‘Race-Biased Dragnet’: DNA From 360 Black Men Was Collected to Solve Vetrano Murder, Defense Lawyers Say
By Jan Ransom and Ashley Southall,
The New York Times
| 03. 31. 2019
When Karina Vetrano was found beaten and strangled in a Queens park nearly three years ago, the New York Police Department carried out one of the most intense and extensive manhunts in the agency’s recent history.
But defense lawyers for the man charged in the killing, Chanel Lewis, are now contending that the police swept up hundreds of black men in a “race-biased dragnet” before settling on him — information they argue should have been turned over to them before trial. They said they learned only recently that the police took DNA samples from at least 360 black men who had been previously taken into custody in parts of Queens and Brooklyn.
Six months after taking the DNA samples, investigators testified that they finally found a match in Mr. Lewis, whom detectives approached on a police lieutenant’s intuition. Mr. Lewis, now 22, confessed to the crime, though he later claimed he was coerced. His first trial ended with a hung jury.
As Mr. Lewis’s second trial is coming to a close, his defense lawyers are raising questions about whether prosecutors...
Related Articles
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...
