California will adopt the most aggressive approach in the nation to a controversial crime-fighting technique that uses DNA to try to identify elusive criminals through their relatives, state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown announced Friday.
Employing what is known as familial or "partial match" searching, the policy is aimed at identifying a suspect through DNA collected at a crime scene by looking for potential relatives in the state's genetic database of about a million felons. Once a relative is identified, police can use that person as a lead to trace the suspect.
The new plan makes California a leader in such searches, which several states permit but do not vigorously pursue. Colorado has recently begun to examine its database for relatives of unknown criminals as part of a research project.
Brown said the new approach was justified by violent crime plaguing the state. He emphasized that it would be used only when all other leads had been exhausted.
"We have 2,000 murders a year in California -- that is 10,000 since the Iraq war started -- and that is a lot of killing," Brown said. "When you see it and see the victims and have to go to funerals, it is pretty serious stuff."
But Tania Simoncelli, science advisor to the American Civil Liberties Union, called Brown's decision a disappointment and said the organization is exploring its legality. The group has not decided whether to challenge the policy in court.
"The fact that my brother committed a crime doesn't mean I should have to give up my privacy," she said.
At a recent FBI conference on familial searching, Jeffrey Rosen, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, warned: "I can guarantee if familial searching proceeds, it will create a political firestorm."
The policy, which takes effect immediately, is designed to work like this: The state's crime lab will tell police about DNA profiles that come up during routine searches of California's offender database and closely resemble, but do not match, the DNA left at a crime scene. (Previously, the state refused to tell police about these partial matches.)
The lab will then perform calculations and tests to determine the likelihood of a biological relationship between the person found in the database and the unknown offender believed to have left DNA at the crime scene.
