Above, killer Curtis Lavelle Vance and victim Anne Pressly.

Last Wednesday, in her first cheerful column I can remember since the run up to Trump’s election, Ann Coulter posted DNA Technology A Dead End For Serial Killers—Catches ’Em After Their First Kill

Between the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and DNA, any budding Ted Bundy can commit one hideous murder, but then he’ll get caught…It’s nearly impossible not to leave your DNA on something, particularly in the middle of a frenzied attack.

Ann is rightly worried about one complication:

In a sane world, these genealogists would be taking a bow…Instead, they’re about to have the murderer lobby screaming at them for violating a psycho killer’s “privacy.” The pro-murder crowd has already intimidated the largest DNA database, Ancestry.com (owned by Blackstone Group), into refusing to help law enforcement solve murders. 23andMe also refuses to cooperate with murder investigations.

In 2004 Sam Francis reported just such a case: PC Trumps DNA In Case Of Charlottesville Rapist.

After the usual serenade of whines and whimpers from the churches, the university and the American Civil Liberties Union, the police announced they were ”scaling back” the DNA sampling.

However, there is a much more serious and immediate problem: Black Jury Nullification

In November 2009 Nicholas Stix reported  ”Someone Who Makes Dogs Bark at Night”: Curtis Lavelle Vance Guilty on All Counts in Anne Pressly Rape-Torture-Murder Trial. The case turned on DNA evidence and was  the most pitifully gruesome I have read of in years.

Stix wisely went on:

…the jury took only two hours to return guilty verdicts. Such decisiveness in the verdict phase notwithstanding, considering that four jurors are black women, I rate Vance as having a zero percent likelihood of getting the death penalty. 

Stix was right: the prosecution had to settle for life without parole because two Jurors stubbornly refused to vote for death.

While the O.J. Simpson case is the most famous black Jury Nullification as Steve Sailer discussed in ”The People vs. O.J. Simpson”—Even Johnnie Cochran Wasn’t Cynical Enough About The Jury, a much worse case followed Vance’s Pressly conviction.

In February 2011 Vance was tried for the rape of a white schoolteacher in Marianna, AK in April 2008 [Lee County justice: the mistrial of Curtis Vance, by David Koon, Arktimes.com,  March 23, 2011] is a thorough account.

“Given how good the DNA evidence is in the Marianna rape, how much of a slam dunk it seems—16 out of 16 genetic markers…it was confusing for a lot of people when on Feb. 3, a jury in Marianna decided they couldn’t reach a verdict. The case was declared a mistrial.

The jury split seven to five along strictly racial lines—seven blacks and five whites. Even though it would be hard to find a genetics expert in the world who would tell you there was more than an unfathomably remote chance that the semen found inside the victim belonged to anyone other than Curtis Vance, the fact of the matter is this: All the white members of the jury were apparently swayed by that evidence, while all the black jurors were not.

Arktimes.com added:

Fletcher Long was the prosecutor in the Curtis Vance rape trial in Marianna….Long told the story of another Marianna rape trial he was involved in a few years back, a case in which the crime lab found that the chance that the semen collected during the investigation belonged to anyone other than the defendant stood at around 2 trillion to one. That case, Long said, twice ended in a mistrial, the jury split strictly on racial lines, with the blacks for acquittal and the whites for conviction. After the second mistrial in that case with the jury again split strictly on racial lines, the victim decided not to press it any further.

Long gave up on this prosecution, too. Marianna at the time was 56% black so the chances of getting a fair aka majority white jury were poor.

Very likely many prosecutions in heavily black area never take place at all because of this black behavior.

In 2012 I discussed this case in Why Zimmerman Is Doomed: Black Jurors. I was wrong. Somehow Zimmerman managed to get a jury of five white and one mixed-race women and was acquitted. But I stand by my conclusion.

The refusal of blacks to convict other blacks, even heinous inhuman murderers like Vance, even in the face of overwhelming physical and eyewitness testimony, even combined with a previous confession, calls into question the suitability of blacks to serve on juries. 

This is the key caveat to Ann Coulter’s DNA/Crime optimism.