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A California woman has filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco after investigators used DNA from her rape kit to arrest her for an unrelated crime. The woman, identified as Jane Doe in court filings, said she was raped in 2016, and police took a DNA sample as part of the investigation.
The woman said that she was unaware that her DNA sample would be entered into a police database used to identify criminals.
Five years later, investigators were looking into a burglary and ran DNA evidence found at the scene through the database. They got a match for the woman and took her into custody on charges of retail theft. However, prosecutors eventually dropped the charges after an outcry about how she was identified.
“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,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “But they overextended that and did something that was even more violating — something that broke my trust toward law enforcement, which nobody should feel.”
San Francisco has since passed an ordinance banning police from using rape kits to identify suspects in other crimes. Pointer said that while the charges against the woman were dropped, the lawsuit is about holding officials accountable for engaging in an “unconstitutional invasion of privacy.”
“Their civil rights are trampled upon, repeatedly and continuously,” her lawyer, Adante Pointer, told the New York Times. “So that’s another part of this: Making sure that we stand up for people in this society who oftentimes don’t have their rights respected.”