I keep hoping for a gunpoint standoff between some Federal law enforcement agency and some local government: pot, guns, it doesn’t matter to me what causes the standoff. I just like the idea of two law enforcement agencies pointing guns at each other: “Let’s settle this Federalism question once and for all, mofo!”
Why do I bring this up? Well, there was a story on the Statesman website yesterday about a possible standoff between the FBI and the Austin Police Department. Here’s what’s going on:
I’ve written before about the 1991 yogurt shop murders and the impact they had on the Austin psyche. Almost 30 years later, this something that’s still talked about, debated (was it crooked cops?), and cited as a defining moment for the city. I think part of what makes this the case is that there’s been no solution.
But there’s a new DNA technology called Y-STR. Apparently, with this technology, it’s possible to narrow down recovered DNA to just the male only component of the sample. So APD sent DNA samples to a lab and got a Y-STR profile, which doesn’t match any of the existing suspects or their family members. So they expanded their search:
They accounted for many of the customers at the shop that evening and got DNA samples from them. There was no match. They used yearbooks from the girls’ schools to build lists of their classmates, and then covertly gathered DNA samples from many of them off discarded soda cans or cigarette butts. Again, there was no match. Worried that first responders might have contaminated the scene, they tested every man who had gone into the burned-out yogurt shop. Still, no match.
Then they submitted the profile to an online Y-STR database…
The National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida operates the U.S. Y-STR Database containing 29,000 samples for population research. Its website says it has samples from “government, commercial and academic resources throughout the United States” and that “all forensic laboratories and institutions are invited to contribute.”
Today, the website contains a disclaimer, saying that it does not function as a law enforcement database and “cannot be used to identify a particular individual whose sample is in the database. All donors are anonymous (and samples) cannot be traced back to specific individuals.”
And they got a hit. But there’s a problem: the owners of the database, and the FBI, won’t release the data on who submitted the sample. (The FBI is involved because the sample was submitted by one of their forensic analysts.)
Montford said agency officials cited a 1994 federal law that created a national forensics database that law enforcement officials use for investigations. That law, they said, required officials to protect the identity of anonymous donors whose DNA was submitted to the Florida database for population research.
“They basically say, ‘We would love to help you, but we have a federal statute that says we can’t release it,’” Montford said.
Why would you put a law like that in place? Well, the DNA in the database can’t be used for a unique identification: at best, it would narrow the field down to “thousands of men” who have the same profile. APD seems to be fine with that: after all, cutting down the possible number of matches from about half of the people who lived in Austin in 1991 to a thousand or so might be useful. But the FBI and the people who run the database seem to be afraid of the possibility that innocent people might become suspects.
At their wits’ end, De La Fuente and other prosecutors began considering a subpoena for the information. They say they are still weighing such an unprecedented step, but fear the litigation would cost untold time and money.
In a statement to the Statesman, the bureau said, “The FBI did not perform forensic testing in this case and cannot speak to this case.”
The FBI acknowledged that it had provided anonymous male profiles to the Florida university for a study into how many of those profiles exist in a specific population and were legally allowed to do so. But the bureau said, “These profiles are not suitable for matching to an individual.”