Auburn man appeals murder and sexual assault conviction in unsolved Alaska case

FAIRBANKS, Alaska – An Auburn, Maine man found guilty of sexually abusing and murdering an Alaska woman in 1993 is challenging the constitutionality of the way his identity was discovered through a relative’s DNA.

Steven H. Downs Androscoggin County Jail

Steven Harris Downs, 49, was sentenced to 75 years in prison two years ago by a Fairbanks Superior Court judge after a three-week jury trial – 67 years for murder and eight years for sexual assault.

Downs’ public defender, Emily Jura of the Alaska Public Defender Agency, filed a 69-page brief on May 17 outlining her three points of appeal.

The first reason is that Downs never volunteered to provide a DNA sample and that genetic genealogy databases were searched without a court order.

The method used to identify Downs as a suspect violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and invaded his legitimate expectation of privacy, Jura wrote.

Downs’ lead trial attorney, James Howaniec of Lewiston, Maine, first raised the issue of DNA consent in a pretrial motion to prevent the evidence from being made available to the jury.

The judge rejected his request.

Howaniec raised the issue again after Downs’ conviction.

The judge also rejected this argument.

Howaniec said Thursday he believes Downs’ case could set a precedent.

“We believe this issue will go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Howaniec said.

Although Downs’ case is not the first in which a defendant was identified as a suspect based on a relative’s genetic profile, most of these cases never went to trial.

This happened in the case of Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo, who pleaded guilty to murdering 13 people and sexually assaulting about 50 women in California in the 1970s and 1980s.

If the Alaska Court of Appeals ruled in Downs’ favor, his case would be dismissed, Howaniec said

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“It is an interesting fusion of law and science and their constant development,” said Howaniec.

At issue is the way police matched Downs to DNA obtained from a swab of a tiny amount of semen found in the body of 20-year-old Sophie Sergie of Pitkas Point, Alaska, who determined the cause of death to be a .22-caliber gunshot wound to the back of the head.

Sergie, who had previously studied at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, had returned for a dentist appointment and to visit friends on campus.

Her body was found on April 26, 1993, in the bathtub area of ​​the women’s restroom on the second floor of the school’s Bartlett Hall.

Downs was a freshman at the time and lived on the third floor of the dorm.

DNA EVIDENCE

Alaska State Police had sent this DNA evidence, along with other DNA evidence collected from crime scenes of unsolved cases, to a DNA testing company, which in turn sent it to Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia to create a profile of the murder suspect.

The genetic information Parabon obtained from the crime scene DNA evidence was then shared with a Florida-based company called GEDmatch, which uses DNA information submitted by subscribers to genealogical DNA testing services such as Ancestry.com, which they obtain by giving their consent for their DNA profiles to be used by GEDmatch and shared with law enforcement, to create a database that can identify overlapping DNA profiles.

GEDmatch returned results that identified everyone in its database who shared significant amounts of DNA with the unknown sample Parabon had received from the Alaska State Police.

Thus, the DNA sample that Down’s aunt provided to the commercial genealogy website eventually pointed to him through genetic genealogy analysis.

Howaniec noted Thursday that one of GEDmatch’s co-founders testified at Downs’ suppression hearing in 2021 that it was “never their intention when they founded the company that this evidence would be accessed by law enforcement and used in a forensic investigation.”

In fact, sometime after the Golden State Killer case and a number of other cases involving similar genetic genealogy analysis, GEDmatch “changed its policy to require warrants before they can release any (of their) information to law enforcement,” Howaniec said.

Jura wrote that Downs’ conviction should be overturned because he never consented to the collection and testing of his DNA.

Jura challenges the collection and testing of Downs’ DNA, calling it an unconstitutional search.

Sergie’s unsolved case was reopened in 2018 when DNA from Downs’ aunt was apparently a chance match with semen found in Sergie, the only physical evidence linking Downs to the crime.

His aunt had previously submitted her DNA to a genealogy website, but it was later tested for blood relations and compared with DNA evidence collected at the crime scene nearly three decades earlier.

Jura wrote that Downs had “a subjective expectation of privacy in these shared segments of his own genetic code” with those of his aunt.

Only after his aunt’s DNA was analyzed was Downs identified as a possible suspect and a search warrant for his DNA was obtained and executed.

“Courts generally assume that individuals have a subjective expectation of privacy in their own DNA, at least until they voluntarily surrender it to law enforcement,” Jura wrote.

The judge had denied Downs’ pretrial motion to suppress DNA evidence, which was presented by the prosecution at trial.

WRONG WEAPON

Another point in Jura’s appeal is that the judge should not have allowed evidence at trial that Downs owned a .22 caliber revolver in 2019.

In her brief, Juras wrote that Downs filed a motion before trial to exclude evidence related to his possession of a .22-caliber Harrington & Richardson revolver that was seized during a police search of his home in 2019.

“Downs argued in particular that evidence of guns he possessed in 2019 had little or no relevance to whether he committed a murder in 1993. It was prejudicial rather than probative and constituted inadmissible bias evidence,” Jura wrote.

At an evidentiary hearing, prosecutors presented evidence suggesting that Downs carried a .22-caliber revolver in his dorm room in 1993 when he was a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Downs denied owning a .22-caliber gun at the time of Sergie’s murder, and said in 2019 that he had purchased his .22-caliber H&R pistol several years earlier from a Livermore gun dealer who had placed an ad in a local magazine.

Ballistics experts testified in court that the bullet found at the crime scene was too damaged to be compared to a specific firearm.

ALTERNATIVE SUSPECT

In her third appeal, Jura wrote that the reported confession of another suspect should have been admitted as evidence at trial.

Kenneth Moto was attending college at the same time Sergie was murdered, Jura wrote.

Police questioned him twice as a suspect or person of interest and there was evidence supporting a connection between Moto and the murder, Jura wrote.

But Moto was ruled out as the source of the DNA found in Sergie’s vaginal swabs at the crime scene, even though his fingerprints were neither examined nor ruled out, Jura wrote.

Moto had testified in court and denied killing Sergie. He also denied telling his sister, Karen Moto, that he killed Sergie. Karen Moto died before Downs’ trial and Downs had asked the court to produce her 2009 statements to police in which she said her brother had confessed to killing Sergie.

By excluding evidence of Moto’s confession, the judge violated Downs’ constitutional right to due process, Jura wrote.

Howaniec said Thursday that he and other members of Downs’ defense team were “very concerned that an innocent man was wrongly convicted based on very flimsy evidence. There were many aspects of this case that we believe raised concerns about the fairness of the trial.”

He raised these concerns after Downs’ conviction, but the trial judge dismissed them.

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