A Butler County Common Pleas Court judge will issue a decision on a former Middlesex Township man’s challenge of his conviction for raping a Cranberry Township woman in 2002.

A hearing into a post conviction relief petition from Ralph Skundrich, 59, whose last address was in Greensburg, was put in recess on April 28 and concluded Thursday, May 28, when Judge Maura Palumbi said she will issue a ruling.

Cranberry Township police charged Skundrich with burglary, rape, terroristic threats, indecent assault and two counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse for entering a township woman’s home on June 6, 2002, and raping her several times under the threat of killing her sleeping 11-year-old daughter. He wore a mask and told the woman he had a knife, according to testimony and court documents.

A jury convicted him on all charges in June 2014 and he was sentenced in November of that year to serve 31 years and 10 months to 63 years and eight months in prison. His sentence was made consecutive to any sentence he already was serving at the time.

Skundrich is also seeking post conviction relief in Allegheny County, where a jury convicted him on charges filed by Pittsburgh police in the July 25, 2002, for sexual assault of an 18-year-old college student in her Shadyside apartment. Police said he threatening her with a gun, demanded money and forced her to have sex while he was wearing a mask. A jury convicted him of all 13 charges in January 2014 and he was sentenced in April of that year to 65½ to 131 years. That relief petition is pending in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.

Skundrich was identified as a suspect in both cases after a DNA match was made from a national database in 2010.

On Thursday, in the Butler County case, Skundrich’s attorney Kenneth Haber rested his case, which claims ineffective assistance of Skundrich’s trial attorney and questions the DNA evidence used in his trial.

He called Nathaniel Adams, a systems engineer with Forensic Bioinformatics, of Ohio, as one of his witnesses. Adams testified the TrueAllele probabilistic genotyping software used to match DNA evidence to Skundrich has not gone through verification and validation processes to ensure its accuracy. The company has refused to turn over the source code used to create the software, he said.

During the first part of the hearing on April 28, Skundrich’s trial attorney, Jose Hernandez Cuebas, testified he didn’t obtain a defense expert to challenge the DNA match or challenge the TrueAllele software.

During the trial, Mark Perlin, chief scientific and executive officer at Cybergenetics, of Pittsburgh, testified about using the firm’s TrueAllele software to identify Skundrich based on a report from the state police crime lab that found DNA tests inconclusive.

Adams said the DNA data was run through the software numerous times, but different results were produced each time.

He said there are no regulations or organizations that govern probabilistic genotyping software, which is used in many states.

Assistant district attorney Andrew Calve called Jennifer Bracamontes, a case worker at Cybergenetics, as a witness.

She said she used the software in 1,100 cases involving DNA evidence and the software was used to identify victims of 9/11. The software has been used by defense attorneys in at least 17 cases in which defendants were granted relief.

TrueAllele has undergone over 40 peer review validation studies and she wrote four of the nine studies that were published, she said.

The state police crime lab uses a different company’s probabilistic genotyping software, she added.

Source codes are not relevant in validation or verification testing of that type of software, Bracamontes said. Instead, data from known DNA is run through the program and the results are checked to see if they accurately match the data, she said.

In Skundrich’s case, the DNA data was taken from facial swabs taken from 14 places on his face, Bracamontes said.

She said she has never seen the source code and does not have access to it. Since May 2023, Cybergenetics’ website has contained information that defense attorneys can use to access the source code. Judges have ordered Cybergenetics to provide access to the source code in three cases, but have denied access in other cases she said.

Data from Skundrich’s DNA was run through the program 17 times and 16 of the runs generated similar results identifying Skundrich as the source, she said.

One run produced no results, but it was considered invalid because that result didn’t appear in any of the other runs, Bracamontes said.