The Prosecutor Who Caught the Golden State Killer Speaks Out: Why We Must Protect Innovation While Fighting Crime

When Technology Solves the Unsolvable

For over three decades, one of America’s most prolific criminals remained anonymous, his identity protected not by sophistication but by the simple passage of time. Between 1974 and 1986, the Golden State Killer terrorized California communities across eleven different jurisdictions, leaving behind a horrifying trail of at least 13 murders, more than 67 sexual assaults, and approximately 120 burglaries. Then, as mysteriously as he had begun, he stopped. He vanished into ordinary life, leaving behind only evidence, trauma, and unanswered questions. The case went cold, and families waited without closure, many losing hope that justice would ever arrive. But justice did come, thanks to an innovative approach called Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG), which combines traditional forensic DNA analysis with modern genealogical research. I had the profound responsibility of leading the prosecution team that finally brought the Golden State Killer to account for his crimes. Since we first employed this groundbreaking technology to crack this notorious case, law enforcement agencies worldwide have used IGG to solve more than a thousand previously unsolvable cold cases, bringing long-awaited answers to grieving families and ensuring dangerous criminals face consequences for their actions.

This success story illustrates a crucial principle: innovation, when properly applied, serves justice and protects communities. But imagine if, just as we were on the verge of this breakthrough, lawmakers had suddenly imposed excessive regulations or, worse, banned the use of IGG entirely out of fear or misunderstanding of the technology. Countless families would have been denied closure, countless victims would have gone without justice, and countless dangerous offenders would have remained free to potentially harm others. The lesson here extends far beyond one forensic technique. When we allow fear to drive policy rather than thoughtful consideration of both risks and benefits, we don’t just stifle innovation—we actively harm the very people we’re trying to protect. We create a world where the good guys are handcuffed by bureaucracy while the bad guys operate freely in the confusion. This principle applies equally to emerging technologies in other fields, including the rapidly evolving world of cryptocurrency and blockchain development, where unclear rules and overzealous enforcement are currently pushing innovation away from American shores and into the hands of those who operate beyond our legal reach.

A Career Built on Accountability and the Rule of Law

My perspective on these matters comes from more than 25 years of holding people accountable for their actions as the District Attorney of Sacramento. Throughout my career, I have prosecuted gang members who terrorized neighborhoods, charged offenders who committed hate crimes against vulnerable populations, and pursued drug traffickers who poisoned communities. My office has also tackled fraud, financial crimes, corruption at the highest levels, and sophisticated high-tech crimes that require understanding complex technology and following digital evidence trails. I’ve authored legislation and worked with lawmakers to pass bills that better protect the public. Through all this experience, one truth has become crystal clear: both prosecutors and the public desperately need clarity about the laws that govern behavior. Ambiguous statutes and inconsistent enforcement create an environment of confusion that benefits no one except actual criminals, who exploit the gray areas to evade accountability.

I know what real crime looks like because I’ve spent my adult life confronting it. I understand the difference between someone who sets out with criminal intent to harm others or enrich themselves at others’ expense, and an industry or individual caught in the crosshairs of a law that was never designed to address their activities. That distinction isn’t just a technicality—it’s the foundation of a just legal system. When we blur these lines, when we apply criminal statutes to conduct that their drafters never imagined and never intended to criminalize, we don’t strengthen the rule of law; we undermine it. As someone who came to this country as a child refugee from Vietnam with nothing but family and a belief that America rewards hard work and respects the rule of law, I take this principle personally. The rule of law must cut both ways: it must be strong enough to protect communities from violent crime and fraud, but restrained enough to protect innovators, entrepreneurs, and developers from government overreach. Getting this balance right isn’t just good policy—it’s a moral obligation for anyone entrusted with prosecutorial power.

When Money Laundering Laws Are Twisted Against Software Developers

This distinction between genuine criminals and innovators caught in legal confusion matters more than ever right now, as federal prosecutors have been weaponizing a particular statute—18 U.S.C. Section 1960—against software developers who have never touched a customer’s funds, never operated a business in any traditional sense, and never harbored any criminal intent. As someone who has devoted his entire career to pursuing justice, I must say clearly: this is not justice. This is overreach, plain and simple. Congress enacted Section 1960 as part of the Bank Secrecy Act framework to target money-transmitting businesses—physical storefronts, wire services, exchange houses, and similar operations that handle other people’s money while deliberately skirting the licensing requirements designed to prevent money laundering. It was created as an enforcement mechanism for licensing requirements, aimed squarely at traditional money services businesses that act as intermediaries in financial transactions. The statute served a sensible purpose: ensuring that businesses that move money on behalf of others comply with regulations that help law enforcement track and prevent illicit financial flows.

What Section 1960 was never meant to do, however, is criminalize the act of writing software. Yet that is precisely what has happened in the cryptocurrency space. Federal prosecutors have stretched this statute far beyond its original scope to reach developers of noncustodial, peer-to-peer blockchain technology. These are individuals who built open-source tools—software that automates transactions directly between willing parties—but who never held even a single dollar of user funds, never had “customers” in any meaningful sense, and never possessed any ability to intercept, redirect, or control the assets that moved through their protocols. Neither the developers themselves nor the software they created controls other people’s funds or transfers money on anyone’s behalf. These tools are more akin to calculators or communication protocols than to banks or money transmitters. Charging these developers under a statute built for traditional financial intermediaries represents a fundamental misunderstanding of both the technology and the law. As prosecutors, our obligation to justice requires that we charge people with what they actually did, under laws that were actually designed to cover that conduct. Anything less is not prosecution—it’s persecution.

The Chilling Effect of Regulation-By-Prosecution

This “regulation-by-prosecution” approach to cryptocurrency development fails the basic test of fairness badly, and its consequences extend far beyond the individual developers caught in its net. This approach creates a chilling effect on open-source innovation throughout the technology sector, pushing many of America’s brightest developers to relocate their work overseas where they perceive less legal risk. It unfairly saddles some talented individuals with criminal convictions for conduct that isn’t genuinely criminal, destroying careers and lives in the process. Perhaps most significantly for America’s long-term interests, it erodes our technological leadership in an area of consequential financial innovation at precisely the moment when that leadership matters most for our economic competitiveness and national security. The statistics tell a troubling story: the United States’ share of open-source blockchain developers fell from 25% in 2021 to just 18% in 2025, driven primarily by the lack of clear rules for software development in this space. Every developer we chase overseas with the threat of criminal prosecution is a developer who now builds infrastructure beyond the reach of U.S. oversight, beyond U.S. regulatory influence, and beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement when something actually does go wrong and genuine criminal activity needs to be investigated and prosecuted.

This outcome doesn’t represent a win for public safety—it’s a self-inflicted wound that makes us less safe and less prosperous. When innovation moves offshore because domestic developers fear prosecution for writing code, we lose the ability to shape how these technologies develop. We lose the economic benefits of hosting these innovations. We lose the talent that could be building the next generation of financial infrastructure under our legal framework where we can ensure appropriate protections. And we lose the visibility and access that our law enforcement agencies need to effectively investigate actual crimes that do occur in these spaces. The irony is profound: by overreaching in an attempt to control this technology, prosecutors are ensuring that the technology develops beyond our control, in jurisdictions that may have little interest in cooperating with American law enforcement or protecting American consumers. Meanwhile, the actual criminals—the scammers, money launderers, and fraudsters who do use digital assets for genuinely illegal purposes—continue operating, often with greater ease because legitimate developers who might help track illicit activity have been driven away.

Signs of Change and the Need for Legislative Clarity

The good news is that some recognition of this problem is beginning to emerge within the government itself. In April 2025, the United States Department of Justice issued an important memorandum entitled “Ending Regulation-by-Prosecution,” which made clear that the DOJ would no longer enforce pure regulatory violations under Section 1960. Following this memo, the Department announced that it would not approve new Section 1960 charges “where the evidence shows that software is truly decentralized and solely automates peer-to-peer transactions, and where a third party does not have custody and control over user assets.” This represents a welcome return to what the law has always actually required—a focus on those who actually control and transmit other people’s money, not those who merely write code that enables individuals to transact directly with one another. This policy clarification acknowledges the fundamental difference between a traditional money transmitter and a software developer, and it represents an important step toward restoring sanity to this area of federal enforcement.

However, neither a departmental memo nor a policy speech carries the force of statute. Prosecutorial guidance, no matter how well-intentioned, can change with new administrations, with different political appointees, or even with individual U.S. Attorneys in different districts who may interpret their discretion differently. The American innovation community and the broader public deserve clarity that is written into law itself, not merely promised in prosecutorial guidance that could shift with the political winds. That is why the Promoting Innovation in Blockchain Development Act currently before Congress deserves serious bipartisan support. This legislation would restore the original intent of Section 1960 by clarifying that it applies to actual financial intermediaries—those who take custody of funds and transmit them on behalf of others—not to software developers who create tools for peer-to-peer transactions. By codifying this distinction in statute, Congress can provide the legal clarity that both innovators and prosecutors desperately need, ensuring that enforcement resources are directed toward actual threats rather than wasted on pursuing people who are building technology that could benefit society.

Targeting Real Criminals While Protecting Innovation

Let me be absolutely clear: I am not naive about the existence of bad actors in the digital asset space. There are genuine criminals who use cryptocurrencies and related technologies to launder money, defraud victims, finance terrorism, and facilitate other serious crimes. I have prosecuted such individuals, and I fully support robust enforcement against these criminals with the full weight of all applicable laws. What I oppose is not vigorous prosecution of actual criminals—what I oppose is the abandonment of the crucial distinction between the tool and the criminal who wields it. We don’t charge email providers with wire fraud when criminals use email to commit fraud; we identify the actual fraudster, build a case with evidence, and prosecute that individual. We don’t charge automobile manufacturers when someone uses a car in the commission of a crime. The same principle must apply to software developers who create tools that can be used for both legitimate and illegitimate purposes. The focus of criminal prosecution must remain on those who possess criminal intent and engage in criminal conduct, not on those who create neutral tools that others may misuse.

Section 1960 remains a powerful and appropriate instrument against genuine money-transmitting criminals in the digital asset space, and nothing about clarifying its proper scope would change that. Custodial exchanges that knowingly process criminal proceeds while ignoring obvious red flags, centralized mixing services operated specifically to obscure the source of illicit funds, platforms that deliberately flout Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) registration requirements while holding customer assets—these are entirely legitimate enforcement targets, and the law as properly understood already reaches them. Law enforcement doesn’t need to stretch Section 1960 beyond its intended meaning to reach a software developer working from an apartment in Sacramento who wrote a peer-to-peer protocol and never held a dime of someone else’s money. The distinction between these scenarios should be obvious to any prosecutor acting in good faith, and enshrining that distinction in clear statutory language would protect both innovation and public safety more effectively than the current confused enforcement environment.

I run an office of nearly 500 employees that prosecutes approximately 30,000 cases annually. As the head of the second-largest District Attorney’s Office in Northern California, I have stood in courtrooms for 25 years and sworn an oath to represent victims, the vulnerable, and the voiceless. That oath demands that I speak out when I see the justice system being misused, even when that misuse is committed by fellow prosecutors acting under federal authority. Getting the distinction between criminals and innovators right isn’t some abstract legal principle—it’s a basic obligation of our federal government and a prerequisite for maintaining public trust in our justice system. Section 1960 is fundamentally a good law that serves an important purpose, but it has been misapplied in relation to those involved in developing truly decentralized finance technology. The solution is straightforward: fix the application of the law, focus enforcement resources on actual criminals who cause actual harm, and let American innovation breathe. That is what justice demands, that is what our economic competitiveness requires, and that is what I will continue fighting for throughout my career in public service.