In resurrecting old crimes, investigators have detected an alarming pattern: Many rapists are repeat offenders.
In Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, about 30 percent of cases that have developed from testing so far are serial rape suspects. One of them, Robert Green, assaulted seven women over nearly a decade as evidence went unprocessed. He pleaded guilty last fall and was sentenced to up to 135 years in prison.
I'm not sure I would have said "alarming." We have known that for a long time. The DNA provides irrefutable confirmation, though.
Conviction does not always follow a DNA match, though. The statute of limitations may have run. A claim of consent may be hard to refute in a very cold case.
"It's great entertainment on television that in one hour's time, we have a crime, we take the sample, we get a `hit,' we arrest the suspect and then he's prosecuted and off to jail," says Doug McGowen, coordinator of Memphis' Sexual Assault Kit Task Force. "That's just not the case, clearly."
In Memphis, Meaghan Ybos had her own agonizing wait.
She was just 16 when she was raped in 2003 by a knife-wielding, masked man in her suburban Memphis home. She says a female Shelby County investigator told her, "`You know you can go to jail for lying about this. You're not doing this for attention, are you?'"
Nine years later, Ybos says the reception was less hostile when she called Memphis police after hearing TV reports of a serial rapist in the community. She suspected it might be her attacker.
It was only then, in 2012, that she learned her sexual assault kit hadn't been sent out for processing, When it was, the results found a DNA link to Anthony Alliano, a serial rapist.
"Before he was caught, I told myself I had moved on and I had healed, which was the furthest thing from the truth," Ybos now says. "I realize how the attack and the disregard of law enforcement just informed every second of my life. I was still suffering from PTSD. I had trouble concentrating, eating, sleeping. Random sights and sounds would send me into a panic attack. It was always with me in every second of those nine years."
In 2013, Alliano pleaded guilty to raping seven women and girls, including Ybos and a 12 year-old who lived nearby and was attacked two days later.
Although not featured in the AP story, an essential part of the effort is having a broad DNA database of offenders of all sorts. A serial rapist will not be in a rapist-only database if he has never been caught for rape. We may know that 10 rapes were committed by the same perpetrator yet not know who he is. Yet routinely violating the law and the rights of others is a broad character trait, and the same person may have been convicted of an entirely different kind of crime. Those broad testing laws that are under constant attack are essential.
We shall see what our new CA Supreme Court justices do to this valuable tool when they decide People v. Buza (S223698). The precedent used by the First District Court of Appeal to say that California's felony arrestee databank was violative of the CA Constitution was, in my opinion, especially thin. They just didn't like the U.S. Supreme Court's resolution of Maryland v. King so they cut the legs out of that argument by saying the People of the State of California through their Constitution think DNA collection for felony arrestees is unreasonable.
An odd conclusion since the felony arrestee databank was created by the People as an initiative statute (Prop 69).
Will CJLF file an amicus in Buza?
Not sure yet. We have a very full plate with limited manpower here.