A state appeals court on Thursday upheld the prison sentence for a man convicted last year of the 1995 rape and beating of a Penn State student in State College.
The three-judge Superior Court panel rejected each of Scott R. Williams’ arguments for appeal in affirming the sentence of 10 to 20 years in state prison handed down by Centre County Judge Brian Marshall in March 2024.
Williams, 53, of Mifflin County, was convicted of rape and aggravated assault after a bench trial last February, and his appeal contended that Marshall erred in denying a series of pre-trial motions seeking to have the case thrown out.
He was arrested in October 2021 after investigators used genetic genealogy processes to connect him to a DNA sample collected from the victim more than two decades earlier.
State College police responded in the early morning hours of May 13, 1995 to the 900 block of South Pugh Street, where a woman was found in the middle of the road, covered in blood and naked from the waist down. A Penn State senior at the time, she had suffered a fractured skull, face and jaw and was flown to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville.
The woman was attacked from behind and dragged to a flower bed, where she was raped and beaten with an object, according to an affidavit of probable cause.
A subsequent investigation using evidence collected through a rape kit developed a DNA profile of the alleged perpetrator, and nearly five years later, on March 29, 2000, former State College detective Thomas Jordan filed an arrest warrant for a John Doe with the DNA profile. It was the first John Doe DNA criminal complaint filed in Pennsylvania.
Over the years, investigators updated the profile as technology allowed and checked the profile against an FBI database on a weekly, then daily basis. In 2019, State College detectives Stephen Bosak and Nicole Eckley worked with two private labs to use the DNA samples in a genetic genealogy process that eventually zeroed in on Williams.
In early 2021, Bosak and Eckley went undercover at a banquet Williams was attending with the goal of obtaining his eating utensils to collect a DNA sample. Williams did not eat or drink during the banquet, but they did collect discarded items used by Williams’ son. The DNA samples taken from those showed a probability beyond 99% that he was the son of the man whose DNA was collected from the victim in 1995, according to an affidavit of probable cause.
The detectives later took bags of trash from outside Williams home. Items inside them associated with Williams yielded DNA samples that were tested by the FBI, which confirmed a match with the DNA of the perpetrator
In his appeal Williams’ attorneys argued that warrantless seizure of items from the trash and extraction of DNA were unconstitutional, and that the evidence should be suppressed.
Writing for the panel, Judge Correale Stevens wrote that Williams “had no objectively reasonable expectation of privacy” in items that were voluntarily abandoned in the trash. The court “has consistently characterized an individual’s decision to place trash out for pickup as an act of abandonment,” Stevens wrote, and that heightened privacy protections do not apply to abandoned property.
“We find [Williams’] alleged expectation of privacy in trash he voluntarily discarded for pickup by a third-party collection company is not one that society is prepared to accept as reasonable, Stevens wrote.
Williams, who maintains his innocence, also argued that the John Doe complaint using the DNA profile was unconstitutional because it did not meet specificity requirements for identifying the defendant and therefore could not stop the clock on the statute of limitations.
Stevens wrote that the DNA profile did satisfy the requirements of the U.S. and Pennsylvania constitutions and the state criminal code, agreeing with Marshall’s ruling that it had a “level of specificity that goes well beyond that of a mere name and physical description, that it would be nearly impossible” to arrest someone who did not contribute the sample collected from the victim.
“A John Doe DNA warrant identifies the perpetrator using a genetic profile with incredible precision and describes the perpetrator with sufficient particularity to prevent arbitrary or capricious arrests,” Stevens wrote.”… The description contained in the John Doe DNA complaint and warrant narrowly limited the possibility of identifying the wrong person and eliminated any discretion on the part of officers seeking to execute the warrant.”
The panel also rejected Williams’ claims that he was rejected the right to a speedy trial and that investigators failed to perform due diligence in the years between when the complaint was filed and his arrest. The opinion noted that investigators exhausted all possible avenues and routinely checked the FBI database before Bosak and Eckley initiated the relatively new genetic genealogy process.
