DNA collection works, crime victim says

Laura Neuman was raped at age 18, but the man who broke into her apartment and held a gun to her head was not arrested for the crime until 19 years later.

Neuman believes that a law, signed by Gov. Martin O’Malley in May to go into effect Jan. 1, 2009, will save many others from the ordeal she can never forget.

Under the law, the DNA of people charged with felonies including arson, murder, rape and robbery will be compared with DNA found at other crime scenes. This will put more criminals behind bars and solve more cold cases, she said.

But others say the law — which allows collecting a cheek-swab of DNA when a person is arrested, instead of waiting for conviction, as the previous law required — violates the rights of suspects.

“The First Amendment to the Constitution says we don’t seize information from individuals just because we want to,” said Cindy Boersma, legislative director for the ACLU of Maryland.

“In this case, they’re taking DNA in the hopes they might discover a reason. It’s not related to the crime at issue,” Boersma said, noting that laws already allow DNA collection as part of evidence-gathering in the crime for which a suspect is charged.

Neuman was living in Baltimore in 1983 when an intruder climbed through her roommate’s window and raped her. The man who eventually confessed, Alphonso Hill, had been in and out of jail for years before he was arrested in 2002. That’s because he had pleaded guilty in the other crimes and his DNA had never been collected and matched with the DNA in Neuman’s rape kit, Neuman said.

Hill pleaded guilty to raping Neuman and is charged in seven other cases, she said, with trials beginning in August. The results could extend his jail time beyond his projected 2009 parole date.

Hill’s fingerprints led to his arrest in her case, but DNA was used in the others.

Neuman is the chairwoman of The Laura Neuman Foundation, founded in 2003 to help pass rape legislation and to reopen cold cases, Neuman said.

The DNA database law, supported by O’Malley and Attorney General Douglas Gansler, is similar to laws in about a dozen states.

Neuman said the governor’s office asked her to testify for the bill before the legislature. “I wouldn’t say I actively sought this change in legislation, but I do support it,” she said.

Opposition to the law has surprised her.

“In some cases, some of the backlash is that there’s not enough information about how the law works,” she said. “My impression is that there’s a concern that privacy rights are being violated. My opinion is that they are not.”

A felony arrest requires probable cause, she explains, and if you are released, the DNA is thrown out.

Disposal in case of exoneration was a change made in the bill in response to concerns, said Scott Shellenberger, Baltimore County state’s attorney.

But the ACLU’s Boersma said that change isn’t enough. “We oppose it,” she said. “This is about collecting DNA so you can stockpile it and use it later to see if you’re connected to a crime.”

Shellenberger said another safeguard is that while the law calls for collecting the DNA at the time of arrest, the information isn’t plugged into the database until a person has been arraigned or charged.

“It means that somebody has taken a serious look at the case and they believe that there is a probable cause to go forward,” he said. “It builds in a certain time period so you know these are good charges.”

The database would then note if the same DNA had been left at the scene of unsolved crimes, he said. Those results could help a judge determine if a defendant should be out on bail, he said.

DNA matches are not 100 percent accurate, but they often allow prosecutors to say the odds are, for example, 1 in 3 million that someone else would have the same DNA.

Neuman pointed out that collected DNA does not contain markers related to medical history or other identifying characteristics.

Another concern that Shellenberger wanted to dispel is that investigators might find a close but not perfect DNA match and start collecting cheek-swabs from family members. The system does not have that capability, he said.

Neuman noted that rapists tend to start with less serious offenses, but once they begin to rape, they tend to do it again and again unless they are caught.

“I do understand the concerns about it [the law], but we also have to move forward and use the technology that’s available to us,” she said. {EXA}

Karen Nitkin is a freelance writer based in Ellicott City.