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 Asso­ci­ated Press State & Local Wire, STATE AND REGIONAL

Hawkins County, TN

The Ten­nessee Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion has arrested a Hawkins County sheriff’s deputy on theft and related charges.

The TBI said in a news release Thurs­day night that 42-year-old Brad Depew of Church Hill was booked into the Hawkins County Jail after a search war­rant was exe­cuted at his home look­ing for miss­ing nar­cotics and other evi­dence from the sheriff’s office.

He was charged with one count of bur­glary, one count of theft and one count of tam­per­ing with evi­dence.
The TBI said Depew was a night shift deputy.

Inves­ti­ga­tors said they received a request last week from the Dis­trict Attor­ney Gen­eral to look into miss­ing items fromthe evi­dence room in March.

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

Times­News, timesnews.net
BYLINE: Jeff Bobo
Link to Article

Hawkins County, TN

Brad Depew

ROGERSVILLE — Hawkins County Sher­iff Ron­nie Law­son said Mon­day that oxy­codone and methadone pills stolen from his evi­dence stor­age room last month may com­pro­mise the case against a cou­ple from whom the pills were seized.

For­mer Hawkins County Sheriff’s Office nar­cotics detec­tive Brad Depew waived arraign­ment Mon­day in Hawkins County Ses­sions Court on charges related to that evi­dence room theft includ­ing bur­glary, theft and tam­per­ing with evidence.

Depew, 42, Bar­rett Lane, Church Hill, was allegedly cap­tured on HCSO sur­veil­lance video March 19 steal­ing a brown enve­lope from the evi­dence room that con­tained hun­dreds of oxy­codone and methadone pills seized dur­ing a drug raid near Sur­goinsville on Dec. 22.

“I was made aware of this inci­dent by my admin­is­tra­tion, and upon per­son­ally review­ing sev­eral video­tapes I per­son­ally called Attor­ney Gen­eral Berke­ley Bell and asked him to con­duct an inves­ti­ga­tion, at which time he noti­fied the TBI (Ten­nessee Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion),” Law­son told the Times-News Monday.

The stolen evi­dence room pills had allegedly been seized from David and Can­dida Hene­gar, 292 Hip­shire Hol­low Road, located south­west of Surgoinsville.

The Hene­gars are fac­ing numer­ous charges includ­ing two counts of pos­ses­sion of Sched­ule II nar­cotics with intent to deliver and two counts of pos­ses­sion of Sched­ule III nar­cotics with intent to deliver.

Read the expanded ver­sion of this report in the print edi­tion of the Times-News or its enhanced elec­tronic edition.

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