test, Ragle sent each lab about 50 blood, semen and hair samples and asked it to determine which specimens came from the same people. One lab was wrong on one of 44 matches; another missed one of 50 matches; the third gave no opinion on 14 samples, although the 37 matches it made were correct.

Ragle disagrees that the errors mean that the technology is invalid. One lab made a mechanical error in labeling a vial incorrectly, he said, but that does not reflect on the science of the procedure itself, he said. He noted that evidence in a forensic lab would be handled with special care. Besides, he said, two of his criminalists have trained for a year and half to do DNA typing, having taken microbiology classes at UCI and having worked at a private DNA lab and at the FBI.

But the party-goers Wednesday heard no criticism of DNA typing. The party had one purpose, said Al Cosentino, a Laguna Hills computer consultant who helped organize it: “We’re going to draw blood from each and every one of you--no, money, money, money.”