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The Case Against DNA
Hugh Pickens writes "Thanks to fast-paced television crime shows such as CSI, we have come to regard DNA evidence as incontestable. But BBC reports that David Butler has every right to be cynical about the use of DNA evidence by the police. Butler spent eight months in prison, on remand, facing murder charges after his DNA was allegedly found on the victim. 'I think in the current climate [DNA] has made police lazy,' says Butler. 'It doesn't matter how many times someone like me writes to them, imploring they look at the evidence... they put every hope they had in the DNA result.' The police had accused Butler of murdering a woman, Anne Marie Foy, in 2005 — his DNA sample was on record after he had willingly given it to them as part of an investigation into a burglary at his mother's home some years earlier. But Butler has a rare skin condition, which means he sheds flakes of skin, leaving behind much larger traces of DNA than the average person. Butler worked as a taxi driver, and so it was possible for his DNA to be transferred from his taxi via money or another person, onto the murder victim. The case eventually went to trial and Butler was acquitted after CCTV evidence allegedly placing Butler in the area where the murder took place was disproved. Professor Allan Jamieson, head of the Glasgow-based Forensic Institute, has become a familiar thorn in the side of prosecutors seeking to rely on DNA evidence and has appeared as an expert witness for the defense in several important DNA-centered trials, most notably that of Sean Hoey, who was cleared of carrying out the 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people. Jamieson's main concern about the growing use of DNA in court cases is that a number of important factors — human error, contamination, simple accident — can suggest guilt where there is none. 'Does anyone realize how easy it is to leave a couple of cells of your DNA somewhere?' says Jamieson. 'You could shake my hand and I could put that hand down hundreds of miles away and leave your cells behind. In many cases, the question is not "Is it my DNA?", but 'How did it get there?"'"
Contaminated DNA samples can even lead to imaginary super criminals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
I really dislike CSI for a long list of reasons, but I'll give the writers some credit here - at least the "omg we have the DNA's" is usually a setup for an interview (interrogation) where they use it as pressure and the murderer gives up everything when they realize they're caught. It's how they wrap up the crime story bit. There's also usually another element there, like "that gas station happened to have Las Vegas style, super high-res security cameras with $1,000 lenses, and you posed for them". You know, something to make it look like they're more than just semen collectors.
The police will try to send any kind of weak shit that they can to the district attorney, because they can then mark the case solved and blame the DA or the Grand Jury should they fail to indict. The police commanders are happy because they get the closed case stats, the prosecutors stay happy because they don't take weak shit cases to trial, so their conviction rate stays up.
Everyone else loses. The whole world shines shit and declares it to be gold.
Also, this doesn't sound like a failure of DNA, this sounds like a failure of the detectives to properly interpret trace evidence.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The MythBusters need to do a show on DNA
When I was on grand jury duty, we had a few cases involving DNA evidence. Each time, the crime lab tech would repeat the same well-rehearsed statement that the odds against finding a match by chance would require something like "100 trillion earths with a population of 10 billion individuals" to find someone with a particular DNA sequence.
I regret not using my prerogative as a grand juror to ask them if the chances of contamination or a lab error were less than that number.
Let's face it, our educational standards have dropped to such a low point that most juries in America can be swayed by any motivated and well funded prosecutor. There's enough DNA evidence to convince the average jury that I am in fact a Chimpanzee, just by showing them that I share 96% of chimp DNA. Prosecutors are quick to point out the difference between "shadow of a doubt" and "reasonable doubt" - 96% DNA clearly removes any 'reasonable' doubt that I am not a chimp. People have been executed in this country within the last decade with even flimsier evidence.
Most murder suspects have to pay their life's savings and rack up additional years of debt to cover legal expenses while simultaneously losing earning opportunities, usually resulting in bankruptcy even if they are acquitted. Even when they hire an attorney they usually don't have the funds to put up an equivalent defense compared to state budgets. The cost of legal defense can devastate an entire extended family. When Brian Banks was falsely accused of rape his mother sold her house, car and went into debt to cover his legal expenses. He is an NFL hopeful with a goal to make enough money to pay back his mother. Not every falsely accused will have such an opportunity.
Having a public defender appointed to represent you just means you get an under-paid, unmotivated lawyer that just wants to wrap up the case quickly with an admission of guilt or a plea agreement. But the state can spend $10 million on just one case in the name of being "tough on crime". Prosecutors have to win almost every case that goes to trial or force the accused to accept archaic plea deals. If they let suspects walk on lack of evidence it becomes front page news, and it damages their future prospects, especially if they seek election to a public office. The emergence of the Prison-Industrial Complex is one of the greatest present-day threats to our democracy and individual freedoms. Pray it doesn't happen to you.
If they can't provide something which refutes the prosecution's case, then they have failed to instill doubt, and the cell phone isn't close to what is needed for that.
The defense doesn't have to "provide" anything, and certainly doesn't have to "refute" anything, as the definition of refute is:
1: to prove wrong by argument or evidence : show to be false or erroneous
The very act of refutation is "proving wrong." You cannot refute unless you prove, and there is no, repeat no burden of proof on the defense. The defense does not have to prove the prosecution wrong, or show that any of their evidence or facts are incorrect. The defense can cede every fact and piece of evidence the prosecution can provide but simply raise enough doubt that this evidence is sufficient to reasonably prove their case. The defense can be successful simply telling another tale with the same evidence.
For instance, the police arrive on the scene to find bigstrat2003 and zzsmirkzz locked in room with a dead prostitute. A knife is buried in the back of the prostitute's neck. Both people are wearing gloves, neither has blood spatter on them, and neither of them are talking. The prosecution claims "bigstrat2003 did it! He was in the room, he had the opportunity, and bigstrat2003 bought the knife earlier that day!" You don't have to prove you weren't in the room. Don't have to prove you didn't buy the knife. You can cede you had the opportunity. You don't have to even say "I didn't do it." All the defense has to say is, "Isn't it possible bigstrat2003 gave the knife to zzsmirkzz, and zzsmirkzz killed him?" Done, reasonable doubt established, and bigstrat2003 walks. No "refutation" required.
Does that make sense now? You don't have to prove or refute anything to establish "reasonable doubt." Just tell another story with the same facts that could be "reasonably" true. However, the more evidence the prosecution has, and the stronger that evidence is, the harder it becomes to tell another story that fits the facts and is still reasonable. If 30 million people watched you murder someone on live TV while it was recorded from 15 different camera angles, and police apprehended you immediately, you could cede all those facts and claim it was not, in fact you, but a doppleganger from an alternate dimension who switched places back with you immediately after committing the crime, but that would hardly be "reasonable."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.