John Getreu’s attorneys suggest a privacy issue with their client’s DNA as obtained from “discarded materials.”
The trial of accused serial killer John Getreu is on pause while the Supreme Court of the State of California weighs in on whether police can use particular bits of DNA because of how they were seized and brought into evidence.
DNA today is ubiquitous in the popular mind when it comes to a social understanding of criminal law. It can often bias us too or throw an impossible monkey wrench into the turning machinery of justice through a phenomenon called “the CSI effect” in real cases – proving that people who are ignorant about the science still expect to see DNA everywhere, regardless of what the real, actual science that’s in play has to say.
That’s why accused serial killer John Getreu’s case is more important than that of your typical killer. The 75-year-old is accused of killing two college students on Stanford University land in the early 1970s. The central question before California’s Supreme Court is whether DNA collected from a coffee cup Getreu threw away is admissible at trial despite the state having never sought a warrant for it – making the issue a fundamentally Fourth Amendment (“search and seizure” clause) one.
Currently, police can get whatever they want to help their case from a suspect’s trash. Not requiring a warrant first is known as “the abandonment doctrine” in legal circles.
Getreu’s case may set precedent to change that. Law enforcement labs only take a bit of “junk DNA” for identifying suspects.
It isn’t so much the “taking” of it: it’s the storing of DNA by law enforcement that is problematic, as most of the time it’s stored in perpetuity and no warrant or statement of probable cause is required to re-search the DNA samples for anything new. ‘
There’s a lot of things that could change if the California Supreme Court sides with John Getreu. Stay here for more details as they develop.
Journalist and dogged student of all things forensic, Wess Haubrich, examines the nitty, gritty details you didn’t know about infamous (and not so infamous but equally weird) crimes and their unseen motivations. Thanks for reading!
You can also support the Real Monsters’ podcast Wess does to get even deeper into these cases. Find it wherever you get your podcasts or here:
Follow the Show on Facebook here Twitter here. We’re also on Instagram and Snapchat.