Battle over DNA, fingerprints
Suspect’s attorney seeks to block collection of more samples in serial killer case.
The defense attorney for Golden State Killer suspect Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. is trying to stop investigators from obtaining more DNA samples and photographing DeAngelo’s body, including his genitals, according to motions filed this week in Sacramento County.
“The government seeks to execute a warrant issued before the defendant’s arrest and arraignment,” defense attorney Diane Howard argued in a court filing Tuesday. “But the government’s right to unfettered investigation is substantially curtailed by constitutional concerns which attend the right to a fair trial and a right to counsel.”
DeAngelo, 72, is suspected of raping at least 46 women and killing at least a dozen people. He was arrested at his home April 24, just days after DNA samples surreptitiously gathered from him by law enforcement linked him to crimes attributed to the Golden State Killer and East Area Rapist.
For more than 40 years, law enforcement agencies up and down California had hunted for a man who terrorized the East Bay, the Sacramento area and Southern California in the ’70s and ’80s.
Sacramento County investigators announced DeAngelo’s arrest last week and said that not only did his DNA match evidence found at some of the killings, but his known whereabouts coincided with the serial killer’s timeline.
Prosecutors argued in court Wednesday that additional DNA, fingerprinting and photographs were just a continuation of a search warrant that a judge signed April 24 and that obtaining them isn’t the same as DeAngelo incriminating himself — which he has constitutional protection from doing.
“In the present case, obtaining the defendant’s major case prints and his DNA sample does not require him to speak or say even a word,” prosecutors wrote. “Likewise, taking photographs of his person does not require the defendant to share his thoughts and beliefs with law enforcement.”
Thus far, authorities have been tight-lipped on what evidence they’ve obtained that connects DeAngelo to the killings other than his DNA.
Over the years, the Golden State Killer was variously known in different parts of the state as the Original Night Stalker, the East Area Rapist and the Visalia Ransacker.
His known crimes started with violent burglaries in Visalia that graduated to rapes around Sacramento County and then rapes and killings by the time he popped up on Southern California law enforcement’s radar at the end of 1979.
Not until DNA technology advanced two decades later did authorities realize all these crimes were by the same person.
And it wasn’t until an investigator took a novel — and some say controversial — approach in submitting the killer’s DNA to a public genealogy database that investigators knew where to start looking.
The familial trail led to DeAngelo, officials say. Detectives then gathered two separate DNA samples from DeAngelo that they said matched evidence collected at crime scenes and took him into custody.
A decision in his attorney’s fight against giving over more DNA and other potential evidence was put off until at least Thursday morning, when a judge is scheduled to have a hearing on the matter.