New York police and legal defender groups are squaring off over whether state police should be allowed to use a new technology in DNA testing as forensic evidence in investigations.
The Commission on Forensic Science held a public hearing on Oct. 9 at the Division of Criminal Justice Services in Albany to weigh this question. The hearing was prompted after state police offered an application seeking the commission’s approval for the use of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) testing to support investigative genealogy within state forensic laboratories.
While the leaders of the state forensics labs are on board with expanding the new technology around the state, public defender groups are concerned that there aren’t proper guardrails to avoid this new technology violating constitutional rights.
“This is not merely a technical validation question. SNP-based testing is the gateway to a broader investigative process that can draw entire families into criminal investigations and raises significant privacy, due process, and constitutional concerns,” wrote a coalition of public defender groups that include Legal Aid Society and the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, among others.
SNP technology in forensics analyzes differences in a person’s DNA to help identify someone, establish biological relationships, and generate investigative leads. SNP tests can be used on much shorter or more degraded DNA fragments than traditional DNA testing, and can reveal more about the source.
Large SNP databases can reveal genetic connections between people. Investigators can combine those relationships with bigger genealogy records to narrow down the identity of an unknown person.
The defender coalition urged the forensic commissioner to block the New York State Police’s request to implement the use of the DNA methodology until there are more regulations around it.
The public defenders pointed out that prior to the hearing, the state police have not provided key written policies on how they plan to use this new technology for review. They also argued that New York’s lack of a statutory framework governing the use and oversight of SNP technology is likely to raise privacy and constitutional legal issues for the accused.
The issues that SNP raise around genealogical investigation are not limited to the individual whose DNA is being tested, the coalition wrote. It extends to all of their relatives who could potentially be implicated in an investigation by virtue of their genes.
“No other forensic technique carries this extraordinary capacity to draw innocent family members into law enforcement scrutiny,” wrote the coalition.
Much of the testimony of those in favor of expanding the new technology cited its power to help solve prominent cold cases, like the Gilgo Beach serial killings.
Melissa Cann, the sister of Gilgo Beach victim Maureen Brainard-Barnes, testified about the sense of “long-sought justice” that her family attained thanks to the use of the technology in that case.
The state police have reportedly claimed that adopting the new technology would lead to new developments on a number of investigations that have gone cold, but did not respond to a request for comment on the pushback their proposal received.
Several forensic scientists — including the crime laboratories in Suffolk, Nassau, and Onondaga Counties, as well as the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner — focused on the advances of the new technology in providing valuable leads that would not otherwise exist.
The letter that this coalition of scientists submitted agrees in theory with the push for the new technology to come with safeguards that address the privacy concerns of the technology, but did not argue to pause the process before those policies are developed in full.