Appellate Court Upholds DNA Search to Find 12-Year-Old’s Killer

A convicted murderer didn’t have standing to challenge the state of Washington’s use of DNA from a commercial database to identify him as a suspect in the 1986 murder of a 12-year-old girl, a state appellate court said.

Gary C. Hartman didn’t have a privacy interest in DNA that his relatives had uploaded to the public database allowing law enforcement access, nor in his own DNA left behind at the crime scene, Judge Rebecca Glasgow of the Washington Court of Appeals said Tuesday.

Without a privacy interest, he couldn’t challenge the state’s comparison of the crime scene DNA with the ...