I feel like I’m missing an important piece to this puzzle (or I’m not smart enough to follow along).
Even if….DNA is missing and / or he refuses to give new samples, why can’t they just take it like before (ie out of his trash or however the previous sample was used)? Even if he is super vigilant in not taking trash out, assume there has to be officers smarter than he is? And, how can a defendant refuse anyway?
This is what I think is going on.
If we go back to the beginning of the case we find a couple of threads we can pull together to get a complete picture.
First, Nilo's case was made through an investigation from a special task force that received a grant to look at untested rape kits and find serial rapists:
Specialized Boston police sex assault unit marks first conviction
Fun fact from that article: Boston police alleged in their grant application that there might be as many as 200 unidentified serial rapists in the area.
Anyway, if you think of the case against Matthew Nilo as a wall that is built up brick by brick, the first "brick" in that wall was the discovery that the DNA showed the same unknown person was responsible for all of the North End/Charlestown rapes. Not all of the cases had equally "good" DNA to work with, apparently. LE took a small amount of DNA that they thought would yield the best results at finding the identify of the rapist through genetic genealogy, and they sent it to a laboratory called Bode, which then subcontracted the work to Gene by Gene. That laboratory came up with the next brick in the wall - a genetic profile for the rapist that was then used to build out family trees until they identified a possible lead, which wasn't enough, on its own, to arrest anybody. But investigators were able to tie together other "bricks" like the age, the description, and the fact that he lived in the North End all lining up. At that point, the surreptitious collection of DNA from his glassware/tableware at the work event would provide the last piece of the puzzle: does DNA collected directly from Nilo actually match the DNA that came from the crime scenes? Once testing of the secretly-collected discarded glassware proved a match, the brick wall was complete and probable cause for his arrest existed.
His defense attorney in the beginning of the case (a different one than is there now) said that the collection of the DNA sample from the discarded items was unconstitutional. So they are asking for more information about how the genetic genealogy match was originally made, and prosecutors have not yet been able to turn that over. But they are going to challenge it on privacy laws and also on the warrantless collection of the "discarded" DNA. In essence, they want to knock the whole wall of the case down by targeting just one of the original bricks against Nilo.
The outcome is important because there are a lot of other task force cases in MA that are riding on this same technology.
There's an article from today's Globe about it but I'm not quoting from it because it might be paywalled for some:
Defense looks to challenge genealogy approach in case of Matthew Nilo, accused of sexually assaulting eight women in Boston - The Boston Globe
www.nbcboston.com
