State Police may hunt for a suspect using kin's DNA

The State Police crime laboratory is considering expanding the use of its DNA database to search for close relatives of suspects whose DNA is recovered from crime scenes, a controversial crime-fighting technique that prosecutors say would help them solve more cases but that critics say would target innocent people, many of them members of minority groups.

Currently, the lab takes DNA found at crime scenes and compares it with DNA samples from convicted felons in hope of finding a perfect match and a suspect. The lab does not permit employees to seek or report close matches, which could give investigators an important lead by indicating the suspect may be related to a felon in the database, according to officials at the state's Executive Office of Public Safety.

But Mary Kate McGilvray, the new acting director of the lab, recently told the annual meeting of state prosecutors that the lab was reconsidering the ban. The possible change, which reflects an emerging national trend, is part of a private $267,000 review prompted by the suspension in January of the civilian database administrator, Robert E. Pino, partly for allegedly violating a ban on so-called familial searches. He was fired Friday.

McGilvray and other public safety officials declined to say why there were considering lifting the ban on familial searches or how the reassessment related to the Jan. 11 suspension of Pino.

McGilvray also met last month with district attorneys to discuss the possibility of allowing familial DNA searching, according to Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, who welcomed the development.

"I think it has the capability of solving serious crimes and getting seriously dangerous individuals off the street and that it would be perhaps unconscionable not to go down this road," Conley said. "Science advances, and it's simply responsible on our part to follow any investigative leads."

But defense lawyers and civil libertarians condemn the idea, saying investigations resulting from partial DNA matches would inevitably cast suspicion on some law-abiding citizens.

"Familial DNA searches would invade the privacy of innocent people, those who just happen to be related to someone convicted of a felony, as well as the privacy of unrelated people whose genetic profiles happen to resemble that of someone in the database," said Anne C. Goldbach, president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and head of forensic services for the state public defender agency.

Critics also fear that such a change would have a particular impact on minorities because a disproportionate share of genetic profiles in the databases comes from members of minority groups.

Jennifer Mnookin, a professor at UCLA's School of Law who has written about familial searching, acknowledged that it can solve crimes, but added, "I'm concerned about it, because I think it risks making existing racial disparities even worse."

Charles McDonald -- spokesman for the Executive Office of Public Safety, which oversees the State Police -- said familial searching is among many matters being considered in a top-to-bottom study of the lab by Vance, a Virginia-based security services firm that is expected to issue a report by June 30. The policy shift would apparently not require legislative approval.

While there is no national count on the number of states that permit familial searches, other states are reassessing their policies on such searches. Next month, for example, the subject will be the key topic of a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Committee to the Virginia Department of Forensic Science, according to Frederick R. Bieber, a medical geneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and a member of the committee.

Last July, the FBI relaxed its ban on law enforcement agencies sharing partial matches with investigators in other states, letting states decide whether to cooperate.

The FBI oversees the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which stores more than 3 million DNA samples collected from convicted criminals nationwide and, in some cases, those who have been arrested but not convicted.

The DNA profiling system focuses on 13 regions of the human genome that are inherited from both parents.

Now, all 13 from a crime scene DNA sample must match a convicted criminal's profile for the Massachusetts state lab to send out a report on a possible suspect, according to state public safety officials.

In siblings, as many as nine regions are identical; unrelated people might have one or two regions that match.

Pino allegedly prepared four reports about near-matches of DNA from unsolved sexual assault cases to DNA profiles of convicted felons, according to a recent affidavit that State Police Detective Captain Gregory J. Foley prepared to rebut future defense challenges to DNA evidence stemming from the lab's recent problems.

Pino allegedly reported two of those four near-matches as perfect matches to law enforcement officials, although no one was wrongly arrested, Foley said.

Pino never reported the other two.

Pino also mishandled other DNA evidence, public safety officials have said, including telling law enforcement officials about matches after the statute of limitations ran out, making it impossible for them to prosecute anyone.

Colonel Mark F. Delaney, superintendent of the State Police, sent Pino a letter Friday firing him, according to the president of Pino's union, Joe Dorant, who said he did not know what reasons Delaney gave.

McDonald, the public safety spokesman, said last week that the crime lab had no written policy banning familial searching. However, he said, "It is prohibited because the policy did not address it."

Pino has declined to comment. But Dorant disputed that the lab banned such searching. He said, among other things, that Pino had a July e-mail from a legal counsel to the State Police that said a state regulation permitted such searches.

The regulation says the lab may search for near-matches for a variety of reasons, including "the possible involvement of relatives." Nonetheless, McDonald said, the lab prohibits such searches.

Bieber, who co-wrote a widely cited article in the journal Science in May, has said that because close relatives have very similar genetic profiles, familial searching could increase by 40 percent the number of cases in which DNA could point to a potential suspect.

Studies also strongly suggest that people convicted of crimes are more likely to have relatives with criminal records.

Almost half of all prison inmates surveyed by the US Justice Department in 1998 reported having a close relative who had also been imprisoned, usually a brother.

"Close matches turn up in the normal course of any DNA comparison," Bieber said. "The question becomes, what do you do with that information?"

In some heinous unsolved cases, including serial rapists and murderers, investigators should be able to pursue those leads, he said.

The technique has been used successfully in a handful of cases, said the Science article, particularly in the United Kingdom.

In one widely cited US case, in 2004 a North Carolina man was exonerated and freed after 19 years in prison -- and another man convicted -- for a 1984 rape and murder, after crime scene evidence was matched in the state's database with the DNA profile of the convicted man's brother.

Hampden District Attorney William M. Bennett said the Massachusetts DNA database has proven an immense success, linking convicts to 30 unsolved crimes in his county just this year.

He said it would make no sense not to alert police officers that a relative might be the culprit, likening that lead to providing a partial description of a license plate number to police investigating a hit-and-run driver.

He rejected concerns about racial bias, saying that familial searching helps police arrest the right person.

"The great thing about DNA is that it's science," he said, ". . . so I have just the opposite reaction."

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.