Police Used a Baby's DNA To Investigate Its Father For a Crime

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: If you were born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government. By the 1970s, states had established newborn screening programs, in which a nurse takes a few drops of blood from a pinprick on a baby's heel, then sends the sample to a lab to test for certain diseases. Over the years, the list has grown from just a few conditions to dozens. The blood is supposed to be used for medical purposes -- these screenings identify babies with serious health issues, and they have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children. But a public records lawsuit filed last month in New Jersey suggests these samples are also being used by police in criminal investigations. The lawsuit, filed by the state's Office of the Public Defender and the New Jersey Monitor, a nonprofit news outlet, alleges that state police sought a newborn's blood sample from the New Jersey Department of Health to investigate the child's father in connection with a sexual assault from the 1990s. Crystal Grant, a technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the case represents a "whole new leap forward" in the misuse of DNA by law enforcement. "It means that essentially every baby born in the US could be included in police surveillance," she says. It's not known how many agencies around the country have sought to use newborn screening samples to investigate crimes, or how often those attempts were successful. But there is at least one other instance of it happening. In December 2020, a local TV station reported that police in California had issued five search warrants to access such samples, and that at least one cold case there was solved with the help of newborn blood. "This increasing overreach into the health system by police to get genetic information is really concerning," Grant says. The New Jersey lawsuit alleges that police obtained the blood sample of a newborn child (who is now elementary-school aged) to perform a DNA analysis that linked the baby's father to a crime. This was done using a technique called investigative genetic genealogy, or forensic genealogy. It usually involves isolating DNA left at a crime scene and using it to create a digital genetic profile of a suspect. Investigators can upload this profile to genealogy websites where other people have freely shared their own DNA information in the hope of connecting with family members or learning about their ancestry. Because DNA is shared within families, investigators can use relative matches to map out a suspect's family tree and narrow down their identity. According to the New Jersey lawsuit, police had reopened an investigation into a cold case and had used genetics to place the suspect within a single family: one of several adults or their children. But police didn't yet have probable cause to obtain search warrants for DNA swabs from any of them. Instead, they asked the state's newborn screening lab for a blood sample of one of the children. Analysis of this genetic information revealed a close relationship between the baby's DNA and the DNA taken at the crime scene, indicating that the baby's father was the person police were seeking. That was enough to establish probable cause in the assault investigation, so police sought a warrant for a cheek swab from the father. After analyzing his DNA, the suit contends, police found that it was a match to the crime scene DNA. "Because there are no federal laws governing newborn screening programs, states set their own policies on which diseases they test for, how long samples are stored, and how they can be used," notes Wired. "Some states hold on to blood samples for months, others for years or decades. Virginia only keeps samples from infants with normal results for six months, while Michigan retains them for up to 100 years. New Jersey stores samples for 23 years before destroying them."

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