The Michelle Martinko case: what was left behind on a drinking straw

The evidence survived the unanswered years

Martinko was eighteen when she was killed on December 19, 1979. Her body was found in her family's Buick at Cedar Rapids's Westdale Mall early the following morning. Investigators preserved her bloodstained dress. Many years later, testing identified a partial male DNA profile in a stain on that clothing. A database search did not immediately supply a name, but the physical evidence gave later investigators something against which a suspect's sample could be compared.[1]

In 2018, genetic genealogy narrowed the inquiry to three brothers. Further work focused attention on Jerry Burns. Police watched him drink through a straw at a restaurant in Manchester and collected it after he left it on the table. The first laboratory result was limited: Burns could not be eliminated as the source of the crime-scene profile. Investigators then obtained a warrant for a mouth swab, which provided a stronger sample for the comparison.[1]

That sequence is worth keeping intact. Genealogy supplied an investigative direction; it was not itself the final match presented as proof. The discarded straw supplied another comparison, followed by the warrant-authorized swab. A jury convicted Burns of first-degree murder. His appeal challenged the warrantless collection and analysis of the straw, alongside other issues. The question was therefore not simply whether DNA could identify someone, but whether this evidence had been obtained lawfully.[1]

The majority followed the abandoned object

The majority concluded that Burns had abandoned the straw and the DNA on it. He had used it in a public restaurant and left it behind. In the court's analysis, he retained no reasonable expectation of privacy that prevented police from collecting that particular item and conducting the identification testing described in the record. The justices affirmed the conviction rather than excluding the resulting evidence.[1]

The scope of that reasoning matters. The majority distinguished this identifiable, voluntarily used object from the idea that people surrender every privacy interest whenever they shed biological material. It also emphasized the kind of analysis performed. The testing at issue sought identification, not information about Burns's health or predisposition to disease. The opinion reserved the possibility that a different use of genetic material could require a different answer.[1]

The dissents separated the straw from its information

Justice Dana Oxley's dissent drew the line elsewhere. Discarding a physical object did not, in her view, settle whether the government could examine the genetic information attached to it. Picking up a straw and analyzing its DNA were separate acts. The disagreement was not over whether police could carry away restaurant trash. It concerned what constitutional protection remained when that trash exposed information about a person.[1]

Justice Matthew McDermott also dissented, developing his own constitutional analysis. The two dissenting justices did not agree on every part of the reasoning. McDermott would have reversed and ordered a new trial without the evidence he considered unlawfully obtained. That proposed remedy was not a declaration of innocence. It was a disagreement about the rules governing proof, and about what evidence the state should be allowed to use.[1]

What the later docket adds

Burns asked the United States Supreme Court to review the case. Its docket records that the petition was denied on October 10, 2023. That left the Iowa judgment in place; it was not a new Supreme Court opinion adopting the Iowa majority's reasoning. Read together, the opinion and docket show both the outcome of this appeal and the disagreement it left behind: whether abandoning an everyday object also abandons the deeply personal information it carries.[2][1]