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Criminal Justice and Genetic Genealogy

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Criminal Justice and Genetic Genealogy Unraveling A podcast about science, technology, and criminal justice By: Emma Peaslee 1 Table of Contents: TABLE OF CONTENTS: ................................................................................................................................................................ 2 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................................................ 3 LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................................................................................ 5 THE HISTORY OF DNA AND CRIME ...............................................................................................................................................................5 THE BUSINESS OF GENETIC GENEALOGY ......................................................................................................................................................8 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND GENETIC GENEALOGY ........................................................................................................................................ 10 PRIVACY CONCERNS ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 14 METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................................................................................................... 19 LIMITATIONS .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 21 2 Introduction In Edmonds, Wash., a young woman went on a bike ride and never came home. Her body was eventually found in the woods. She had been shot in the head. A young boy was believed to be in South Korea with his mother. His body was discovered beneath a billboard in North Carolina. He had been strangled. In La Jolla, Calif., a woman was found stabbed in her home. The detectives found blood in multiple rooms. These crimes took place decades ago, scattered across the country, but they were all solved within the last year. They were not committed by the same mysterious killer, but they were all solved by the same mysterious technology. What started as a way to research family history and discover distant relatives has created a breakthrough in criminal investigations. Over the past decade, websites like 23andMe and Ancestry have popularized a business known as genetic genealogy. Genetic genealogy involves profiling DNA in combination with traditional genealogical methods to infer familial relationships. But this new DNA technology has recently been used to do more than just find great-grandparents.1 In April 2018, police announced the arrest of the “Golden State Killer” due largely to an “innovation in DNA technology” otherwise known as genetic genealogy.2 A serial rapist and murderer, the suspect was responsible for dozens of attacks throughout the state of California in the ’70s and ’80s. The case had largely come to dead end despite years of work by law enforcement and FBI. The April arrest marked the first time this technology caught the attention of both the public and investigators across the country, and it signaled a shift in the future of criminal investigation. 1 Heather Murphy, “Sooner or Later Your Cousin’s DNA is Going to Solve a Murder,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/golden-state-killer-dna.html, (accessed October 4, 2019). 2 Murphy, “Sooner or Later Your Cousin’s DNA is Going to Solve a Murder,” The New York Times. 3 The police worked with a genetic genealogist to convert and upload the anonymous killer’s DNA to a public genealogy website. These websites provide different information than traditional police DNA databases because they allow access to the genetic information of everyday people, not just criminals. They also don’t require a direct match. Investigators can find potential suspects even when the suspect’s genetic information is not on the site. The matches are often based on a distant relative, and investigators work backward to build a family tree for their suspect from that data. This information acts as a tip that points police in the right direction. The closer the match the easier it is for investigators to track down potential suspects. Less than two years after the Golden State Killer arrest, genetic genealogy is being used in police departments across the country to solve cold-cases, identify remains, and even overturn a conviction. The new technology has implications for thousands of unsolved cold- cases and unidentified bodies still out there. However, some of the larger companies have already become wary of police searches and have created specific guidelines to prevent the sharing of DNA without customers’ knowledge. Privacy advocates say this fear is warranted because while traditional police DNA databases only provide a genetic fingerprint, genetic genealogy databases can provide information about a person’s appearance, medical conditions, and even potential predispositions to mental health problems.3 The steps police are taking have led them to uncharted territory. What happens when technology advances before the regulations? My project will be several audio stories featuring people who are for and against this new technology. Who is benefitting and who could be⎯ or already has been⎯ hurt by genetic genealogy? Privacy advocates believe there is a reason to be concerned with law enforcement's unfettered access to people’s genetic information. According to a recent study, 60% of Americans of Northern 3 Tina Hesman Saey, “Genealogy companies could struggle to keep clients’ data from police,” ScienceNews, June 10, 2019, https://www.sciencenews.org/article/forensic-genetic-genealogy-companies-police-privacy, (accessed September 28, 2019). 4 European descent, the primary users, can be identified through the databases whether or not they’ve submitted their genetic information.4 In two to three years, that number is expected to be closer to 90%. The future of privacy and genetic genealogy will have implications for the American population whether they ever use the service. Literature Review The History of DNA and Crime One of the first uses of deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA to solve a criminal investigation was in England in the 1980’s.5 A genetic professor at the University of Leicester, Alec Jeffreys, discovered that DNA could be used to tell people apart. Much like the origins of genetic genealogy, Jeffreys had mostly been using this new advancement for connecting family members. However, others saw the implications for criminal investigations after two local rape and murder cases perplexed police. Jeffreys was recruited and then able to link the two cases to the same killer and rule out a prime suspect with DNA analysis. The killer was eventually caught when the police put out a call for DNA samples and overheard a person saying they’d been paid to pose as someone else for the round-up. The police then tested the man who had attempted to evade them. When confronted with the DNA match, he confessed. The process Jeffreys used to help catch the killer is what’s known as “DNA profiling.”6 4 Yaniv Erlich, Tal Shor, Itsik Pe’er, Shai Carmi, “Identify inferences of genomic data using long-range familial searches,” Science, Vol. 362, Issue 6415, pp. 690-694, November 9, 2018, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/690. 5 Celia Henry Arnaud, “Thirty years of DNA forensics: How DNA has revolutionized criminal investigations,” Chemical & Engineering News 95, no. 37 (2017): 16-20, https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i37/Thirty-years-DNA-forensics- DNA.html. 6 Lutz Roewer, “DNA fingerprinting in forensics: past, present, future,” Investigative Genetics 4, no. 22 (2013), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3831584/. 5 What followed that first breakthrough has been considered a “golden research age” for DNA and criminal investigations.7 DNA is a genetic code containing four letters: A, T, G, and C. These letters are the bases of DNA, and they are interpreted by the cells to make molecules and structures that allow the body to function.8 DNA contains areas where short sequences of bases are repeated several times, and they’re found in many different spots throughout the genome or an organism’s complete set of DNA.9 The exact number of repeats is different for each person so scientists can use this information to identify people.10 During those first criminal cases done by Jeffreys, the DNA profiling process took six to eight weeks. In the 1990’s, the forensics community switched to shorter repeating sequences known as short tandem repeats (STRs). This update allowed the process to become faster and more automated. In addition to this development, a biochemist named Kary Mullis developed polymerase chain reaction (PCR). In PCR, enzymes “amplify” DNA samples by copying them. This makes it easier to get DNA profiles from smaller samples.11 With these advancements, technicians can take a single strand of DNA and copy it a million times over in a couple of hours. This allows people like forensic scientists to get a lot of information from even very small DNA samples. Much like the police in Leicester discovered after Jeffreys joined the case, DNA evidence is not
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