The pseudonymous plaintiff claims that San Francisco police detectives had assured her that her DNA would only be used to investigate the sexual assault.
A San Francisco woman has filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming that police investigators used DNA samples she had submitted during a sexual assault examination to arrest her in connection with an unrelated property crime.
According to The Los Angeles Times, the plaintiff—identified in court documents only by the pseudonym Jane Doe—is in her early 20s.
When Doe reported a sexual assault and consented to a forensic examination in November of 2016, law enforcement officers allegedly told her that her DNA would not be used for any purposes outside of the assault investigation.
However, Doe’s lawsuit claims that San Francisco police kept her DNA in a centralized database until at least February 2022, and “tested it in hundreds, if not thousands of cases” by comparing it to DNA evidence collected from other crime scenes.
The Los Angeles Times notes that Doe’s case is not particularly unique. In the same month, February 2022, then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin announced that his office had found that the San Francisco Police Department’s crime lab had regularly used sexual assault victims’ DNA samples to connect some of them to unrelated crimes.
Boudin called for an end to the practice, calling it “legally and ethically wrong.”
The Times writes that Doe was among the women indicted after her DNA matched specimens retrieving from a crime scene.
In Doe’s case, detectives arrested Doe after matching her DNA to a sample collected from the scene of a burglary.
Speaking to the Times, Doe said she is “traumatized” that the police not only kept her DNA on-file but continued using it without her consent.
“It’s just traumatizing on so many levels, because I was going through something, and just like any other person would do, I contacted the police and thought they’d do their job,” Doe said. “But they overextended that and did something that was even more violating — something that broke my trust toward law enforcement, which nobody should feel.”
Doe’s attorney, Adante Pointer, said the San Francisco Police Department’s practice violates federal constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Pointer suggested that San Francisco officers may have similarly misused hundreds—perhaps thousands—of other victims’ DNA in a similar manner.
Doe told the Times that her experience could dissuade other sexual assault victims from confiding in law enforcement.
“When it comes to sexual assault, it’s a confusing and hard subject to talk about,” she said. “You know how a turtle is scared in its shell and you poke at it and it goes back in. That’s how I felt — closed in and in a dark hole.”
Her attorney said that, even though San Francisco “got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,” other departments could still be misusing crime victims’ DNA.
“We’re talking about the most sacred thing to an individual person, which is their DNA,” Pointer said. “There were no safeguards that a person was aware this information was being assessed and used, and no safeguards on who they’re sharing it with.”
Sources
A woman was arrested using DNA from her rape kit. She’s now suing San Francisco
San Francisco victim’s rape kit used as evidence against her years later in unrelated case: lawsuit
Join the conversation!