A San Francisco woman has filed suit against the California city after DNA collected in her sexual assault was used to pin her to an unrelated crime.
Per CBS News, the woman, who’s going by Jane Doe, filed the lawsuit on Monday, which accuses the San Francisco Police Department of using her DNA test kit to tie her to a 2021 burglary. The DNA had been stored in the system as part of a domestic violence and sexual assault case back in 2016, and the revelation that it had been used to connect the victim to another crime spurred a national outcry from rape survivors. Advocates said such an overreach could dissuade victims from coming forward to law enforcement to report their assaults in the future.
“This is government overreach of the highest order, using the most unique and personal thing we have — our genetic code — without our knowledge to try and connect us to crime,” Adante Pointer, the woman’s attorney, said in a statement.
Then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin said in a February address that the DNA sample was found as part of a multi-paged collection of evidence against a woman who had been charged with a felony property crime, Boudin soon dropped the charges against the woman once he learned where the DNA sample derived from.
Police Chief Bill Scott said at a commission meeting in March that he had also discovered 17 victim profiles, 11 of which were rape kits, that had been used to link potential suspects to unrelated investigations. Scott said he believes the only person arrested was the woman who filed suit on Monday.
He added that the San Francisco Police Department’s crime lab halted this practice shortly after a complaint was filed by the district attorney’s office and that they revamped its operating procedure to prevent the misuse of DNA collected from rape survivors.
Federal law prohibits the use of rape victims’ DNA to connect victims to an unrelated offense, but there remains no law in California to stop law enforcement databases from maintaining the victim's profiles and using them in criminal searches years later. Last month, state lawmakers approved a bill that would forbid this practice, stating that DNA collected from rape survivors could not be used for any reason other than to find the assault suspect. Local law enforcement would also be prohibited from maintaining and searching victims' DNA years later.
The legislation is currently pending before Governor Gavin Newsom.
