DNA Bank Solves Crimes

Years had passed without an arrest in the rape and murder of a teenage hitchhiker in redwood country’s Del Norte County. Then, last summer, a name popped up on a state computer.

Robert Allen Wigley was a “cold hit” in the state’s convicted offender databank. His DNA matched evidence samples from the crime.

“This is just a wonderful thing that happened,” said Del Norte County sheriff’s Det. Gene McManus, who had investigated suspects since the 1994 killing--but never Wigley. “He was a gift from heaven.”

Wigley’s identification and homicide arrest were, more precisely, a gift of California’s 8-year-old DNA databank, which is slowly kicking into gear after a history of underfunding and neglect.

In 2001 there were 48 cold hits matching DNA evidence from unsolved crimes with the genetic material of convicted felons--the program’s most successful year by far.

But with the biggest prison system in the country, California still trails well behind national leaders such as Virginia. Thousands of rape kits sit untested in law enforcement freezers around the state. Thousands of prison inmates have not had their DNA sampled and hundreds are refusing to cooperate.

“It’s just not working the way it could work, it should work,” said Alameda County Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Rock Harmon, who chairs the forensics evidence committee for the California District Attorneys Assn.

California’s program is part of an evolving national law enforcement effort to use DNA from convicted felons to solve crimes and take advantage of advances in the forensic DNA field. All 50 states have laws authorizing databanks and more than 30 have them in operation.

The databanks operate on sophisticated technology and a simple procedure: Store the DNA profiles of offenders. Run DNA evidence from unsolved crimes through the banks and see if any match.

The promise of the databanks can be seen in Virginia. With a population smaller than Los Angeles County’s, the state has so far scored more than 600 hits, compared with a total of 74 in California. In January alone, Virginia made the same number of hits that California made in all of last year.

California started a major catch-up effort in 1999. Since then it has spent millions to eliminate a huge backlog of untested offender samples at the state lab and get them into the databank.

The Department of Corrections collected 50,000 DNA specimens from inmates, and last year the Legislature expanded the number of felony crimes subject to sampling requirements from nine to 13.

Additionally, $50 million is being distributed over three years to local and county law enforcement agencies to analyze thousands of untested specimens from unsolved sex crimes, including those involving homicides.

Cold Hits Rise to About 1 a Week

With 200,000 offender profiles and DNA samples from 2,500 cases in the databank, the number of cold hits in California jumped last year to an average of nearly one a week.

That rate can only go up, promises the Department of Justice. “Now it’s going to keep flying. It’s going to grow exponentially,” spokesman Manuel Valencia said.

But Alameda County prosecutor Harmon and others remain frustrated.

“This could really work. But it’s just not being done,” Harmon said. “We make too big a deal out of our few successes.”

He points to the thousands of inmates who have not given DNA samples, including many who refuse to give the blood specimens and mouth swabs required by law.

“I like to say we have the only volunteer database in the world,” Harmon said sarcastically.

Refusal to give a DNA sample is a misdemeanor, a meaningless punishment to those locked up for years. And Corrections Department rules forbid the use of force in taking the samples without a court order.

Corrections Department spokeswoman Terry Thornton said there are 800 state inmates who won’t give samples, along with the roughly 600 people on death row who have been shielded from the DNA requirements by a lawsuit.

Harmon said he believes the number of uncooperative inmates is much higher, and he faults the Corrections Department for its limits on the use of force. “Strap ‘em down,” he said.

A proposal to let corrections officers resort to force without a court order to get DNA samples was recently introduced in the state Legislature.

The force issue touches on civil liberties questions that hover over the entire concept of offender DNA databanks.

“There is a certain specter of Nazi Germany,” said Scott Ciment, legislative advocate for California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a private criminal defense bar.

Advocates went to court several years ago to stop the sampling of eight condemned female prisoners, arguing that the testing violated their constitutional rights. A court order was issued barring the sampling, though for procedural rather than constitutional reasons. The state is appealing the injunction, which has effectively prevented sampling of all death row inmates.

Ciment’s organization opposed the recent addition of four offenses--residential burglary, residential robbery, arson and carjacking--to the nine sex and violent crimes requiring DNA samples.

Ciment also says it would be unwise to make it easier for prison guards to use force.

DNA profiling can be used to prove innocence as well as guilt, and defense and civil liberties groups concede that the databanks are helpful to law enforcement. But they worry that the compilation of genetic material from entire classes of people pushes society in a dangerous direction.

“It’s appropriate that law enforcement have it as a tool,” said Elizabeth Schroeder, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “But it has to be limited so that we don’t wind up as a national DNA databank--and all of us wind up as a suspect.”

Although the DNA samples are collected solely for identification purposes, they contain all manner of genetic information about not only the inmates but also their blood relatives.

“It will give extraordinarily private information on health and other things,” Schroeder said. “While we don’t see any evidence of government agencies overreaching in that way, we have some shocking examples in the past of government collecting information for seemingly benign purposes and then expanding its use.”

ACLU Wants Samples Destroyed

The ACLU, like California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, argues that once the inmate samples have been profiled, they should be destroyed.

Databank officials say they don’t have the desire, time or equipment to extract the kind of genetic information that could be misused.

“There isn’t a realistic concern,” countered Ken Konzak, lab director for the state DNA databank. “I don’t know why all of a sudden they assume there’s a terrific interest in some ‘1984’ scenario in California,” he added, in a reference to the George Orwell novel.

Konzak also said it makes no sense to destroy the DNA samples once the identifying points have been mapped. The state needs to keep them to verify results later if necessary, and rapid advances in the DNA field will inevitably produce new techniques with which to analyze the specimens.

Though some worry that too many crimes now carry sampling requirements in California, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Kahn says not enough do.

“We have no better tool to fight crime, to bring closure to victims, exonerate the innocent and take violent offenders off the street,” said Kahn, who is in charge of forensic sciences in the district attorney’s office.

One reason Virginia’s offender databank has so many cold hits, she says, is that the state requires all felons to provide DNA samples.

“We find the vast majority of violent crimes were solved because we had people in the databank because of property crimes,” said Paul Ferrara, director of Virginia’s Division of Forensic Science.

Law enforcement officials there routinely collect biological evidence from burglaries and nonviolent crimes. Most agencies in California say they are stretched too thin to do that sort of sampling.

Up in California’s Del Norte County, sheriff’s Det. McManus is doing as much as he can. “It’s revolutionizing my job,” he said.

McManus was working as a deputy in 1994 when an 18-year-old hitchhiker from Washington was raped, strangled and left dead in a state park. He found her body, and when he became a detective soon after he started investigating the case.

He checked out several suspects, obtaining blood samples from them to check against the rape kit evidence. They didn’t match.

At some point, McManus is not sure when, the state entered the crime specimen into the DNA databank. No hits resulted. Then in August, after Wigley’s DNA sample had been submitted to the bank, there was a match.

Wigley, 35, had lived in Crescent City and been in and out of prison. At the time of the match, McManus said Wigley was living in Oregon and was wanted in California for a probation violation, failing to register as a sex offender.

After the cold hit, Oregon state police tracked Wigley down and he was extradited to Del Norte County, where he is in jail. He is charged with first-degree murder with two special circumstances that could carry the death penalty: rape prior to a homicide and torture.