The Kansas Supreme Court has been asked to consider whether it’s legal to charge a defendant’s DNA with a crime in a case that could have national implications.

As the result of a crime lab’s mistake in 1991, death row inmate Douglas Belt was not connected to eight sexual assaults in central Kansas and one in Illinois until he became a suspect in the beheading of a Wichita housekeeper a decade later.

The lab mislabeled a blood sample in 1991 that could have connected Belt to several rapes. The mistake was discovered in December 2002 when a new DNA sample was taken from Belt in the housekeeper’s death.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation apologized for the mistake, which caused problems for prosecutors because Kansas had a five-year statute of limitations for rape.

With time running out, McPherson County Atty. Ty Kaufman was thought to be the first prosecutor in the country to file what has become known as a “John Doe” warrant charging the person to whom the DNA belonged.

John Doe warrants also were filed in Saline, Thomas and Reno counties in the 1990s after DNA tests indicated the same person was responsible for all of the attacks, which occurred between 1989 and 1994. The victims, all but one of whom lived in or near mobile homes, were bound and gagged with duct tape and raped and sodomized.

An Illinois case involving a 1992 sexual assault is pending.

Prosecutors again pursued the rape cases after Belt, formerly an over-the-road truck driver, was sentenced to death in November 2004 in Sedgwick County in the decapitation killing of housekeeper Lucille Gallegos. He was linked to the murder after his DNA was found on a railing outside Gallegos’ blood-soaked apartment.

Judges in Reno, Saline and McPherson counties tossed the rape cases in recent months for reasons that ranged from delays that resulted from the KBI’s mistake to the lack of specifics in the warrants.

Tim O’Keefe, an attorney who handled Belt’s appeal in Reno County, said the Thomas County case was dropped because the victim decided she did not want to pursue it.

The cases from all of the Kansas counties except Thomas were consolidated last month and have been transferred to the state’s Supreme Court. No date has been set for oral arguments.