SCOTUS grants relief to death row inmate seeking DNA testing

The US Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that a Texas death row inmate has the right to sue over the state’s laws governing DNA testing, reported Jurist. The majority opinion was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Ruben Gutierrez was convicted of capital murder in 1998. Since 2010, he has been unsuccessfully requesting DNA testing of crime scene evidence he claimed would prove he was not in the victim’s home the night of the murder. Texas’ Article 64 allows DNA testing where a “convicted person establishes by a preponderance of the evidence” that he “would not have been convicted if exculpatory results had been obtained through DNA testing.”

Gutierrez filed a §1983 lawsuit in federal court against Luis Saenz, the district attorney who has custody of the untested evidence. Gutierrez argued that Texas’ state post-conviction DNA testing procedures violated his liberty interests under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The trial court agreed and granted declaratory relief. However, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed, holding that Gutierrez lacked standing because his claimed injury was not redressable since a declaratory judgment would be unlikely to cause the prosecutor to allow testing. The defendants additionally argued to the Supreme Court that the prosecutor has several independent state-law grounds not to provide the DNA testing.

The Supreme Court disagreed and found Gutierrez had standing based on its precedent concerning standing for a due process claim against custodians of evidence. They explained that “if a federal court concluded that Texas’ postconviction DNA testing procedures violate due process, the state prosecutor’s justification for denying DNA testing would be eliminated, thereby removing the barrier between [Gutierrez] and the requested testing.” Furthermore, the possibility that “a prosecutor might eventually find another reason to deny a prisoner’s DNA testing request does not eliminate the prisoner’s standing to argue that the cited reasons violated his rights under the Due Process Clause.”

The defendants also argued that the case is moot after Sanez refused “Gutierrez’s DNA testing request even after the District Court issued the declaratory judgment.” The court disagreed, explaining that holding so “would allow defendants to manufacture mootness by ensuring that, no matter what procedures a court requires them to employ, the same substantive outcome will follow.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett issued a concurrence opinion stating she would reverse the Fifth Circuit’s decision on the sole basis that “it failed to consider the breadth of the relief that Gutierrez requested in his complaint.”

Justice Samuel Alito dissented from the majority, holding that it ignored that precedent “held that…declaratory judgment would redress the prisoner’s deprivation of DNA testing because it would ‘substantially’ alter the likelihood of the district attorney’s ordering DNA testing.”

Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined Alito’s dissent. Thomas wrote separately to emphasize that “this Court has no business intervening in this case in the first place” because the original meaning of “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment “did not include entitlements to government-created benefits” and “likely referred only to freedom from physical restraint.”

While Gutierrez’s request for rehearing was pending in the Fifth Circuit, Texas scheduled his execution. The court had pre­vi­ous­ly issued a stay of exe­cu­tion to Gutierrez on July 16, 2024, just 20 min­utes before he was sched­uled to be executed.

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Book Review: Barbara Bradley Hagerty--Bringing Ben Home: A murder, a conviction, and the fight to redeem American justice

Bringing Ben Home: A murder, a conviction,
and the fight to redeem American justice

Barbara Bradley Hagerty

Riverhead Books, p. 443

Review by Matthew T. Mangino 

            Ben Spencer was convicted in 1987 of the carjacking and murder of Jeffrey Young. “Bringing Ben Home: A murder, a conviction, and the fight to redeem American justice,” is Ben’s compelling journey through a “broken” criminal justice system, told by Barbara Bradley Hagerty.

            Hagerty was a correspondent for NPR for 18 years.  She received numerous awards for her on air reporting and has met with success as a writer as well. 

            Bringing Ben Home was an ambitious project and Hagerty pulled it off. She not only meticulously brought Ben Spencer’s harrowing story to life; she was able analyze the growing problems in the criminal justice system which makes justice for some out of reach.

            Bradley examines the unlikely phenomenon of people pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit. She acknowledges that Spencer never confessed to the crime, but she deftly weaves this important issue into her story.

            A startling one in five innocent people charged with murder confessed.  Whether it’s investigators lying to suspects about evidence—condoned by the U.S. Supreme Court or its a prolonged interrogation of a juvenile or intellectually disabled suspect—innocent people confess to crimes they did not commit.

            After Spencer’s first trial his conviction was overturned on appeal. Bradley examined a plea offer that was made to Spencer of 20 years with the likelihood of being released in three years.  Spencer refused the offer “I didn’t do anything” was his response.

            Unfortunately, in today’s criminal justice system, innocent people plead guilty all the time.  Whether the risk of losing at trial is too great because of the Defendant’s prior record—which enhances sentences, or the so-called trial penalty which punishes people more harshly if they go to trial—innocent people plead guilty to avoid trial.

            The politics of criminal justice can at times be shocking. Prosecutors who refuse to give up on obviously bad cases.  In most states prosecutors are elected and letting a “convicted killer” off doesn’t bode well on election day.

            Bradley tells the story of Bill Clinton, who as a candidate for President in 1992, returned to his native Arkansas to oversee the execution of a mentally disabled black man.

            Bradley examined how some staples of forensic evidence like bite marks and microscopic hair evidence have been debunked.  For instance, Bradley pointed out the FBI concluded that with regard to hair analysis “its experts had provided scenically invalid testimony in 96 percent of cases.”

            How do we now know that widely accepted forensic analysis is now junk science? As Bradley put it, “The double helix has sparked a revolution.”

            DNA has exposed the errors of our way.  As Bradley suggested “DNA jump-started the innocence revolution.” But, as with Ben Spencer, DNA is not present in every case.  However, as Bradley’s story makes clear even in the cases without DNA, there are still mistaken identifications, police misconduct and band forensics.

            It is difficult to imagine that an innocent man who spent 34 years in prison is lucky, but Ben Spencer was the luckiest of the unlucky. Bradley examines in detail the group of advocates and lawyers who took up Spencer’s cause and fought tirelessly for justice. Many men and women sit in prison with no one to give them a voice, and opportunity for vindication.

            On top of that, even with a team working on your behalf you need even more than luck. “[O]verturning a wrongful conviction, even with DNA evidence, is extremely difficult . . . [without it] it’s so much harder,” Rebecca Brown of the Innocent Project told Bradley.  She goes on to say, “It comes down to, really, serendipity. . . We should not be having to depend on luck.”

            Bradley takes on the criminal justice system -- whether its big pictures issues like flawed forensic evidence, the trial penalty, habeas corpus or politics – or the private anguish of a single person wrongfully convicted of a crime – Bradley paints a vivid and troubling portrait of America’s criminal justice system.

(Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino)

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CREATORS: DNA Reveals Flaws in Criminal Justice System

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
February 11, 2025

The Innocence Project used to track all DNA exonerations throughout the country. An exoneration clears a convicted person of blameworthiness. Now they track all "Innocence Project successes," which includes all exonerations generated through DNA or other evidence.

There were 375 DNA exonerations between 1989 and 2020. For those 375 men and women and their families, DNA saved them from the anguish and pain of being locked up for a crime they did not commit. For the rest of us, DNA revealed the many flaws in the criminal justice system.

The "other successes" are even more impressive than the DNA exonerations. In "Bringing Ben Home: A Murder, a Conviction, and the Fight to Redeem American Justice," Barbara Bradley Hagerty declared, "The double helix has sparked a revolution." DNA has exposed the errors of our way.

The Innocence Project is right to celebrate those non-DNA exonerations. "[O]verturning a wrongful conviction, even with DNA evidence, is extremely difficult. ... [Without it] it's so much harder," Rebecca Brown of the Innocence Project told Bradley. She goes on to say, "It comes down to, really, serendipity. ... We should not be having to depend on luck."

DNA is not present in every case. However, there are still mistaken identifications, police misconduct and bad forensics throughout the system. The Innocence Project lists six "contributing causes" for wrongful convictions: eyewitness misidentification; false confessions or admissions; government misconduct; inadequate defense; informants; and unvalidated or improper forensic science.

More specifically, in 63% of wrongful convictions there was eyewitness identification; 52% had inaccurate or unscientific forensic analysis; 19% had untrustworthy informants: and 28% had confessions.

Imagine that nearly 3 in 10 people exonerated pleaded guilty to a crime they did not commit. How does that happen?

In 2010, 17-year-old India Spellman was arrested by Philadelphia police for the robbery of a woman with a gun and as the shooter in the robbery and murder of a second person. India and her co-defendant were taken to the police department for interrogation. Although she was a juvenile, her parents were kept from the interrogation room.

As the 17-year-old was alone with the police, a detective hit her in the face and screamed at her. He left the interrogation room and returned with a statement that Spellman signed after detectives refused to read her the content of the statement. The statement was a confession to being involved in both robberies.

Thirteen years later, a judge vacated Spellman's conviction. The trial — which featured a misidentification, a coerced confession and prosecutors withholding exculpatory evidence — had been unconstitutional.

As science evolves, so does the reliability of forensic evidence. The gold standard pre-DNA was the human fingerprint. You may be surprised to learn that the uniqueness of a fingerprint is an assumption, not a well-studied idea.

According to Discover magazine, the "lack of a fundamental scientific basis for the supposed uniqueness of fingerprints — and the inability for apparent experts to reliably match them or even agree on what's required for a match — has seen some federal courts reject fingerprints entirely as evidence."

Even DNA has come under scrutiny. As collection of DNA at crime scenes has become more sophisticated, gathering minute biological samples has emerged as potential for folly. Finding someone's DNA at a crime scene doesn't necessarily mean they were ever at that location. Transfer DNA can spread to objects and places by way of other human carriers.

In one case, according to Discover magazine, a man's DNA was found on a murder victim who was killed in their home. The man whose DNA was found at the crime scene was in the hospital during the murder. The DNA had been transferred by a paramedic who brought the man to the hospital and who later responded to the 911 call made regarding the homicide.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Bluesky @matthewmangino.bsky.social.

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In Texas 'tough on crime' impacts the guilty as well as the innocent

Politicians like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton project an image of being tough on crime, but they’re also tough on those who are innocent, per a year-end report from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, as reported by The Austin Chronicle.

The annual report tells the stories of several individuals who faced execution in 2024 despite evidence that they were not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. Three of the eight people the state planned to execute this year tried to present evidence of innocence. The state killed Ivan Cantu on Feb. 28, despite evidence not heard by his trial jury – or any court – which demonstrated that the main witness against him lied on the stand about important details of the case. In July, Ruben Gutierrez received a last-minute stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to decide whether he should be allowed to sue the state of Texas to compel them to conduct DNA testing on items involved in his conviction. Gutierrez has said for years that such testing will show he is innocent. The state of Texas has fought the testing every step of the way.

The most glaring example of that kind of intransigence was the case of Robert Roberson. Roberson was convicted in 2003 of killing his chronically ill 2-year-old daughter Nikki on the basis of the dubious medical hypothesis known as “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” now regarded in many circles as junk science. Roberson’s advocates have tried for years to get Texas’ criminal justice system to consider evidence showing that Nikki died of undiagnosed pneumonia, not being shaken. The courts have refused to grant him a new trial. Gov. Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles have supported his execution.

The Texas Supreme Court stayed the execution on Oct. 17 at 9:45pm, four hours after it was to have begun, to allow the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence to bring Roberson to the Capitol to testify on his innocence. Paxton stopped the testimony last month, allowing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to ignore a subpoena from the committee. Roberson’s supporters expect another execution to be set for him in the coming year.

In two other death penalty cases, courts decided that Melissa Lucio and Kerry Max Cook were innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is considering whether to accept the recommendation of Lucio’s trial court and overturn her death sentence. She remains locked up as she awaits the decision. Cook was officially exonerated by the TCCA nearly 50 years after his conviction and is now free.

The TCADP’s report shows that Texas juries are continuing to sentence fewer and fewer people to death. Only six new people were sent to death row this year. However, as death sentences decline, they continue to be applied disproportionately to people of color. Five of the six men sentenced to death this year are people of color: three are Black, one is Hispanic, one is Native American. According to the report, nearly 70% of death sentences over the last five years have been imposed on people of color. More than 40% were imposed on Black defendants. This disparity hasn’t changed over the years. Although Black people constitute about 13% of Texas’ population, they represent 47% of death row.

But the total number of people awaiting execution is down. As of Dec. 16, TDCJ lists 174 people on the row, the lowest number since 1985.

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Missouri executes man in spite of prosecutor's concerns

 The 15th Execution of 2024

A Missouri man, Marcellus Williams, convicted of breaking into a woman’s home and repeatedly stabbing her was executed on September 24, 2024 over the objections of the victim’s family and the prosecutor, who wanted the death sentence commuted to life in prison, reported The Associated Press.

Marcellus Williams, 55, was convicted in the 1998 killing of Lisha Gayle, who was stabbed during the burglary of her suburban St. Louis home.

Williams was put to death despite questions his attorneys raised over jury selection at his trial and the handling of evidence in the case. His clemency petition focused heavily on how Gayle’s relatives wanted Williams’ sentence commuted to life without the possibility of parole.

“The family defines closure as Marcellus being allowed to live,” the petition stated. “Marcellus’ execution is not necessary.”

As Williams lay awaiting execution, he appeared to converse with a spiritual advisor seated next to him. Williams wiggled his feet underneath a white sheet that was pulled up to his neck and moved his head slightly while his spiritual advisor continued to talk. Then Williams’ chest heaved about a half dozen times, and he showed no further movement.

Williams’ son and two attorneys watched from another room. No one was present on behalf of the victim’s family.

The Department of Corrections released a brief statement that Williams had written ahead of time, saying: “All Praise Be to Allah In Every Situation!!!”

Republican Missouri Gov. Mike Parson said he hoped the execution brings finality to a case that “languished for decades, revictimizing Ms. Gayle’s family over and over again.”

“No juror nor judge has ever found Williams’ innocence claim to be credible,” Parson said in a statement.

The NAACP had been among those urging Parson to cancel the execution.

“Tonight, Missouri lynched another innocent Black man,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement.

It was the third time Williams faced execution. He got reprieves in 2015 and 2017, but his last-ditch efforts this time were futile. Parson and the state Supreme Court rejected his appeals in quick succession Monday, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene hours before he was put to death.

Last month, Gayle’s relatives gave their blessings to an agreement between the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney’s office and Williams’ attorneys to commute the sentence to life in prison. But acting on an appeal from Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey’s office, the state Supreme Court nullified the agreement.

Gayle, 42, was a social worker and former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. Prosecutors at Williams’ trial said he broke into her home on Aug. 11, 1998, heard the shower running and found a large butcher knife. Gayle was stabbed 43 times when she came downstairs. Her purse and her husband’s laptop were stolen.

Authorities said Williams stole a jacket to conceal blood on his shirt. His girlfriend asked him why he would wear a jacket on a hot day. She said she later saw the purse and laptop in his car and that Williams sold the computer a day or two later.

Prosecutors also cited testimony from Henry Cole, who shared a cell with Williams in 1999 while Williams was jailed on unrelated charges. Cole told prosecutors that Williams confessed to the killing and provided details about it.

Williams’ attorneys responded that the girlfriend and Cole were both convicted of felonies and wanted a $10,000 reward. They said that fingerprints, a bloody shoeprint, hair and other evidence at the crime scene didn’t match Williams’.

A crime scene investigator had testified the killer wore gloves.

Questions about DNA evidence also led St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell to request a hearing challenging Williams’ guilt. But days before the Aug. 21 hearing, new testing showed that DNA on the knife belonged to members of the prosecutor’s office who handled it without gloves after the original crime lab tests.

Without DNA evidence pointing to any alternative suspect, Midwest Innocence Project attorneys reached a compromise with the prosecutor’s office: Williams would enter a new, no-contest plea to first-degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without parole. A no-contest plea isn’t an admission of guilt but is treated as such for the purpose of sentencing.

Judge Bruce Hilton signed off, as did Gayle’s family. But Bailey appealed, and the state Supreme Court blocked the agreement and ordered Hilton to proceed with an evidentiary hearing, which took place last month.

Hilton ruled on Sept. 12 that the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence would stand, noting that Williams’ arguments all had been previously rejected. That decision was upheld Monday by the state Supreme Court.

Attorneys for Williams, who was Black, also challenged the fairness of his trial, particularly the fact that only one of the 12 jurors was Black. Tricia Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project said the prosecutor in the case, Keith Larner, removed six of seven Black prospective jurors.

Larner testified at the August hearing that he struck one potential Black juror partly because he looked too much like Williams — a statement that Williams’ attorneys asserted showed improper racial bias.

Larner contended that the jury selection process was fair.

Williams was the third Missouri inmate put to death this year and the 100th since the state resumed use of the death penalty in 1989.

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There have been 13 executions this year in the US, there are 8 scheduled in the next month

There have been 13 executions carried out so far in 2024.  Between now and October 17, there are eight executions scheduled in five states. According to the Death Penalty information Center, there are three executions scheduled in Texas, two in Alabama and one in South Carolina, Missouri and Oklahoma.

There will be a flurry of activity as the execution dates get closer, judging by the latest decision out of Missouri it may not be good news for the condemned.

A judge in Missouri rejected inmate Marcellus Williams’ attempt to overturn a murder conviction and death sentence on the basis of updated DNA evidence. Circuit Judge Bruce F. Hilton stated in his rejection of the bid that “none of this evidence is ‘new’ as it was available at trial,” reported Jurist.

Williams’ legal team filed a motion to vacate his conviction and death sentence in January. The motion was filed to provide the court evidence that had not been available at trial. It included updated evidence from three experts concerning DNA found on the murder weapon. All three experts concluded the DNA was not from Williams. One expert stated, “DNA evidence now shows Mr. Williams did not likely wield the knife that was used.”

In rejecting the motion, Judge Hilton emphasized Missouri’s innocence analysis, the first step of which is determining “whether the new evidence is new in the sense that it was not available at trial.” He stated that the “new” DNA evidence was “consistent with the trial testimony,” citing testimony by an expert at the trial that the DNA could not conclusively be linked to Williams, and a crime scene report that stated that “the suspect wore gloves.”

Additionally, Judge Hilton rejected Williams’ claims of ineffective counsel, exclusion of evidence and racial prejudice. He stated the claims were “repackaged” arguments that had already been processed and rejected by previous courts.

Missouri’s Supreme Court upheld Williams’ conviction and death sentence in July. He must now apply to Missouri’s governor for executive clemency before his scheduled execution later this month.

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Missouri Supreme Court blocks plea agreement for man scheduled to be executed next month

The Missouri Supreme Court has blocked an agreement that would have resentenced death row inmate Marcellus Williams to life without parole after new testing of DNA evidence complicated his innocence claim, reported CNN.

A St. Louis County Circuit Court judge has now set the agreement aside and scheduled an evidentiary hearing for August 28, court records show. The lower court may seek an administrative stay of Williams’ September 24 execution date while the proceedings unfold, the chief justice wrote.

The Missouri Supreme Court’s decision caps a whirlwind 24 hours in the case that has pitted Wesley Bell, a local prosecutor running for Congress as a Democrat, against state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican seeking reelection.

Williams, 55, has long maintained he did not murder Felicia Gayle, a one-time reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch found stabbed to death in her University City home in 1998. He was convicted in 2001 of first-degree murder, burglary and robbery, among other charges, and sentenced to death.

Twenty-three years after his conviction, Williams’ innocence claim is championed by attorneys for the Innocence Project and the Midwest Innocence Project.

In January, the St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, led by Bell, filed a motion to vacate Williams’ conviction, saying DNA evidence that could purportedly exclude Williams as the killer had never been reviewed by a court. Prosecutors were expected to present DNA evidence in court Wednesday that they say would exclude Williams as the person who wielded the knife used in the murder. The motion cited the analysis by three DNA experts.

However, the results of new DNA testing showed the evidence had been mishandled, complicating Williams’ innocence claim, the Associated Press reported.

The key hearing Wednesday did not get underway as scheduled, and after several hours, Bell’s office announced a consent judgment, an agreement between Williams and the prosecutor’s office. The deal dictated Williams receive a life sentence after entering a so-called Alford plea of guilty to first-degree murder. An Alford plea generally allows a defendant to maintain their innocence while acknowledging it is not in their interest to go to trial given the evidence against them.

A copy of the judgment said it was reached after a conference Wednesday in which a representative of Gayle’s family “expressed to the Court the family’s desire that the death penalty not be carried out in this case, as well as the family’s desire for finality.” Gayle’s widower declined to comment on Thursday.

The Missouri attorney general had fought Bell’s motion and opposed Wednesday’s agreement, saying in a statement new DNA test results indicated the evidence would not exonerate Williams.

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The true crime phenomenon can be traced to Truman Capote's 1966 release of 'In Cold Blood'

In 1966, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood all but created the true crime genre, reported Vox. Nearly 50 years later, radio journalist Sarah Koenig decided the case of a Baltimore high school student, Adnan Syed, convicted of murdering his teenage ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, needed a second look. 

With its high production values, conversational style, and a storyline unfolding in real time across episodes, 2014’s Serial fueled a new wave of interest in true crime and transformed podcasting. Its first season — with its piano-plinking earworm of an opening theme and endless parodies — was once the most downloaded podcast in the world at 300 million, a number that now feels almost quaint thanks to the influence Serial has had on the entire medium. 

But Serial’s most consequential effect was on the criminal justice system itself.

Before the landmark series, the main way we received our pop culture narratives about crime came through police procedurals like Law & Order and high-profile investigations like that of O.J. Simpson or JonBenét Ramsey, where the accompanying media circus often overshadowed the facts; serious deconstruction of individual cases was relegated to niche internet forums or the occasional prestige documentary. Even in more routine circumstances, police departments typically controlled the stories around criminal investigations, choosing what the public got to know and when they knew it. This grip on information often meant the media had no choice but to parrot the police narrative of a case — a framing mirrored by the onscreen “copaganda” of procedurals and other scripted shows.

Serial changed that by ushering in an age of increased scrutiny over the narratives we’re fed about policing and by making millions of listeners more fundamentally aware of the limits and flaws of the justice system. From that awareness has come serious action that arguably helped free Serial’s own subject.

Much has been made of the ways in which the true crime podcasting boom may have normalized the more negative stereotypes of the genre: obsessed fans harassing suspects and thinking they know better than authorities, or boozed-up white women joking about murder as millions of fans laugh along without regard for victims or survivors. To be sure, thorny complications can arise, but little attention has been given to the positive outcomes of this kind of collectivism when it’s applied to an unjust system.

True crime podcasts, starting with Serial and the high-profile podcasts that followed, “have offered a critical lens through which to scrutinize the procedures and decision-making in the criminal justice system,” Kent Bausman, a criminologist and sociology professor at Maryville University, told Vox in an email. “They have enlightened the public consciousness about the convoluted machinations of the system and revealed with great clarity the human experience of miscarriages of justice.” Bausman noted that true crime podcasts frequently provide insight into “everything from the production and use of false confessions and the inherent problems that exist regarding the use of forensic evidence in the courtroom.”

Bausman pointed out that organizations like the Innocence Project have existed for decades, yet it’s only recently that they’ve become better known as a result of the true crime explosion. We’ve gained a broader cultural awareness of the factors that lead to the wrongful convictions that the Innocence Project and its peers help overturn — things like false confessions, police misconduct, bad forensics, and false testimony at trial. Additionally, terms like “Missing White Woman Syndrome” and “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women” have sprung up to encompass an entire range of police inadequacies when it comes to the racial and socioeconomic gaps between “perfect” victims and forgotten ones.

True crime has “revealed with great clarity the human experience of miscarriages of justice”

True crime fans are now loud advocates for thorough investigations. They’re more knowledgeable about shady criminal justice techniques, from entrapment and “Mr. Big” operations to Brady violations and the Reid technique. There’s an increased familiarity with nonprofits that help law enforcement solve cases, from Texas EquuSearch to the DNA Doe project, as well as those that seek criminal justice reform, like End the Backlog.

Several of these organizations build upon what is perhaps the biggest recent breakthrough in criminal investigations: forensic genealogy. The use of familial DNA to catch culprits has revolutionized crime-solving amid the true crime boom. In 2018, when forensic genealogy led to the capture of the Golden State Killer, the true crime world greeted the announcement like sports fans might celebrate winning the World Series — a comparison that captures the complicated nature of a genre that makes entertainment out of tragedy. Wider concerns about genealogical privacy and private companies sharing user information quickly followed.

That collectivity and the sense that a “true crime community” exists also largely came about because of Serial.  After Serial, millions of people became amateur detectives. Legions of fans have made themselves an invaluable part of the crime-solving process via social media, as well as longtime true crime forums like Websleuths. They’ve pored over cases until they’ve become nigh experts themselves, drummed up tips to law enforcement, generated new interest in cold cases, and often all but led authorities by the nose to conclusions they should have reached long ago; in one famous case, this latter scenario played out before the ears of millions of listeners after an amateur sleuth made his own podcast to draw attention to the Kristin Smart case and forced his local cops to pay attention. 

Journalist-led true crime podcasts have also had a direct impact on the cases they’ve investigated in the intervening years — like In the Dark, which helped free its season two subject, Curtis Flowers, from death row in 2019. In 2022, the runaway hit Murdaugh Murders helped catalyze the re-investigation of the death of Stephen Smith, which is widely believed to be connected to the byzantine crimes of Alex Murdaugh. 

Not all criminal investigations benefit from millions of newly minted amateur sleuths diving into the fray. Bausman warns it can in fact “commodify both offenders and victims for the public’s amusement.” He also pointed out that despite the renewed attention true crime podcasts can bring to stagnant investigations, the clearance rates for homicide cold cases have not increased due to this influence. 

Still, Serial continues to have an outsized impact on our cultural understanding of the criminal justice system, and this sea change ultimately came full circle back to Adnan Syed. 

Legions of fans have made themselves an invaluable part of the crime-solving process

In 2022, Syed’s hometown of Baltimore revisited dozens of convictions as part of a larger overall effort by Maryland to atone for decades of draconian sentences handed out to juvenile and young offenders, many of whom spent their entire adult lives in prison with no opportunity for parole. This is just one example of how prosecutorial divisions across the country are reexamining wrongful and unfair convictions through what are known as conviction integrity units and sentencing review units. These programs are part of the normalization of criminal justice reform that has come amid an enormous shift in attitudes about prosecutions in the decade since Serial aired.

It was a dogged pursuit of local criminal justice reform that allowed Syed to finally walk free, though the flashier “whodunit” aspects of his case that initially attracted Koenig also delivered a twist. Syed’s case review uncovered new evidence, including two new suspects, that cast reasonable doubt on his trial and conviction. Prosecutors dropped all charges against Syed just days later; they later walked this back on a technicality. Those nuances also reflect a post-Serial shift in public advocacy and focus: on the rights of victims and their families in cases like this one.

Although his case is still in limbo, Syed remains out of jail, his conviction stayed until Hae Min Lee’s family’s concerns can be resolved. It’s the kind of messy, satisfyingly unsatisfying conclusion that befits both Serial itself and the evolved criminal justice era we’re in — one in which answers rarely come easily, but for perhaps the first time, all of us are looking.

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FBI has 21.7 million DNA profiles about 7 % of the U.S. population

 The FBI has amassed 21.7 million DNA profiles — equivalent to about 7 percent of the U.S. population — according to Bureau data reviewed by The Intercept.

The FBI aims to nearly double its current $56.7 million budget for dealing with its DNA catalog with an additional $53.1 million, according to its budget request for fiscal year 2024. “The requested resources will allow the FBI to process the rapidly increasing number of DNA samples collected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” the appeal for an increase says.

“When we’re talking about rapid expansion like this, it’s getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database.”

In an April 2023 statement submitted to Congress to explain the budget request, FBI Director Christopher Wray cited several factors that had “significantly expanded the DNA processing requirements of the FBI.” He said the FBI collected around 90,000 samples a month — “over 10 times the historical sample volume” — and expected that number to swell to about 120,000 a month, totaling about 1.5 million new DNA samples a year. (The FBI declined to comment.)

The staggering increases are raising questions among civil liberties advocates.

“When we’re talking about rapid expansion like this, it’s getting us ever closer to a universal DNA database,” Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in genetic privacy, told The Intercept. “I think the civil liberties implications here are significant.”

The rapid growth of the FBI’s sample load is in large part thanks to a Trump-era rule change that mandated the collection of DNA from migrants who were arrested or detained by immigration authorities.

The FBI began building a DNA database as early as 1990. By 1998, it helped create a national database called Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, that spanned all 50 states. Each state maintained its own database, with police or other authorities submitting samples based on their states’ rules, and CODIS allowed all the states to search across the entire country. At first, the collection of data was limited to DNA from people convicted of crimes, from crime scenes, and from unidentified remains.

Even those categories were controversial at the time. When CODIS was launched nationally, most states did not submit DNA from all people convicted of felonies; the only point of consensus among the states’ collection programs was to take DNA from convicted sex offenders.

“If you look back at when CODIS was established, it was originally for violent or sexual offenders,” Anna Lewis, a Harvard researcher who specializes in the ethical implications of genetics research, told The Intercept. “The ACLU warned that this was going to be a slippery slope, and that’s indeed what we’ve seen.”

Today, police have the authority to take DNA samples from anyone sentenced for a felony charge. In 28 states, police can take DNA samples from suspects arrested for felonies but who have not been convicted of any crime. In some cases, police offer plea deals to reduce felony charges to misdemeanor offenses in exchange for DNA samples. Police are even acquiring DNA samples from unwitting people, as The Intercept recently reported.

“It changed massively,” Lewis said of the rules and regulations around government DNA collection. “You only have to be a person of interest to end up in these databases.”

The database is likely to continue proliferating as DNA technology becomes more sophisticated, Lewis explained, pointing to the advent of environmental DNA, which allows for DNA to be collected from ambient settings like wastewater or air.

“Just by breathing, you’re discarding DNA in a way that can be traced back to you,” Lewis said.

While this might sound like science fiction, the federal government has already embraced the technology. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offered a contract for laboratory services to assist with “autonomously collected eDNA testing”: environmental DNA testing based on samples that are no longer even manually collected.

Until recently, the U.S. DNA database surpassed even that of authoritarian China, which launched an ambitious DNA collection program in 2017. That year, the BBC reported, the U.S. had about 4 percent of its population’s DNA, while China had about 3 percent. Since then, China announced a plan aimed at collecting between 5 and 10 percent of its male population’s DNA, according to a 2020 study cited by the New York Times.

China has a record of abusing its DNA database for surveillance and crackdowns on dissent. The efforts have been aided by American technology and expertise. In 2021, the U.S. intelligence community raised alarms about China’s widespread DNA collection, including foreigners’ genetic information.

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Tread carefully with DNA evidence in the University of Idaho murders

Miriam Aroni Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, and Rebecca Blair, senior research associate at Fair and Just Prosecution opine for NBC News:

Last week, police announced they had arrested Bryan Kohberger in the brutal murders of four University of Idaho students. After a weekslong investigation, authorities zeroed in on Kohberger in part by comparing DNA found at the crime scene with DNA of a relative of Kohberger apparently obtained from the family’s home trash. 

With only limited information available, it is far too early to judge the strength of the prosecution’s case. But the role DNA has already played has drawn renewed attention to broader issues around the uses and limits of this technology — and scientific evidence more generally — in the criminal legal system. 

At its best, DNA testing can tell you whose genes were found in a particular location — but it can’t tell you how they got there.

The approach used to identify Kohberger is just one of several recent developments in DNA analysis that have transformed the way law enforcement investigates crimes. While these advancements present tremendous potential for law enforcement and criminal investigations, burgeoning new areas of forensic analysis also have shortcomings that underscore the need to proceed with caution and recognize that not all technological advancements are foolproof. 

Over the past decade, recognition of the deep flaws in many common forensic techniques — like blood spatter, hair or bite mark analysis — has grown, even as pop culture continues to depict often-questionable forensic methods as infallible determinants of scientific truth. 

In a justice system rife with flawed science, DNA evidence is rightly viewed as the gold standard for forensics: After DNA evidence was first introduced in the criminal justice system in the late 1980s, scientists spent years developing and evaluating protocols for comparing individual DNA samples, which have been repeatedly found to produce consistent, reliable results.

This has enabled investigators to crack decades-old cold cases and contributed to the exonerations of at least 568 innocent people. But while the value of DNA analysis in criminal investigations is now widely recognized, the limits and pitfalls of DNA testing technology and other often less credible sciences are not sufficiently understood among prosecutors, law enforcement and the public. 

 The criminal legal system is increasingly relying on innovative new techniques for analyzing genetic material. As such, it’s important that we build a greater understanding among both the criminal justice field and the public of how DNA is used, what it can tell us definitively and what it cannot. That’s particularly critical in high-profile cases in which pretrial publicity around purportedly definitive “scientific results” can harden thinking and strip defendants of their right to a fair and unbiased jury.

DNA analysis was a revolution in forensics, but like every form of scientific evidence it has the potential for error. At its best, DNA testing can tell you whose genes were found in a particular location — but it can’t tell you how they got there. An innocent person’s DNA might be found at a crime scene because they brushed against the victim on the street, used the same doorknob as the perpetrator or dropped a cigarette butt nearby. 

Recent technological advancements allowing scientists to analyze increasingly small or contaminated DNA samples further complicate the process. While these new techniques can yield valuable insights, they require more subjective judgment and thus are far more likely to produce false matches than traditional testing. DNA samples are also sometimes mishandled or tampered with, compromising results. 

DNA often yields powerful insights, in particular when used in ruling out individuals: Analysts can identify inconsistencies between two DNA samples that make it nearly impossible for both samples to have come from the same person. But because the DNA of any two people is more than 99% identical, it is far harder to say with total certainty that two DNA samples must have come from the same person, particularly when dealing with incomplete or tainted samples. 

And while the absence of a suspect’s DNA from the crime scene can, in some cases, provide strong evidence that they were not present or implicate another suspect, the presence of their DNA is not always evidence of guilt. As such, reliance on DNA alone in investigations, absent other corroborating facts, can lead to tunnel vision and confirmation bias, in which law enforcement and prosecutors subconsciously discount evidence that points away from their chosen suspect. 

To guard against mistakes, law enforcement and forensic scientists must set strict protocols for collecting and handling genetic material to ensure samples aren’t contaminated or degraded. Prosecutors should be educated on the developments in, and limitations of, DNA analysis and other forensic techniques, and defense attorneys should always be provided with equal access to evidence and testing, allowing them to probe potential errors. Furthermore, forensic evidence should rarely, if ever, be the sole basis for arrest or prosecution — and the public should keep that in mind as it absorbs information in high-profile cases involving DNA. 

Bryan Kohberger looks toward his attorney, public defender Anne Taylor, right, during a hearing in Latah County District Court on Jan. 5 in Moscow, Idaho.Ted S. Warren / Pool via Getty Images

The growing use of forensic genetic genealogy — the practice of comparing crime scene DNA with existing DNA databases to identify close relatives of the perpetrators — raises additional concerns. While promising in its ability to help solve cases, the technique has enabled law enforcement to gain access to the DNA of nonsuspects. 

Furthermore, misuse of this information could carry profound consequences, and it’s crucial that we protect against abuses. Because Black and Hispanic people are significantly overrepresented in law enforcement databases, they are also disproportionately likely to be implicated by this genealogical analysis, potentially exacerbating racial disparities throughout the system. 

In 2021, the Innocence Project worked with Maryland lawmakers to address these risks by passing the first law regulating the use of forensic genetic genealogy. The bill limits the use of these techniques to only the most serious violent crimes or cases that present immediate public safety risks. It also requires that law enforcement obtain informed consent before analyzing the DNA of nonsuspects (like family members), unless doing so would compromise the investigation. 

The protections in the Maryland law should be replicated nationwide, especially as we continue to see law enforcement agencies exploit private health information — like DNA collected from newborn genetic screenings or examinations of rape victims — to identify crime suspects. 

We also need protections against misuse of other forensic advancements. To that end, district attorneys should have a point person on forensics within their offices who is versed on these issues, and advocate for state forensics science commissions (like that created in Texas) to ensure that discredited sciences don’t form the basis for arrests, prosecutions and convictions. 

We will have to wait to find out what the investigation into the unthinkable murders of four Idaho students ultimately yields. But while we struggle to confront the senseless horror of these killings, and commend the efforts of law enforcement to solve the case, we should also remember that each high-profile incident presents an opportunity to push for better, more rigorous standards. Victims and survivors of crime and the broader community, as well as individuals charged and arrested, deserve no less.

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The Marshall Project: Some Conservative lawmakers want to overhaul capital punishment, or end it

Two years ago, a group of Republican lawmakers toured the death chamber in Oklahoma, which has been responsible for more executions per capita than any other state in the last half-century. They took in the jet-black gurney straps, the phone connected to the governor’s office and the microphone used for last words, write Maurice Chammah and Keri Blakinger in The Marshall Project.

“The hair rises on the back of your neck,” said state Rep. Kevin McDugle. “A few legislators couldn’t be in the room very long.”

They continued on to death row to see Richard Glossip, who has spent more than two decades in solitary confinement, facing execution for a 1997 murder. Glossip says he had nothing to do with the crime, and a growing number of conservative lawmakers believe him.

“I just remember putting my hand up on the glass,” McDugle recalled, “and he put his hand up, and I said, ‘You've got people fighting for you. Keep your head up, brother.’”

As Oklahoma officials seek to resume putting prisoners to death later this year, McDugle has pursued bills in the state legislature to help those on death row prove their innocence, knowing Glossip could be among the first facing execution.

“My fear is some people will be executed before we pass a bill,” McDugle said.

Glossip’s case is reaching the highest echelons of politics in a deep-red state at a time when Republicans across the country are increasingly split on the future of capital punishment. Support for the death penalty used to be popular in both parties, but over the last three decades, Democrats have turned away from the punishment, leaving Republican legislators, governors, prosecutors and judges to fight for its continued use. At the same time, a small conservative movement — including groups like Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty — has been openly questioning capital punishment. It’s now clear their efforts are paying off.

Earlier this year, Virginia became the first Southern state to repeal the death penalty after three Republicans voted with the state legislature’s Democratic majority. A Marshall Project review found that in roughly half the states with an active death penalty system, Republican lawmakers have recently sponsored or written bills to ban or constrain the punishment, or to help potentially innocent prisoners avoid it.

Although many of these bills are unlikely to pass, their sheer volume suggests a significant shift in conservative views. Some of these Republican legislators see their bills as incremental steps toward ending the punishment. But others, like McDugle, don’t want to end the death penalty — they just want to fix it.

“I want to make darn sure that if we as Oklahoma are putting someone to death, they deserve to be there,” McDugle said. “I know there is human error all the way through.”

Conservatives have been slowly turning away from the death penalty for years, as high-profile innocence cases have helped frame capital punishment as a problem of out-of-control big government. In 2000, after a series of exonerations of people who had been sentenced to death, the Republican governor of Illinois, George Ryan, declared a moratorium on executions. At the time, Texas Gov. George W. Bush was running for president, and the national press questioned whether an innocent person had faced execution under his watch; soon after, his fellow Republicans in the state legislature voted to make DNA testing more available for prisoners. From 2014 to 2019, Republican support for the death penalty, as opposed to life sentences, dropped from 68% to 58%, according to Gallup Polls. Republican legislators in Nebraska voted to repeal the punishment in 2015, although the state’s residents then voted to bring the punishment back.

Some lawmakers have been motivated by anti-abortion arguments about the sanctity of human life and stories of Christian redemption on death row. Others talk about the cost to taxpayers. South Dakota state Sen. Arthur Rusch previously served as a judge in a capital case. “My case cost at least $1 million if not more,” he said, noting that the court paid for counseling for some jurors who suffered from post-traumatic stress after the lengthy trial. He was elected to the senate in 2015, and has filed numerous bills to abolish or restrict the punishment; none have succeeded, he said, but each time he brings along a few more peers.

“Changing your mind on an emotional subject like this can be difficult,” said Hannah Cox, who writes columns for Newsmax, a conservative web outlet, and serves as national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. She’s found that efforts to fix the system can serve as “baby steps,” as she tries to show her fellow conservatives that the system can’t be saved. “If you fix one of 13 problems with the death penalty, there are still another 12.”

Of those problems, conservatives have been less likely to cite the racial disparities in capital punishment that animate many of its liberal opponents. Of the more than 2,500 people on death rows around the country, 41% are Black. In contrast, Black people make up 13% of the total U.S. population. For his part, McDugle acknowledges the disparity but said it isn’t what motivated his efforts.

“When I look at a bill, I don’t see color at all. I look at an individual and say, ‘If an individual commits a crime of this nature, should they be put on death row or not?’” he said.

Robert Dunham, the executive director of the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center, said it’s wrong to think that conservative lawmakers only get involved in cases where White people face execution. “Where the case looks like a 21st-century lynching, it offends conservatives’ consciences,” Dunham said, adding, “I think that the fact that extreme injustices also do happen to White capital defendants is eye-opening to people who have not appreciated the depth of the problems in capital punishment.”

Many conservatives focus on the moral calculation of who deserves the ultimate punishment. Ohio recently passed a bill, sponsored by a Republican legislator, to ban the execution of anyone with a serious mental illness. Republicans are pushing similar bills in Florida, Kentucky and Missouri.

In Texas, state Rep. Jeff Leach has filed a bill that would ban the death penalty for people who were technically “accomplices” to murders but played a minor role, including getaway drivers. Much like the Oklahomans, he was motivated by a single case — that of Jeff Wood, who was sentenced to die after his friend killed a store clerk while Wood waited outside in the car, after what they thought would be an easy robbery.

Though Wood’s case is not in Leach’s district, he wrote to the North Texas lawmaker and pleaded for help. His letter ended up on the top of Leach’s pile of prison mail, and he picked it up one day on vacation when it was too rainy to go to the beach. He’d been hoping to catch up on his backlog of letters, but Wood’s story sucked him in.

“It’s been on my mind and on my heart ever since,” Leach said. “Jeff Wood isn’t innocent, but the state shouldn’t even be considering putting him to death.”

Other lawmakers are more concerned about the risk of executing an innocent person. Texas Rep. Steve Toth, a Republican lawmaker from just north of Houston, filed a bill banning the death penalty in cases where there’s only one eyewitness and no other evidence. As a Baptist pastor, he was moved by seeing death row exonerees speak to the legislature several years ago, as well as the film “Just Mercy.”

“Even the Bible says you shouldn’t put someone to death without a corroborated eyewitness,” he said, citing the Book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. “If we’re going to put someone to death we need to be absolutely certain.”

The crime that landed Glossip on death row took place in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, 1997, at the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City. Sometime before dawn, owner Barry Van Treese was bludgeoned to death and left in Room 102. As the motel’s live-in manager, Glossip quickly became a suspect, and police arrested him two days after the killing.

Later, authorities realized that 19-year-old handyman Justin Sneed was the one who actually carried out the fatal beating. They arrested him, too, and under questioning Sneed confessed, but claimed that Glossip had masterminded the killing.

There was scant evidence of Glossip’s involvement, but an Oklahoma jury still found him guilty, based largely on Sneed’s testimony. In exchange for that testimony, Sneed got a life sentence, while Glossip went to death row.

An appeals court tossed out the verdict, saying Glossip’s lawyers hadn’t done a good enough job. When the case went back to trial in June 2004, it ended with the same result.

In 2015, Glossip came within hours of execution before the governor called it off over a controversy involving the state’s death drugs. Since then, his case has continued attracting celebrity attention, and his lawyers say they’ve found more witnesses who could help prove their client’s innocence. Right now, they’re fighting to get access to files the district attorney’s office is refusing to turn over, but that Glossip’s team says could hold the key to proving his innocence.

A few years ago, conservative business owner Justin Jackson watched “Killing Richard Glossip,” a four-part series on Investigation Discovery, the true crime television network, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Jackson is friends with Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, and while the two were hunting deer, he voiced his concerns. Eventually, he cold-called Glossip’s lawyer and offered his help, and started talking about the case to friends in the legislature, including McDugle.

One of McDugle’s bills would require prosecutors to share materials with defense lawyers. (Around the country, prosecutors frequently tangle with the defense over what they must share.) Another bill would allow the parole board to create a Conviction Integrity Review Unit to study innocence claims (usually these are housed in county-level prosecutor offices, although Michigan and Pennsylvania have statewide units.) The third would create a “Prosecutor Conduct Review Panel,” which would decide what evidence is potentially favorable and must be given to the defense. (Currently, prosecutors get to decide.)

McDugle failed to get these bills out of legislative committees and blamed prosecutors for undermining his efforts. He will continue to push the proposals next year but also knows it may be too late. He plans to lobby the state’s parole board directly to study the Glossip case and recommend that Stitt free him from death row. McDugle has also been swayed to advocate for a Black man on death row who maintains his innocence, Julius Jones.

Some opponents of the death penalty hope these bills will eventually bring legislators like McDugle to the conclusion that capital punishment is broken beyond repair.

“It’s easier to start naming specific policies you don’t like before getting to ‘throw the whole thing out,’” said Laura Porter, executive director of the 8th Amendment Project, which works on anti-death penalty legislation across the country. “I’ve seen that growth from an individual issue, or case, to ‘OK, I’m done with it.”

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'Crowdfunding for justice' amateur sleuths put there money where their interests are

Last January, Carla Davis was on LinkedIn when she saw an intriguing post: “Identify the Victim of 1978 Tennessee Murder,” reported The New York Times.

Ever since the man’s burned remains were found on a campground outside Nashville, the authorities had been trying to figure out who he was and who had killed him. After 42 years with no leads, the local sheriff’s office wanted to try a relatively new technique pioneered in the Golden State Killer case, combing through consumer genetic databases to find the man’s relatives, however distant, to triangulate his identity. The local sheriff couldn’t afford it, so a genetics lab called Othram was panhandling on the internet.

Othram’s founder and chief executive, David Mittelman, a metaphor-loving geneticist, compares the forensic money request to Kickstarter. “Instead of a product, you’re getting justice for a family,” he said. “We’re crowdfunding for justice.”

That phrase has traditionally meant funding bail or legal bills for the accused, but Othram was seeking $5,000 to sequence the victim’s DNA. On a whim, Ms. Davis, a wellness coach who lives in Dubai, donated the remaining $3,897.52 needed.

She didn’t stop there. Over the last year, Ms. Davis has given more than $100,000 to Othram, as if it were a charity rather than a venture-backed start-up, primarily for cold cases in Mississippi, her birth state.

“A friend told me I should just invest in the company,” Ms. Davis said. “It didn’t matter to me that it wasn’t tax-deductible. These families have waited so long for answers.”

Ms. Davis is part of a growing cohort of amateur DNA detectives, their hobby born of widespread consumer genetic testing paired with an unquenchable desire for true crime content. Why just listen to a murder podcast when you can help police comb through genealogical databases for the second cousins of suspected killers and their unidentified victims?

So far donors around the country have given at least a million dollars to the cause. They could usher in a world where few crimes go unsolved — but only if society is willing to accept, and fund, DNA dragnets.

It’s hard to commit a crime, or do anything, without leaving some DNA behind. While crime scenes may include incriminating genetic evidence from perfectly innocent people, “probative” DNA — material that is clearly relevant to an investigation, such as a bloodstain — can be a powerful clue. But only if investigators can match it to the right person.

The case of the Golden State Killer, who committed 13 murders and dozens of rapes in California, went unsolved for decades, until the F.B.I. decided in 2018 to use DNA evidence from a sexual assault to build out the perpetrator’s likely family tree. The resulting identification and prosecution of a 72-year-old former police officer proved the value of what’s called “forensic genetic genealogy.”

What made the investigation possible was GEDmatch, a low-frills, online gathering place for people to upload DNA test results from popular direct-to-consumer services such as Ancestry or 23andMe, in hopes of connecting with unknown relatives. The authorities’ decision to mine the genealogical enthusiasts’ data for investigative leads was shocking at the time, and led the site to warn users. But the practice has continued, and has since been used in hundreds of cases.

Because many local agencies lack the resources to participate, philanthropists have stepped in to help. A group of well-off friends calling themselves the Vegas Justice League has given Othram $45,000, resulting in the solving of three murder-rape cases in Las Vegas, including those of two teenage girls killed in 1979 and in 1989.

 “We want to help the police and the community just knock these out,” said Justin Woo, an online marketer who founded the Las Vegas group. “It’s not quite ‘Minority Report,’ where you’re predicting and stopping, but if you get these people off the street through the DNA stuff, it’s really helpful.”

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