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British DNA Database Mismatch

Posted by emmett on from the oops dept.

nahal writes "DNA evidence is extremely compelling to a jury at trial when trying to convict a suspect. In this article at USA Today, the world's largest DNA crime-solving machine, located in Great Britain, mistakenly matched a suspect to a crime in a 1-in-37 million chance. American experts have called it 'mind blowing'."

1 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. DON'T THEY KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT STATISTICS? by Nicolas+MONNET · · Score: 4

    This is so basic, I can't even believe it! I can't believe peoples lives are decided on such a weak mathematical basis!

    If the chance of a match between two random DNA samples is 1/37.10^6, and they have 660000 samples in their database, then the likelihood -- assuming their system does'nt give false positives, which I doubt -- of a database match is ... 1.78% !!! We don't know how much DNA tests they make each year, but it's porbably well over a thousand, wich leads to over 10 false positives a year!

    Americans find that "mind blowing"? Minboggling stupidity, if you ask me