Conceptions of Consent, Family, and Jurisdiction in Forensic Genetic Genealogical Searches

Conceptions of Consent, Family, and Jurisdiction in Forensic Genetic Genealogical Searches

Description

The announcement in April of 2018 that law enforcement officials in the United States had identified a serial rapist and murderer known as the Golden State Killer (GSK) heralded a new era in forensic genetic investigation. At a press conference announcing the arrest on the United States’s official National DNA Day, investigators initially refused to disclose their methods. Instead, a litany of law enforcement officials, and even a victim’s relative turned DNA advocate, spent time promoting the passage of a pending expansive DNA law and even repeatedly ‘sham[ing]’ a politician by name who had resisted his entreaties. But within days, reporters revealed that the suspect had been traced through a crime scene profile uploaded to GEDMatch, a recreational genealogical database, which produced links to a dozen or so distant relatives. After building out a family tree with ‘thousands’ of members, investigators honed in on Joseph James DeAngelo, who eventually pled guilty to the crimes. The investigators who conducted most of the research became minor celebrities, and their success spawned a cottage industry of crime-solver television shows and new forensic genetic genealogical (FGG) service shops. An FGG search differs from traditional forensic DNA in several respects. First, FGG searches involve a more invasive and comprehensive form of DNA testing than the traditional form of forensic genetic testing. FGG compares hundreds of thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the coding region of the genome, rather than a couple of thousand short tandem repeat sections (STRs) deliberately chosen from non-coding or ‘junk’ regions of the DNA strand. Second, FGG searches use largely unregulated commercial and recreational databases, rather than law enforcement databases subject to strict controls to safeguard of both privacy and quality assurance. Third, rather than look for an exact match, FGG searches uncover scattered leads in a suspect’s family tree, from which genealogists then reverse engineer the rest of the tree to isolate one branch or a single suspect. In this respect, FGG searches differ even from familial searches of DNA databases, which typically focus on close male relatives of a suspect and have a poor success rate at achieving even that. FGG searches also require law enforcement to comb through highly personal records—such as those containing birth, death, census, law enforcement, educational, financial, social media, real estate records and so on—to build out a family tree. In the course of the investigation, investigators might also seek DNA samples from biological relatives in order to help fill gaps or steer the direction of the investigation. These complex FGG investigations also take place wholly in secret, and investigators in the US have deliberately hidden their true scope from the public. For instance, in the GSK case, later reporting revealed that neither investigators nor the DNA database companies had been forthcoming—and not just in the press conference, but in the year-long victory lap of media appearances that took place after the arrest. In fact, it was not a hit in the GEDMatch database that broke the case. It was not only public databases that were searched. And DeAngelo was not the sole person who had been suspected of the crime and not even the only person from whom investigators had taken DNA. Instead, as explained later in this chapter, the investigation had involved dubious police practices, more genetic sleuthing and more innocent people placed under police suspicion than the police had let on. Within two years of that event, hundreds of cases had used genetic genealogy methods to identify suspects, resulting in dozens of convictions. Commercial providers like Parabon and Bode International have officially started offering FGG services, and other companies have joined suit. The searches have proven largely efficacious, relying on a combination of the size of the database searched, the discerning power of the search algorithm, the depth and range of coverage in non-genetic records necessary to build out family trees and the skill of the particular genealogist. At the same time, there are some indications of increasing trepidation among the general public with regard to recreational genetics. Illumina, the company that dominates the recreational genetics-testing technology, ‘hit a lull’ after years of exponential growth; analysts have speculated that concerns about privacy may be a contributing factor, as well as possible exhaustion of the pool of interested consumers. A recent announcement from the Pentagon in the United States may serve only to underscore this fear, as they warned service members of the risks of recreational genomics. And in the US, several legislators have spoken about enacting a total ban, and a few states have imposed restrictions on the practice, including the first comprehensive regulatory scheme in the state of Maryland. The emergence of FGG affords a valuable platform from which to assess an incipient technolegal world—one in which cutting-edge technologies clash with well-established legal, social and political concepts. Forensic genealogy harnesses several distinct scientific advances, including the availability and affordability of inexpensive, large-scale single nucleotide polymorphism (or SNP) testing of the genome; the commercialisation of recreational genetics by private companies; and the development of open-platform sites to share genomic data. Hitched to one another by law enforcement, these technosciences pose a challenge to fundamental legal concepts that have long constrained law enforcement. Namely, they unsettle notions of consent, the spatial and relational limits on knowledge generation and conventional legal structures governing law enforcement access to information. Focusing primarily on the law and practice of forensic genetic genealogy in the United States, this chapter addresses each of these sites of conflict.

Source Publication

Law, Practice and Politics of Forensic DNA Profiling: Forensic Genetics and Their Technolegal Worlds

Source Editors/Authors

Victor Toom, Matthias Wienroth, Amade M’charek

Publication Date

2023

Conceptions of Consent, Family, and Jurisdiction in Forensic Genetic Genealogical Searches

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