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Monday, October 19, 2009

Courts - "Prosecutors in Manhattan — aware that the legal clock for bringing a case was running out — devised the novel strategy of indicting the rapist’s DNA"

"Indicting DNA Profiles Is Vital in Old Rape Cases" is the headline to this story today in the NY Times, reported by Al Baker. Some quotes from the long story:

Nearly 10 years had passed since a college student was raped on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and with no known suspect in the 1993 case, the police were not close to an arrest. But what they did have was nearly as critical: the rapist’s DNA profile.

In New York City, prosecutors have secured 117 indictments of DNA samples in rape cases, linked 18 of those profiles to specific people, and obtained 13 convictions, either through trials or negotiated pleas. Five cases are pending.

“What we said was, ‘There is no reason for people to get away with rape because of the statute of limitations,’ ” said John Feinblatt, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s criminal justice coordinator. “They shouldn’t be able to hide behind it; they shouldn’t be able to race for time and get over the finish line and leave a victim without a case being solved.”

The success in rape cases has led officials in New York to expand the use of DNA as an investigative tool for not only serious, violent crimes, but also for offenses like serial car theft.

Many states, including Arkansas, Michigan and Delaware, use genetic evidence as a basis for indicting unknown assailants in sex crimes, said Scott Akehurst-Moore, a law librarian at Suffolk University Law School in Boston who has studied and written about the subject. In one well-known case in Delaware, he said, state law was modified to allow DNA indictments for a wide range of crimes including murder, rape, forgery and perjury.

In Sacramento, Calif., a deputy district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, said the strategy of indicting DNA is applicable not only to sexual assault cases.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on October 19, 2009 08:34 AM
Posted to Courts in general