Douglas Belt's DNA charged in rape cases.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on Nov. 27, 2004

Douglas Belt, who was sentenced to death this month for the murder of Lucille Gallegos, will soon stand trial in McPherson County as the first person in America whose DNA was charged with a crime.

Those charges were filed in 1991 by McPherson County Attorney Ty Kaufman, who was faced with a series of unsolved rape cases for which the only evidence he had was the DNA of the alleged attacker.

He had to file charges in the cases soon or the time period in which a charge could be made was going to expire.

So he filed what has become known as a "John Doe" warrant charging the person to whom the DNA belonged as responsible for the crime.

Since then, the controversial courtroom tactic has been used many times by prosecutors across the country. It has also come under fire from defense lawyers, who say it is unfair to the people who may be charged years later with a crime.

Belt, 43, also is charged in rapes that occurred in Saline, Reno and Thomas counties. Kaufman said John Doe warrants were filed in those counties in the 1990s after DNA tests showed the same person was responsible for all of the crimes.

When he filed the case, Kaufman said, he had to persuade a judge that a DNA profile of a rape suspect was a more specific identifier than a person's name and date of birth - the standard identifiers listed on most criminal complain ts.

"We just needed to be able to positively identify the defendant in some way, " Kaufman said. "We didn't have a picture. We didn't have his name. We didn't have his Social Security number. But we did have something better. We had his DNA.

"It was our hope against hope that somehow, some way, we would run onto this person eventually."

It wasn't until 2003 - long after the statute of limitations would have expired in the rape cases - that Belt was identified as the person whose DNA was found at the crime scenes.

Kansas had a two-year statute of limitations in rape cases when the McPherson County crimes occurred, but the limit has since been extended to five years. There is no statute of limitations for murder.

A 2002 American University Law Review article about John Doe DNA indictme nts lists the 1991 McPherson County case as the first of its kind in the nation. The article said the second was filed in 1999 in Milwaukee.

Prosecutors in California recently won the nation's first conviction in a John Doe case when Paul Eugene Robinson, 33, was convicted of five counts of sexual assault and sentenced to 65 years in prison.

The New York Times recently reported that New York City has 50 pending John Doe warrants that arose from sexual assault cases.

There is at least one outstanding John Doe warrant pending in Sedgwick County District Court, prosecutor Kevin O'Connor said, though he said he could not discuss specifics.

"I can tell you that it's a 2000 case and that it involved multiple victims of sexual assaults, " he said.

Wichita lawyer Richard Ney calls the warrants "legal fiction" because he says they are designed to circumvent statute of limitations laws.

"The statute of limitations are designed to give a defendant a fair playing field, " he said.

Ney said asking a person to put on a defense or come up with an alibi in a 30-year-old bank robbery case would be inherently unfair.

He also said the tactic conceivably could be used to file charges against a bank robber whose image was captured by a security camera.

"If you have a picture, charge the picture, " he said. "If you have a fingerprint, charge the fingerprint. If you have an eyewitness description, charge the eyewitness description. Where will this end?"

Although the issue has yet to be taken up by the United States Supreme Court, Kaufman said several state appellate courts have upheld the practice.

"Everybody who has looked at it has approved of it, " he said.

Although Kaufman has no court dates scheduled, he said he plans to return Belt to McPherson County soon to stand trial on the rape charges. Belt is being held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility.

This story was originally published April 14, 2016 at 9:55 AM with the headline "Douglas Belt's DNA charged in rape cases. ."