Wichita ? A man who will be tried on rape charges in McPherson County is believed to be the first in the nation whose DNA was charged with a crime.

Douglas Belt, who was sentenced to death this month in Sedgwick County for the murder of housekeeper Lucille Gallegos, was charged in 1991 as “John Doe” by McPherson County Attorney Ty Kaufman.

Kaufman, whose only evidence in a series of rape cases was the DNA of the alleged attacker, had to file charges before the statute of limitations ran out. He filed what has become known as a “John Doe” warrant charging the person to whom the DNA belonged with the crime.

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

Since then, such warrants have been used many times by prosecutors across the country. Defense attorneys criticize the warrants, which they say are unfair to people who may be charged with a crime years after it occurs.

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

When he filed the case, Kaufman said, he had to convince a judge that a DNA profile was a more specific identifier than a person’s name and date of birth — the identifiers listed on most criminal complaints.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

Wichita lawyer Richard Ney says the warrants are “legal fiction” because they are designed to circumvent statute of limitations laws, which Ney said are designed to “give a defendant a fair playing field.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has not taken up the issue, but Kaufman said several state appellate courts have upheld the warrants.

No court date has been set, but Kaufman said he plans to return Belt to McPherson County soon for trial. Belt is being held at the El Dorado Correctional Facility.