By Nupur Kudapkar
DNA or Deoxyribonucleic acid is a self-replicating material that is present in nearly all living organisms as the main constituent of chromosomes; it is the carrier of genetic information. It contains the instructions necessary for life (Oxford Languages). When finding evidence as a prosecutor to put a criminal away, your best friend will be DNA evidence because even though the person in question might lie, DNA will not. As the years have passed, DNA technology has gotten stronger. DNA that has been saved from cold cases decades ago now has a chance to be solved so the victims and their families can rest in peace. Law enforcement’s capacity to solve cold cases with DNA has dramatically improved as databases with DNA profiles have been developed and expanded at the local, state, and national levels. Hundreds of thousands of possible suspect DNA profiles are stored in convicted criminal databases, which may be matched to DNA profiles produced from crime scene evidence. Given the recidivistic character of many crimes, such as sexual assault and burglary, there’s a good chance the person who committed the offense under investigation has already been convicted of a similar crime and has a DNA profile in a DNA database that CODIS can search. CODIS also allows for cross-comparison of DNA profiles created from biological evidence discovered at crime scenes. Even if a perpetrator is not found in the database, crimes may be connected to one another, assisting an investigation and may be leading to the identification of a suspect.
A case that hits close to our homes, San Francisco; the Golden State Killer. With 13 murdered, 50 raped, and 120 burgled, between the years 1974 and 1986 Joseph James DeAngelo Jr lived free for over 44 years before he was caught. Shockingly enough he was a former police officer. According to investigators, the “Golden State Killer’s” DNA lay in evidence storage for decades, creating a unique genetic fingerprint. For years, the samples were essentially useless to investigators, who ran across the same roadblock that has troubled cops since DNA forensics’ inception: You can’t use a genetic fingerprint unless you know who it belongs to. The killer, whoever he was, did not appear to be among the FBI’s millions of convicted criminals, offenders, and arrestees in its national DNA database. The Golden State Killer was only detected as a giant blinking question mark in the DNA evidence from all those crime scenes. Until three years ago, when police revealed that they had pierced the wall and identified Joseph James DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer suspect using an inventive approach that thrills cops but annoys privacy advocates. They followed their suspect down the line of his ancestors. GEDmatch, a genealogy service that has recently grown popular — databases loaded with the profiles of people who have contributed their genetic codes with the goal of locating their relatives and ancestors — police said they verified the crime scene DNA.