Armed with a Supreme Court ruling and a DNA profile in 2010, Monterey police obtained the county's first "John Doe" arrest warrant, identifying a commercial burglary suspect whose name and face were unknown.

The effort is about to pay off. Monterey police Lt. Leslie Sonne said the department will soon make an arrest it believes will clear 14 other commercial burglaries from Palo Alto to Beverly Hills where police collected the same DNA profile.

Monterey police Sgt. Bill Clark said the case exemplifies how advances in DNA testing and the availability of warrants based solely on a suspect's genetic profile are changing the way detectives process property crime scenes that used to get only a dusting for fingerprints.

DNA analysis has come a long way since the days when criminalists needed a large blood stain to get a profile. Since 2005, scientists have been able to isolate DNA swabbed from surfaces like windowsills and cellphones that were merely touched by suspects, hence the common reference "touch DNA."

"When we started years and years ago, we needed a blood stain the size of penny to get any results," said Meghan Kinney, a criminalist with the Department of Justice's lab in Watsonville. "Now we don't even need to be able to see it to get a DNA type from it."

And if police can convince a judge that DNA from a crime scene was likely left by the perpetrator, they can get a John Doe warrant for that genetic profile. The significance: The warrant stops the

Objections

No-name warrants have been used in sexual assault cases, where semen often provides an easy DNA profile, since the 1990s. But it was not until January 2010 that the state Supreme Court upheld the practice.

Now, the possibility of "tolling" the legal filing deadline with the simple swipe of a surface has investigators arming themselves with cotton swabs like never before.

The legal tool is not without controversy. The Supreme Court's ruling was split 5-2. In his dissenting opinion, Justice Carlos Moreno said the warrants do not authorize the arrest of any individual and are being used as a mere placeholder to circumvent the statute of limitations until the named perpetrator can be identified and found.

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Monterey police rely more on 'touch DNA' to find suspects