Johnny Cochran will always be remembered for his line in defense of O.J. Simpson, following the infamous glove demonstration. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit. While it worked for a glove, will it work for DNA? Not according to Douglas County, Colorado, District Attorney Carol Chambers.
Via Radley Balko, from the Denver Post :
Via Radley Balko, from the Denver Post :
Residents were alarmed last summer by a rash of thefts, trespasses and burglaries in Stonegate, a neighborhood in Douglas County. Fear turned to panic in July after an intruder reportedly climbed into a second- story window and groped an 8-year-old girl in her bed.
A sicko was on the loose and pressure was on to catch him.
A week later, Sheriff David Weaver announced that his office had made an arrest.
Nobody wants a “sicko” on the loose, and the pressure on the police to “do something about it” can be enormous. Law enforcement hates to disappoint when the focus is on them. It makes them look so, well, incompetent. And so they don’t.
Sheriff David Weaver must have been relieved to tell the locals that they had the “sicko”, a thin 19 year old redhead named Tyler Sanchez. So what if he looked nothing like the description of the sicko. So what if he was cognitively impaired. He confessed, after a 17 hour interrogation, repeating back only the information that was fed him by the police. Case solved.
Except for one sticky detail. The 8 year old girl who was molested had semen on her underwear. Semen has DNA. The DNA came from two men, and matched the girl’s father and another unknown male. What it failed to match is Sanchez. It didn’t fit.
The Sheriff, however, was not to be denied. After all, this was the next step in a escalating pattern of criminal conduct for Sanchez.
Sheriff David Weaver must have been relieved to tell the locals that they had the “sicko”, a thin 19 year old redhead named Tyler Sanchez. So what if he looked nothing like the description of the sicko. So what if he was cognitively impaired. He confessed, after a 17 hour interrogation, repeating back only the information that was fed him by the police. Case solved.
Except for one sticky detail. The 8 year old girl who was molested had semen on her underwear. Semen has DNA. The DNA came from two men, and matched the girl’s father and another unknown male. What it failed to match is Sanchez. It didn’t fit.
The Sheriff, however, was not to be denied. After all, this was the next step in a escalating pattern of criminal conduct for Sanchez.
What prosecutors say is a pattern of escalating behavior is nothing more than a deferred judgment from a 2007 juvenile graffiti case followed by a probation violation when Sanchez was caught with the smell of alcohol on his breath.Graffiti. Alcohol. The gateway to molesting 8 year olds. Cops understand how this works, even if us non-LEOs don’t get it. But this left them with one piece of hard evidence that didn’t fit. Everyone knows how conclusive DNA is when it does match, but what happens when it doesn’t?
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I’m with you, Scott, I get it!
Since using DNA to place someone at a scene is now totally compromised (well wait, apparently it ALWAYS HAS BEEN!) I think the state should save a lot of taxpayer dollars by not even working DNA in the majority of cases.
I also think this paves the way for a lot of innocence projects to spring up.
And lastly, I think this stalwart defender of the public’s safety, this DA Chambers, should rocket right up through the county/state/federal judge evolution and get a seat on the grand ol’ opry. I think SCOTUS is too afraid of making things easier for the state, what with their overbearing concern for the Bill of Rights and what that document implies, so she would add a much-needed wedge to fit “state’s interest” into that august body.
One of the problems of DNA evidence is the widespread belief in its infallibility. As you point out DNA is easily transferred.
I’d like to talk about another reason DNA evidence is fallible – the possibility of false positive matches. There has been little study done into false positives and their frequency. In the UK the false positive rate is quoted as 1 in 1 billion, based on the 10 STR loci used in the SGM plus system used in the UK. However that’s a theoretical value based on the assumption that the STR loci are independent – I do not believe that this has been experimentally tested. Additionally DNA samples are often partial samples, which increases the false positive rate.
You may think that a 1 in a billion chance is pretty low, but in the UK there are about 5 million people on the DNA database, so a cold search has a 1 in 200 chance of matching an innocent person. If the police do 200 matches a week then that’s one innocent person a week that comes under suspicion – and that’s ignoring that many DNA samples are partial samples.
We need research into the reliability of DNA evidence – what precisely are the possibilities of false positive and false negative matches? I think there is even an argument that DNA should be inadmissible as evidence until the level of false positive matches is experimentally determined and verified.
You’re absolutely right, and this was confirmed in the National Academies of Sciences Report and the DNA whitepaper by Bioforensics.
It’s interesting that you mention the OJ trial and DNA in the same article. I watched the entire OJ trial and the bloody glove was only a small reason why OJ was acquited.
The DNA “evidence” was a big issue. Therewas no DNA specimen that was just from OJ. The proseqution had specimens of blood that had “mixed” DNA from more than 1 person. They tried to show that the DNA was a mixture of OJ’s blood and Nicole’s.
Unfortunately for the prosecution, the defence had as a rebutal expert witness the man who had won the Nobel Prize for developing DNA typing. He testified that the technology of DNA testing had not progressed to the point that anyone could take an unknown specimen of blood that was the mixed blood of 2 or people and could tell who the people were.
The other aspect of that was that the defence had insisted that the police photograph OJ in the nude from all angles when arrested. The photos showed that when arrested, OJ had no bruises or marks on him. Also, that the only cut on him was a small jagged cut on his little finger. The tiny cut on OJ’s little finger would never have bled enough onto the driveway to mix with Nocole’s or anyone elses blood.
Many people, including many prosecutors like to think that OJ was guilty of murder but got off because of his slick, unscrupulous lawyers and mistakes of the prosecution lawyers.
No, the fact is that OJ was not guilty of the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman and that despite the tricks and planted evidence of the prosecution (the planted bloody sock, planted bloody glove on OJ’s property, and lies about the DNA evidence), that OJ had good enough defence lawyers, and good enough expert witnesses, that the jury could clearly see that the prosecution had no case against OJ and that I could see that OJ could not possibly have commited the murder.
At stake is the credibility of the compelling odds often cited in DNA cases, which can suggest an all but certain link between a suspect and a crime scene.
When DNA from such clues as blood or skin cells matches a suspect’s genetic profile, it can seal his fate with a jury, even in the absence of other evidence. As questions arise about the reliability of ballistic, bite-mark and even fingerprint analysis, genetic evidence has emerged as the forensic gold standard, often portrayed in courtrooms as unassailable.
But DNA “matches” are not always what they appear to be. Although a person’s genetic makeup is unique, his genetic profile may not be. Siblings often share genetic markers at several locations, and even unrelated people can share some by coincidence.