The method has also been applied in cases involving the identification of unidentified human remains — victims of crimes, accidents, or other deaths whose identities were unknown. The Federal Justice Department guidelines explicitly included this application as an appropriate use of the technique. A significant number of previously unidentified decedents have been identified through genealogical database searches and subsequent family tree work.
The limits of the method remain relevant. Not every cold case where biological evidence exists will produce the conditions for successful genealogical identification. The evidence must be adequate. The family must have participated in consumer testing in sufficient numbers. The documentary record must support the genealogical work. These conditions are not universal.
The questions raised by the method — about privacy, consent, the appropriate scope of law enforcement access to consumer genetic data, and the responsibilities of genealogy companies toward users who did not expect their data to be used in criminal investigations — are ongoing. They are not resolved by the success of the Golden State Killer investigation. If anything, the success of the investigation made those questions more pressing, because it demonstrated that the method works, which raised the stakes of the policy questions that the method’s use poses.
The Vera Institute of Justice, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other organizations focused on civil liberties and criminal justice policy have produced analyses of investigative genetic genealogy that engage these questions in detail. Scholars in bioethics, law, and privacy have written about the method’s implications. The debate is ongoing, and the legal framework continues to develop at the state level, with different states making different choices about what guidelines to establish.