French Police DNA Test 527 Students and Staff Members in High School Rape Case

In France, police have seen fit to DNA test
all male students and staff—527 individuals in total—at
Fenelon-Notre Dame high school in La Rochelle as part of an ongoing
sexual assault investigation.

The “DNA dragnet,”
as the AP calls it, comes after months of failed leads into the
September 30, 2013, rape of a female student in a high school
restroom. Though police recovered DNA evidence from the victim’s
clothing, they turned up no matches in the country’s extensive DNA
database.

DNA testing at the girl’s Roman Catholic high-school started on
Monday and will likely last through Wednesday. Prosecutor Isabelle
Pagenellen said that no one had yet refused to give a DNA
sample—perhaps because she’d warned that anyone who did would be
considered a suspect and may be detained. 

“The choice is simple for me: Either I file it away and wait for
a match in what could be several years, or I go looking for the
match myself,” she told the Associated Press. 

U.S. authorities have a less aggressive policy toward
prosecuting rapists, notes
Allie Jones with some dismay at The Wire. This is
true, and thank goodness: While there are a lot of valid critiques
of the way sexual assault case are handled in America, demanding
the DNA of anyone in the vicinity of an assault is not something to
emulate. 

Students and staff at Fenelon-Notre Dame may be going along with
the tests, but not all are doing so happily. “It’s disturbing to
have to do the test, it’s bizarre,” one
student told The Local. Defense lawyer Joseph
Cohen-Sabban told French newspaper Le
Figaro that the situation was “ludicrous” and  “a
truly unacceptable abuse of process.” Refusing to give a DNA
sample when not in custody is a right, he added. 

French courts rarely order mass DNA tests, and those that have
occurred generally targeted specific categories of people.
According
to France24.com, the only previous time blanket DNA sampling
was conducted in France was in 1997 in response to the murder of
visiting British teen Caroline Dickinson. French police tested more
than 400 local residents the following year. Dickinson’s killer,
who was later arrested in the U.S., was not among those
tested.