IAPE Evidence Blog

jacksonsun.com
BYLINE: Lau­ren Foreman

Jack­son, TN

A Chicago native has been con­victed of rap­ing a Jack­son woman in a 1997 case that took author­i­ties 13 years to put together using DNA analy­sis and a cre­ative strat­egy for prosecutors.

Last month, Madi­son County Judge Don Allen sen­tenced Joseph Davi­son to 24 years in prison for the crime. Allen required that Davi­son serve 85 per­cent of the sen­tence, accord­ing to a news release from Jack­son Police Chief Gill Kendrick.

Jack­son police have called the rape con­vic­tion an unprece­dented cross-state case in which they charged a DNA pro­file of an unknown rape sus­pect to get things mov­ing before the statute of lim­i­ta­tions per­ma­nently closed the case.

“At the time the assault occurred in 1997, DNA pro­fil­ing was still an up and com­ing sci­ence here,” Kendrick stated in the news release. The 1997 case was the first of its kind in Madi­son County.

On June 27, 1997, an intruder who had qui­etly entered a Jack­son woman’s Arling­ton Avenue home “threat­ened her, cov­ered her face with pil­lows and raped her,” accord­ing to the news release.

Jack­son offi­cials could not find the man but entered DNA gath­ered from the crime scene into an index sys­tem that did not come up with a match until 2010.

“By ini­ti­at­ing a pros­e­cu­tion against the principal’s genetic iden­tity (even though we did not know his name at the time), we stopped the statute of lim­i­ta­tions from run­ning out, ” Kendrick said in the release.

Work­ers at a Ten­nessee Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion lab in Nashville noti­fied the Jack­son Police Depart­ment of a match with Joseph Davi­son in August 2010.

Davi­son had left Jack­son for Chicago in 2006 after being con­victed of aggra­vated bur­glary and attempted rape charges, charges that occurred before a 1998 Ten­nessee law requir­ing con­victed felons to pro­vide DNA samples.

The Chicago Police Depart­ment arrested Davi­son on Nov. 26, 2010. And a change in Illi­nois law had strength­ened that state’s author­ity to col­lect sam­ples from cer­tain offenders.

“DNA has changed the whole out­look on cases like this,” Jack­son Police Capt. Mike Holt said. “Had we not done some­thing, we wouldn’t have been able to prosecute.”

Since the 1997 case, Jack­son police have issued about four of the ‘John Doe’ war­rants a year.

“And they are not all sex­ual assault cases,” Holt said. He said some war­rants con­cern burglaries.

Holt said he hoped local imple­men­ta­tion of “John Doe war­rants” would set a prece­dent for other cities and inspire leg­isla­tive changes regard­ing statutes of lim­i­ta­tion and DNA evidence.

“I think it reaf­firms the impor­tance to us in law enforce­ment that even when we don’t know who the sus­pect is, we have to do every­thing right to keep those cases viable,” Holt said. “In hopes that there will be jus­tice some day.”

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

The Salt Lake Tri­bune, sltrib.com
BYLINE: Janelle Steck­lein The Salt Lake Tri­bune
Link to Article

Bland­ing, UT

Bold bur­glars broke into the Bland­ing Police Depart­ment and stole drugs and guns from the department’s evi­dence locker.

The stolen weapons, mean­while, all have been recov­ered — found by author­i­ties as far away as Salt Lake City.
Bland­ing Police Chief Lyle Bayles said that early Mon­day at least one thief broke a rear win­dow and entered the police depart­ment armed with a power grinder to breech the metal evi­dence door. The thief, who was in the build­ing for less than 15 min­utes, headed straight to the evi­dence locker and stole about 46 pounds of mar­i­juana, nine hand­guns, a cell­phone and a small amount of pey­ote, Bayles said.

By Fri­day after­noon, five peo­ple had been arrested in con­nec­tion with the thefts, and 11 guns were seized, along with stolen narcotics.

High­way Patrol Trooper Dan Altenes said two of the stolen weapons were dis­cov­ered Thurs­day morn­ing when two 21-year-old men were stopped for speed­ing on Inter­state 15 in the Salt Lake City area. In addi­tion to find­ing the guns, troop­ers seized about 5 pounds of mar­i­juana, cocaine and pre­scrip­tion med­ica­tion, he said.
“[The stop] turned into quite a trea­sure trove,” Altenes said.

The traf­fic stop also yielded a list of other sus­pects believed to be involved in the thefts, author­i­ties said.
Cedar City Police Sgt. JR Robin­son said offi­cers exe­cuted a search war­rant late Thurs­day at a home in Enoch and recov­ered the rest of the stolen guns and some of the drugs. He said offi­cers seized nine guns and about 20 pounds of mar­i­juana. Offi­cers arrested three peo­ple who live in the Cedar City area” Robinsonsaid.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

abc30HD, KFSN-TV Fresno, CA, abclocal.go.com
BYLINE: Son­taya Rose
Link to Arti­cle
One Video

Fresno, CA

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Fresno Police have spent the sum­mer seiz­ing a record num­ber of guns. The past three months, police have taken in almost 250 guns as evi­dence. The num­bers are so high, police have run out of stor­age space in the department’s prop­erty room.

Wednes­day night, Fresno Police took 11 guns off the streets, includ­ing an SKS assault gun with a thirty round mag­a­zine. Police are find­ing quite a few peo­ple just dri­ving around town are crim­i­nals armed with guns.

Wednes­day night two offi­cers who stopped in to use the restroom at the Shell sta­tion on Olive and Cedar didn’t end up get­ting much of a break. Inside the store they got a tip about a cus­tomer armed. After a brief scuf­fle in the door­way, police say they found a loaded hand­gun on Devaughn Lenor. Police say, these types of sce­nar­ios have become the norm.

Chief Jerry Dyer said, “Some of the firearms are brought in from out of state and we also know that a lot of these firearms are stolen in home burglaries.”

On a week­day night in the city of Fresno, these are the find­ings of Fresno Police. One thou­sand rounds of ammu­ni­tion booked into evi­dence, nearly all of it from his home in South­east Fresno.

Police also found two bal­lis­tic vests stolen from Fresno County Pro­ba­tion. Arrested were Jason Men­doza and Adam Duenas.

The prop­erty on dis­play doesn’t even include a gun police found that they believe was used in a murder.

Sergeant Kirk Pool runs the evi­dence and prop­erty room at the police depart­ment; he says cur­rently it’s packed with guns.

Pool said, “It’s far more than what we are used to and we have the stor­age capac­ity for so it’s tak­ing a lot more man hours to process it and we’re hav­ing to be a lot more cre­ative in find­ing new space to store firearms.”

Last Fri­day, Fresno Police Offi­cers took in a whop­ping 42 guns in a sin­gle day, includ­ing 36 from a chop shop bust that stretched all the way to Chowchilla.

Police Chief Jerry Dyer says he’s not sure why offi­cers are recov­er­ing more firearms, but he has a few ideas.

“It could be because the intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion that we are receiv­ing is bet­ter, that our proac­tive efforts are more focused or it could be that were just see­ing more peo­ple out there on the streets that are arm­ing them­selves with guns,” said Chief Dyer. “And the peo­ple that are arm­ing them­selves with guns are the gang members.”

Shoot­ings are up city­wide 8% over last year. The puz­zling part is that homi­cides are down 22% and over­all vio­lent crime is down 4%. 

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org