DNA pins man to 11-year-old crime

Although the 28 year-old man, surnamed Chen was a minor at the time of the crime, he is being tried as an adult in accordance with the Juvenile Accident Act; the law stipulates that a person charged with a serious crime which has spanned over five years will not be tried at the juvenile court.

Chen's charges resulted from his 2007 arrest for gang activities involving attempted murder and the possession of illegal drugs. When Taipei prosecutors took Chen's DNA sample and ran it through the Forensic DNA Database, they were surprised to find a match in a crime committed in 1998.

According to officials, Chen was only 17 years-old when he and a friend roamed the Hsin-yi District one night in late August and beckoned a call girl into a seedy motel. When she agreed, Chen and his accomplice threatened her with a box cutter and took turns raping her. They then taped her mouth shut, bound her hands and feet with duct tape and absconded with NT$23,000 of the hooker's cash.

Both men had taken the precaution of using condoms, which were found discarded in the motel room complete with their semen inside. Local police extracted the bodily fluids to preserve the DNA samples but were unable to catch the culprits.

After the nation implemented the “Extraction of DNA Act” in 2000, the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) created the Forensic DNA Database. The semen samples of 1998 were subsequently transported and stored away.

When he entered adulthood, Chen joined a gang and was arrested in 2007, facing attempted murder and narcotics charges. Through the preserved DNA database, police were able to trace the rape case back to Chen and press him with additional rape and robbery charges.

The fact that the case happened over a decade ago made it difficult to resolve. Chen objected to the rape charges, arguing that sex with the call girl had been consensual. The victim, who has since married, had trouble recalling the events of the night to police. Prosecutors went through painstaking rounds of questioning with past hotel employees to support their case.

In the end, the DNA evidence and Chen's criminal proclivities after the crime allowed prosecutors to charge him with rape and robbery. The office is collectively seeking a 12 year sentence for Chen. There was no word on the identity of Chen's accomplice and the man remains at large.

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