In an interview, Callaghan disputed he said that.
"I didn't say it was unlikely to happen," he said. "I was asked specifically, what's the likelihood here? I said, I don't know, but it takes a lot for a state to be cut off from the national database."
A week later, the judge ordered the search. Lawyers for the lab then took the matter to the Illinois Supreme Court, arguing in part that Illinois could lose its access to the federal DNA database. The high court refused to block the search.
The result: 903 pairs of profiles matching at nine or more loci in a database of about 220,000.
State officials obtained a court order to prevent distribution of the results. The Times obtained them from a scientist who works closely with the FBI.
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A 'unilateral decision'
A similar fight occurred in a death penalty case in Maryland during the summer and fall of 2006.
The prosecutor saw a DNA match between a baseball cap dropped at the crime scene and the suspect as so definitive that he didn't plan to tell the jury about the chance of a coincidental match, records show.
Seeking to cast doubt on the evidence, the defense persuaded the judge to order an "Arizona search" of the Maryland database. The state did not comply.
After the defense filed a contempt-of-court motion, Michelle Groves, the state's DNA administrator, argued in court and in an affidavit that, based on conversations with Callaghan at the FBI, she believed the request was burdensome and possibly illegal.
According to Groves, Callaghan had told her that complying with the court order could lead Maryland to be disconnected from CODIS -- a result Groves' lawyer said would be "catastrophic."
Groves' affidavit was edited by FBI officials and the technology contractor that designed CODIS, court records show. Before submitting the affidavit, Groves wrote the group an e-mail saying, "Let's see if this will work," the records show.
It didn't. After the judge, Steven Platt, rejected her arguments, Groves returned to court, saying the search was too risky. FBI officials had now warned her that it could corrupt the entire state database, something they would not help fix, she told the court.
Platt reaffirmed his earlier order, decrying Callaghan's "unilateral" decision to block the search.
"The court will not accept the notion that the extent of a person's due process rights hinges solely on whether some employee of the FBI chooses to authorize the use of the [database] software," Platt wrote.
