A potential first for state’s high court
In reversing robbery conviction, becomes pioneer in ruling on DNA in ‘John Doe’ arrest warrants
The state Supreme Court may have become the nation’s first appellate court to rule on the degree of precision needed in DNA evidence when it is used as the basis for an anonymous arrest warrant.
In its decision, the court overturned the convictions of a Norwalk man, Terrence Police, in the shooting and robbing of a woman in a grocery store parking lot in 2012. Police was arrested on the basis of the anonymous warrant, which the court said relied on genetic crime scene evidence that was not of sufficient quality to allow analysts to determine Police’s unique DNA profile or develop a statistical probability that he was the likely robber.
Because the robbery investigation remained unsolved by 2017, and detectives were facing a deadline set by a five-year statute of limitations, they applied for and were granted what is known as a “John Doe” arrest warrant — a warrant for an as yet unidentified suspect. The John Doe arrest that ultimately led to Police’s conviction was based on partial descriptions from witnesses and DNA collected from items left at the crime scene by the robber.
The court, in a unanimous decision by Justice Christine Keller, invalidated the warrant because, among other things, the DNA evidence it cited lacked the precision, or particularity, required under the state and federal constitutions to unequivocally differentiate Police from other potential suspects.
“We conclude that, to satisfy the particularity requirement of the fourth amendment, the affidavit accompanying a John Doe DNA arrest warrant application must contain information assuring the judicial authority issuing the warrant that the DNA profile identifies the person responsible for the crime on the basis of his or her unique DNA profile and should include information as to the statistical rarity of that DNA profile,” the court said.
“Otherwise, the judicial authority cannot fulfill its gatekeeping role of preventing the harms that the particularity requirement was intended to prevent, namely, the issuance of general warrants and the seizure of one thing under a warrant describing another.”
The issuance of a so-called John Doe DNA warrant is extremely rare in Connecticut and elsewhere. No similar case has reached a state appeals court. The Supreme Court called the question presented by Terrance Police a “significant issue of first impression not only for this state but, to our knowledge, the rest of the country.”
Lawyers said they don’t anticipate the ruling will result in significant changes to the way genetic, or DNA evidence is treated in state courts. Rather, they said it appears
to hold DNA to the particularity standard the state and federal constitutions apply to other sorts of evidence used in warrants.
“The decision was not unexpected,” said Timothy Sugrue, a senior assistant state’s attorney involved in the appeal. “We really have to digest it to determine whether there are any Fourth Amendment issues that might require further review by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Pamela Nagy, Terrence Police’s public defender, could not be reached.
While Police’s convictions were overturned, it appears from the facts of the case that there probably would have been no appeal were it not for an earlier and unrelated law enforcement oversight involving DNA evidence.
Terrence Police had been convicted of shooting a woman in the stomach, shoving her into her car in a parking lot and running off with her cellphone, as well as her wedding and engagement rings. Police investigators obtained surveillance video of the suspect fleeing. They also found the cellphone case, a gun and clothing left by the assailant.
A man who said he was Police’s cousin told detectives that he recognized Police from the video and that Police had confessed to family members. Detectives also learned that Police had a prior felony arrest and that, upon conviction, he had been required to provide a DNA sample, which was to have been entered into a law enforcement database.
Through some oversight, the Terrence Police DNA sample was not entered into the database. So when detectives ran the DNA recovered from the crime scene against the database, there was no match. Lack of a match effectively eliminated Police from the suspect pool.
In order to preserve a chance to make an arrest as the five-year statute of limitations expired on robbery and assault, detectives obtained the John Doe arrest warrant, which was based on the surveillance video and the DNA crime scene evidence, known as “trace” or “touch” DNA. Such DNA often consists of skin cells and in those cases it is possible that one person’s DNA can be left by another. Trace DNA also may not produce the full genetic profile needed to statistically isolate a suspect from the population in general.
The “trace” or “touch” DNA evidence on the crime scene items appeared to have come from at least four people, the court said.
A year later, after the statute of limitations had expired, a person known to Terrence Police called detectives. She said she recognized him from the surveillance video and that he had confessed to her as well, according to the case record.
Based on the woman’s assertion, detectives obtained a search warrant that allowed them to collect a complete DNA sample from Terrence Police — the sort of sample that should have been entered into the database after his earlier conviction.
When the sample was compared to the crime scene evidence, there was a match. Police was arrested on the John Doe warrant issued more than a year earlier as the statute of limitations was set to expire. He was convicted in 2019.
The high court reversed the conviction, asserting that arrest was based on a faulty John Doe warrant.
“In the present case, the arrest warrant affidavit did not alert the judicial authority to the fact that the DNA profiles did not include the perpetrator’s unique DNA profile but, rather, were mixed partial profiles generated from the touch DNA of at least four different individuals, three of whom evidently had no involvement in the crimes at issue whatsoever. Nor did it apprise the judicial authority of the statistical probability that any person chosen at random from the general population would have those DNA profiles,” the court said.
The court said it’s decision in the Terrence Police case is not intended to “diminish” the value of DNA evidence in criminal trials. It said the “mixed partial” DNA samples cited in the John Doe warrant might even have persuaded a jury to Police’s guilt had his case gone to trial.
“We have simply concluded that a John Doe arrest warrant that identifies a suspect on the basis of a general physical description that could apply to any number of people and mixed partial DNA profiles that are not positively known to include the suspect’s profile, and that fails to state the statistical rarity of any of the profiles, does not satisfy the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment and, therefore, does not commence a prosecution for purposes of satisfying the applicable statute of limitations,” the court said.