DNA Technology

Anything on the news and elsewhere in the media with evidence of digital manipulation, bogus story-lines and propaganda
antipodean
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Re: DNA Technology

Unread post by antipodean »

Here's a case that was solved as a result of DNA technology. I know the arresting officer, and knew the victim.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/arti ... d=10615959
ICfreely
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Re: DNA Technology

Unread post by ICfreely »

Dear antipodean,

My condolences.

1) You knowing the victim and officer does not validate “DNA technology.”
2) The officer and prosecutor most likely accept “DNA technology” at face value. That the “science” has been settled and “DNA fingerprinting” can be conclusively narrowed down to a specific individual.
3) The same holds true for the professionals who ran the tests.
4) Most importantly the perpetrator, like most people, also believes that DNA results are iron clad.

"Obviously, a guilty plea means you don't have to go through a trial, which is a blessing for our family."
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/arti ... d=10615959

The fact of the matter is if the perpetrator had the resources to fight the charges and hire a team of specialists to scrutinize the lab’s methodology he (innocent or guilty) would have been able to get the results nullified.

DNA computing is a branch of computing which uses DNA, biochemistry, and molecular biology hardware, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies. Research and development in this area concerns theory, experiments, and applications of DNA computing. The term "molectronics" has sometimes been used, but this term has already been used for an earlier technology, a then-unsuccessful rival of the first integrated circuits;[1] this term has also been used more generally, for molecular-scale electronic technology.[2]

History
This field was initially developed by Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California, in 1994.[3] Adleman demonstrated a proof-of-concept use of DNA as a form of computation which solved the seven-point Hamiltonian path problem. Since the initial Adleman experiments, advances have been made and various Turing machines have been proven to be constructible.[4][5]

While the initial interest was in using this novel approach to tackle NP-hard problems, it was soon realized that they may not be best suited for this type of computation, and several proposals have been made to find a "killer application" for this approach. In 1997, computer scientist Mitsunori Ogihara working with biologist Animesh Ray suggested one to be the evaluation of Boolean circuits and described an implementation.[6][7]

In 2002, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips.[8] On April 28, 2004, Ehud Shapiro, Yaakov Benenson, Binyamin Gil, Uri Ben-Dor, and Rivka Adar at the Weizmann Institute announced in the journal Nature that they had constructed a DNA computer coupled with an input and output module which would theoretically be capable of diagnosing cancerous activity within a cell, and releasing an anti-cancer drug upon diagnosis.[9]

In January 2013, researchers were able to store a JPEG photograph, a set of Shakespearean sonnets, and an audio file of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speech I Have a Dream on DNA digital data storage.[10]

In March 2013, researchers created a transcriptor (a biological transistor).[11]

In August 2016, researchers used the CRISPR gene-editing system to insert a GIF of a galloping horse and rider into the DNA of living bacteria.[12]

Latest research on DNA computing can perform reversible DNA computing bringing it one step closer to the silicon-based computing used in PC. In particular, John Reif and his group at Duke University proposed two different techniques to reuse the computing DNA complexes. The first design uses dsDNA gates[13] while the second design uses DNA hairpin complexes[14]. While both the designs face some issues such as reaction leaks, this is a significant breakthrough in the field of DNA computing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing
Proof of concept (PoC) is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility,[1] or a demonstration in principle with the aim of verifying that some concept or theory has practical potential.[citation needed] A proof of concept is usually small and may or may not be complete.

Usage history
The appearance of the term in news archives suggests it might have been in common use as early as 1967.[2] In 1969 Committee on Science and Astronautics. Subcommittee on Advanced Research and Technology hearing proof of concept was defined as following "The Board defined proof of concept as a phase in development in which experimental hardware is constructed and tested to explore and demonstrate the feasibility of a new concept".[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_concept
If you’re already sold on “DNA technology”, then so be it. If not, then I suggest you revisit my following post:


DNA Identification - Some Lingering and Emerging Evidentiary Issues (1997)


“The road to judicial acceptance of DNA identification evidence has been rocky. An initial period of enthusiastic acceptance gave way to widespread apprehension that the vanishingly small probabilities said to be associated with a matching type in an unrelated individual were exaggerated (National Research Council, 1996). At the same time that these concerns were being addressed, the technology of DNA typing has been making major strides. Thus, the road to judicial acceptance has been paved with good intentions, contradictory contentions, and new inventions.”

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~kayed/pub ... omega7.htm


FBI resists scrutiny of 'matches' - A crime lab's findings raise doubts about the reliability of genetic profiles. The bureau pushes back. (2008)

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/20/local/me-dna20


DNA's Dirty Little Secret - A forensic tool renowned for exonerating the innocent may actually be putting them in prison. - Michael Bobelian (2010)


http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/featur ... elian.html


UNRELIABLE EVIDENCE? A LOOK AT DNA FORENSICS (2010)


“Scientists are starting to question this assumption that 10-13 loci are enough to rule out the possibility of a random match to DNA other than the suspect. In other words, if 10-13 loci are not enough to make a definitive barcode, then a 10-13 loci DNA profile can actually match more than one individual.”

http://www.marymeetsdolly.com/blog/inde ... nsics.html


Forensic DNA Evidence: The Myth of Infallibility – William C. Thompson (2012)

“The rhetoric of infallibility proved helpful in establishing the admissibility of forensic DNA tests and persuading judges and jurors of its epistemic authority. It has also played an important role in the promotion of government DNA databases.4 Innocent people have nothing to fear from being included in a database, promoters claim. Because the tests are infallible, the risk of a false incrimination must necessarily be nil. One indication of the success and influence of the rhetoric of infallibility is that until quite recently concerns about false incriminations played almost no role in policy discussions. For example, David Lazer’s otherwise excellent edited volume, DNA and the Criminal Justice System, which offers a broad assessment of ways in which DNA evidence is transforming the justice system, says almost nothing about the potential for false incriminations. The infallibility of DNA tests has, for most purposes, become an accepted fact— one of the shared assumptions underlying the policy debate.”

“In the case of Josiah Sutton, for example, the laboratory reported an RMP of 1 in 690,000 (the frequency of Sutton’s profile) when the probability of a random match to the mixed evidentiary sample was approximately1 in 15. (Also, because Sutton was one of two men who were falsely accused of the crime, the chance the lab would find a coincidental match to at least one of them was approximately 1 in 8.)”

“Do innocent people really have nothing to fear from DNA evidence? It should now be clear to readers that this claim is overstated. Cross-contamination of samples, mislabeling, and misinterpretation of test results have caused (and will continue to cause) false DNA matches. Coincidental matches and intentional planting of evidence create added risks of false incrimination. These risks are magnified for people whose profiles are included in government DNA databases. We know less than we should about the nature and scope of these risks, and we have done far less than we should to minimize and control these risks.”

“At present there is no generally accepted method. The approach laboratories typically use is to compute the frequency of genotypes at loci where the two profiles match and simply ignore loci where they do not. This approach has been strongly criticized for understating the likelihood of a coincidental match (and thereby overstating the value of the DNA evidence), but it remains the most common approach in cases of this type and is currently used throughout the United States.”

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... id=2214379


DNA Evidence: Brave New World, Same Old Problems By Ken Strutin, Published on October 14, 2013


http://www.llrx.com/node/2425/print


MODELING SUSPECTS' FACES USING DNA FROM CRIME SCENES (2015)


“In the past few years, researchers have made big strides toward being able to reconstruct people's appearance from their DNA. Parabon NanoLabs isn't the first company to think to offering such services to police. Biotech companies Identitas and Illumina both offer eye and hair color guesses from DNA samples. Parabon NanoLabs seems to be unique in offering an illustrated face estimate. Outside experts say the illustrations are not likely to be accurate, however, based on the research that's been done about the genetics of human faces. Greytak counters that because of proprietary research, Snapshot illustrations are more accurate than one might think—and anyway, they need only to be close enough to jog the memory of a witness. Snapshot hasn't yet been validated by outside groups, which researchers Popular Science talked to believe should be the next step.”
“Greytak says Parabon NanoLabs often validates Snapshot with its clients, who are federal and state law enforcement agencies. The agencies send Parabon NanoLabs DNA samples from people they know. The company generates a face illustration, then the agency sends the company photos of the actual person for comparison. It's a step many agencies go through before deciding to buy Snapshot for a case, Greytak says. Depending on how voluminous and fresh DNA samples are, a Snapshot illustration may cost up to $5,000 per suspect.”
“So how likely is it that police will start reverse-engineering faces for all the DNA they find on a crime scene? Will Snapshot become, as Greytak hopes, "a key step in investigations"? The answers might depend on the service's cost and how much police trust its science, but not on its legality.”
“Curious whether there might be restrictions on reverse-engineering suspects' faces, Popular Science contacted David Kaye, a law professor at Pennsylvania State University who specializes in scientific evidence. "Leaving aside the question of whether this can be done accurately, I don't see any issue, frankly," he says. Police are generally allowed to figure out as much as they can from a crime scene, he adds.”

http://www.popsci.com/new-service-rever ... ime-scenes

DNA 17 – The New DNA Profiling Standard (2015)

http://www.sciencenutshell.com/dna-17-n ... -standard/


DNA error

http://dnaerrors.freehomepage.com/

viewtopic.php?f=25&t=1487#p2394363

P.S.

May I ask what the term “DNA technology” means to you (what your definition of it is)?
antipodean
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Re: DNA Technology

Unread post by antipodean »

P.S.

May I ask what the term “DNA technology” means to you (what your definition of it is)?
I don't want to get into a pissing contest over who has the greater understanding of how DNA works.

What interests me is how was the case then solved without the existence of DNA.

As soon as Marie's body was found at the back of the factory, I straight away thought that her murder was probably carried out by someone who's parents (given Marie's age) may have once worked at the factory. & I thought Marie may have known her killer.

I find it worrying that the Police took so long to convict Reekers given that he once worked there. And he had previous for violent rape.
ICfreely
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Re: DNA Technology

Unread post by ICfreely »

antipodean wrote: I don't want to get into a pissing contest over who has the greater understanding of how DNA works.

Neither do I, dear antipodean. Trying to figure out "how DNA works" as you say is comparable to trying to figure out how "viruses" work. Your guess is as good as mine. :)

I’m posting a few excerpts from the following article because it’s too long to post in its entirety. It’s definitely worth a read. Maybe it’ll help you better understand why I don’t believe in “DNA fingerprinting.”

The False Promise of DNA Testing
The forensic technique is becoming ever more common—and ever less reliable.
Matthew Shaer
June 2016 Issue


The DNA evidence was harder to refute. Having seen enough prime-time TV to believe that a DNA test would vindicate them, Sutton and Adams had agreed, while in custody, to provide the police with blood samples. The blood had been sent to the Houston crime lab, where an analyst named Christy Kim extracted and amplified DNA from the samples until the distinct genetic markers that swim in every human cell were visible, on test strips, as a staggered line of blue dots.

Kim then compared those results with DNA obtained from the victim’s body and clothing and from a semen stain found in the back of the Expedition. A vaginal swab contained a complex mixture of genetic material from at least three contributors, including the victim herself. Kim had to determine whether Sutton’s or Adams’s genetic markers could be found anywhere in the pattern of dots. Her report, delivered to police and prosecutors, didn’t implicate Adams, but concluded that Sutton’s DNA was “consistent” with the mixture from the vaginal swab.

In 1999, a jury found Sutton guilty of aggravated kidnapping and sexual assault. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. “I knew Josiah was innocent,” Batie told me. “Knew in my heart. But what could I do?” She wrote to the governor and to state representatives, but no one proved willing to help. She also wrote to lawyers at the Innocence Project in New York, who told her that, as a rule, they didn’t take cases where a definitive DNA match had been established.

[Why not?
The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck at Cardozo School of Law, exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.
https://www.innocenceproject.org/about/
Seeing as exonerating the wrongly convicted through DNA testing is their specialty one would think that Innocence Project would, in the least, take a cursory look at Sutton’s case. Unless, of course, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck’s primary purpose is to establish the infallibility of DNA forensics.. After 20 years of closely following these shysters that's my contention.]


Batie hand-delivered the files from her son’s case to Raziq, who forwarded them on to William Thompson, the UC Irvine professor. Thompson had been studying forensic science for decades. He’d begun writing about DNA evidence from a critical perspective in the mid-1980s, as a doctoral candidate at Stanford, and had staked out what he describes as a “lonely” position as a forensic-DNA skeptic. “The technology had been accepted by the public as a silver bullet,” Thompson told me this winter. “I happened to believe that it wasn’t.”

Thompson was gratified by the overturning of Sutton’s conviction: The dangers he’d been warning about were obviously real. “For me, there was a shift of emphasis after Josiah,” Thompson told me. “It was no longer a question of whether errors are possible. It was a question of how many, and what exactly we’re going to do about it.” But as technological advances have made DNA evidence at once more trusted and farther-reaching, the answer has only become more elusive.

DNA typing has long been held up as the exception to the rule—an infallible technique rooted in unassailable science. Unlike most other forensic techniques, developed or commissioned by police departments, this one arose from an academic discipline, and has been studied and validated by researchers around the world. The method was pioneered by a British geneticist named Alec Jeffreys, who stumbled onto it in the autumn of 1984, in the course of his research on genetic sequencing, and soon put it to use in the field, helping police crack a pair of previously unsolved murders in the British Midlands. That case, and Jeffreys’s invention, made front-page news around the globe. “It was said that Dr. Alec Jeffreys had done a disservice to crime writers the world over, whose stories often center around doubtful identity and uncertain parentage,” the former detective Joseph Wambaugh wrote in The Blooding, his book on the Midlands murders.

A new era of forensics was being ushered in, one based not on intrinsically imperfect intuition or inherently subjective techniques that seemed like science, but on human genetics. Several private companies in the U.S. and the U.K., sensing a commercial opportunity, opened their own forensic-DNA labs. “Conclusive results in only one test!” read an advertisement for Cellmark Diagnostics, one of the first companies to market DNA-typing technology stateside. “That’s all it takes.”

As Jay Aronson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, notes in Genetic Witness, his history of what came to be known as the “DNA wars,” the technology’s introduction to the American legal system was by no means smooth. Defense attorneys protested that DNA typing did not pass the Frye Test, a legal standard that requires scientific evidence to have earned widespread acceptance in its field; many prominent academics complained that testing firms were not being adequately transparent about their techniques. And in 1995, during the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, members of his so-called Dream Team famously used the specter of DNA-sample contamination—at the point of collection, and in the crime lab—to invalidate evidence linking Simpson to the crimes.

Among them were Dream Team members Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who had founded the Innocence Project in 1992. Now convinced that DNA analysis, provided the evidence was collected cleanly, could expose the racism and prejudice endemic to the criminal-justice system, the two attorneys set about applying it to dozens of questionable felony convictions. They have since won 178 exonerations using DNA testing; in the majority of the cases, the wrongfully convicted were black. “Defense lawyers sleep. Prosecutors lie. DNA testing is to justice what the telescope is for the stars … a way to see things as they really are :rolleyes: ,” Scheck and Neufeld wrote in a 2000 book, Actual Innocence, co-authored by the journalist Jim Dwyer.

[There’s no doubt in my mind that Scheck and Neufeld are shysters of the highest order. And I don’t make this claim lightly.]

While helping to overturn wrongful convictions, DNA was also becoming more integral to establishing guilt. The number of state and local crime labs started to multiply, as did the number of cases involving DNA evidence. In 2000, the year after Sutton was convicted, the FBI’s database contained fewer than 500,000 DNA profiles, and had aided in some 1,600 criminal investigations in its first two years of existence. The database has since grown to include more than 15 million profiles, which contributed to tens of thousands of investigations last year alone.

As recognition of DNA’s revelatory power seeped into popular culture, courtroom experts started talking about a “CSI effect,” whereby juries, schooled by television police procedurals, needed only to hear those three magic letters—DNA—to arrive at a guilty verdict. In 2008, Donald E. Shelton, a felony trial judge in Michigan, published a study in which 1,027 randomly summoned jurors in the city of Ann Arbor were polled on what they expected prosecutors to present during a criminal trial. Three-quarters of the jurors said they expected DNA evidence in rape cases, and nearly half said they expected it in murder or attempted-murder cases; 22 percent said they expected DNA evidence in every criminal case. Shelton quotes one district attorney as saying, “They expect us to have the most advanced technology possible, and they expect it to look like it does on television.

Shelton found that jurors’ expectations had little effect on their willingness to convict, but other research has shown DNA to be a powerful propellant in the courtroom. A researcher in Australia recently found that sexual-assault cases involving DNA evidence there were twice as likely to reach trial and 33 times as likely to result in a guilty verdict; homicide cases were 14 times as likely to reach trial and 23 times as likely to end in a guilty verdict. As the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in the United Kingdom, pointed out in a major study on forensic evidence, even the knowledge that the prosecution intends to introduce a DNA match could be enough to get a defendant to capitulate.

“You reached a point where the questions about collection and analysis and storage had largely stopped,” says Bicka Barlow, an attorney in San Francisco who has been handling cases involving DNA evidence for two decades. “DNA evidence was entrenched. And in a lot of situations, for a lot of lawyers, it was now too costly and time-intensive to fight.

Think of it this way: There are many thousands of paintings with blue backgrounds, but fewer with blue backgrounds and yellow flowers, and fewer still with blue backgrounds, yellow flowers, and a mounted knight in the foreground. When a forensic analyst compares alleles at 13 locations—the standard for most labs—the odds of two unrelated people matching at all of them are less than one in 1 billion.

With mixtures, the math gets a lot more complicated: The number of alleles in a sample doubles in the case of two contributors, and triples in the case of three. Now, rather than a painting, the DNA profile is like a stack of transparency films. The analyst must determine how many contributors are involved, and which alleles belong to whom. If the sample is very small or degraded—the two often go hand in hand—alleles might drop out in some locations, or appear to exist where they do not. Suddenly, we are dealing not so much with an objective science as an interpretive art.

A groundbreaking study by Itiel Dror, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, and Greg Hampikian, a biology and criminal-justice professor at Boise State University, illustrates exactly how subjective the reading of complex mixtures can be. In 2010, Dror and Hampikian obtained paperwork from a 2002 Georgia rape trial that hinged on DNA typing: The main evidence implicating the defendant was the accusation of a co-defendant who was testifying in exchange for a reduced sentence. Two forensic scientists had concluded that the defendant could not be excluded as a contributor to the mixture of sperm from inside the victim, meaning his DNA was a possible match; the defendant was found guilty.

Dror and Hampikian gave the DNA evidence to 17 lab technicians for examination, withholding context about the case to ensure unbiased results. All of the techs were experienced, with an average of nine years in the field. Dror and Hampikian asked them to determine whether the mixture included DNA from the defendant.

In 2011, the results of the experiment were made public: Only one of the 17 lab technicians concurred that the defendant could not be excluded as a contributor. Twelve told Dror and Hampikian that the DNA was exclusionary, and four said that it was inconclusive. In other words, had any one of those 16 scientists been responsible for the original DNA analysis, the rape trial could have played out in a radically different way. Toward the end of the study, Dror and Hampikian quote the early DNA-testing pioneer Peter Gill, who once noted, “If you show 10 colleagues a mixture, you will probably end up with 10 different answers” as to the identity of the contributor. (The study findings are now at the center of the defendant’s motion for a new trial.)

Ironically, you have a technology that was meant to help eliminate subjectivity in forensics,” Erin Murphy, a law professor at NYU, told me recently. “But when you start to drill down deeper into the way crime laboratories operate today, you see that the subjectivity is still there: Standards vary, training levels vary, quality varies.”

The growing potential for mistakes in DNA testing has inspired a solution fitting for the digital age: automation, or the “complete removal of the human being from doing any subjective decision making,” as Mark Perlin, the CEO of the DNA-testing firm Cybergenetics, put it to me recently.
Perlin grew interested in DNA-typing techniques in the 1990s, while working as a researcher on genome technology at Carnegie Mellon, and spent some time reviewing recent papers on forensic usage. He was “really disappointed” by what he found, he told me: Faced with complex DNA mixtures, analysts too frequently arrived at flawed conclusions. An experienced coder, he set about designing software that could take some of the guesswork out of DNA profiling. It could also process results much faster. In 1996, Perlin waved goodbye to his post at Carnegie Mellon, and together with his wife, Ria David, and a small cadre of employees, focused on developing a program they dubbed TrueAllele.

At the core of TrueAllele is an algorithm: Data from DNA test strips are uploaded to a computer and run through an array of probability models until the software spits out a likelihood ratio—the probability, weighed against coincidence, that sample X is a match with sample Y. The idea, Perlin told me when I visited Cybergenetics headquarters, in Pittsburgh, was to correctly differentiate individual DNA profiles found at the scene of a crime. He gave me an example: A lab submits data from a complex DNA mixture found on a knife used in a homicide. The TrueAllele system might conclude that a match between the knife and a suspect is “5 trillion times more probable than coincidence,” and thus that the suspect almost certainly touched the knife. No more analysts squinting at their equipment, trying to correspond alleles with contributors. “Our program,” Perlin told me proudly, “is able to do all that for you, more accurately.”

Around us, half a dozen analysts and coders sat hunched over computer screens. The office was windowless and devoid of any kind of decoration, save for a whiteboard laced with equations—the vibe was more bootstrapped start-up than CSI. “I think visitors are surprised not to see bubbling vials and lab equipment,” Perlin acknowledged. “But that’s not us.”

He led me down the hallway and into a storage room. Row upon row of Cybergenetics-branded Apple desktop computers lined the shelves: ready-made TrueAllele kits. Perlin could not tell me exactly how many software units he sells each year, but he allowed that TrueAllele had been purchased by crime labs in Oman, Australia, and 11 U.S. states; last year, Cybergenetics hired its first full-time salesman.

Four years ago, in one of its more high-profile tests to date, the software was used to connect an extremely small trace of DNA at a murder scene in Schenectady, New York, to the killer, an acquaintance of the victim. A similarly reliable match, Perlin told me, would have been very difficult to obtain by more analog means.

And the software’s potential is only starting to be mined, he added. TrueAllele’s ability to pull matches from microscopic or muddled traces of DNA is helping crack cold cases, by reprocessing evidence once dismissed as inconclusive. “You hear the word inconclusive, you naturally think, Okay. It’s done,” Perlin told me, his eyes widening. “But it’s not! It just means [the lab technicians] can’t interpret it. Let me ask you: What’s the societal impact of half a crime lab’s evidence being called inconclusive and prosecutors and police and defenders mistakenly believing that this means it’s uninformative data?”

His critics have a darker view. William Thompson points out that Perlin has declined to make public the algorithm that drives the program. “You do have a black-box situation happening here,” Thompson told me. “The data go in, and out comes the solution, and we’re not fully informed of what happened in between.”
...
When I interviewed Perlin at Cybergenetics headquarters, I raised the matter of transparency. He was visibly annoyed. He noted that he’d published detailed papers on the theory behind TrueAllele, and filed patent applications, too: “We have disclosed not the trade secrets of the source code or the engineering details, but the basic math.” <_<
...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... bt/480747/
ICfreely
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Re: DNA Technology

Unread post by ICfreely »

antipodean wrote:What interests me is how was the case then solved without the existence of DNA.
His specific blood type (especially if it's rare) could have helped narrow the field:
Again, my condolences, antipodean. IMO, the perpetrator's belief in the infallibility of "DNA fingerprinting" solved (if you want to use that word) the case.

quote form the article I posted:
As the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in the United Kingdom, pointed out in a major study on forensic evidence, even the knowledge that the prosecution intends to introduce a DNA match could be enough to get a defendant to capitulate.
According to the article you posted the perpetrator was riddled with guilt as it was. Once he was told that there was a "DNA match" he capitulated. He would have most likely done the same if he were told there were eyewitnesses, video, photographs or traditional fingerprints (which is also more subjective than realized) placing him at the crime scene.

What troubles me is the fact that while Innocence Project has been getting all the headlines for reversing a few hundred convictions Based on DNA, untold thousands have been convicted solely based on it. In other words, someone can be convicted of a crime based solely on a "DNA match" produced by highly questionable patented (secretive) computer algorithms.
“DNA evidence was entrenched. And in a lot of situations, for a lot of lawyers, it was now too costly and time-intensive to fight.”
And if the defendant doesn't have the resources to challenge the results, then they're done for. I find it extremely troubling that a rich guilty person can nullify the results while a poor innocent person cannot. Do you see what I'm getting at?
patrix
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Re: DNA Technology

Unread post by patrix »

This is very interesting. I wonder if there are any double blind studies that show how accurate DNA testing is? A pretty easy study to design I would say. A lawyer that has a client with deep pockets could even do one to raise reasonable doubt. Have some people touch various objects and have blood samples in front of witnesses and video and then send them to various DNA labs. Does anyone know if this ever been done?
aa5
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Re: DNA Technology

Unread post by aa5 »

It goes with my general thesis that 'scientists' are the priests of our society. And the priests of all societies are the holders of truth and wisdom, all societies view their own priests as 'all knowing'. This is why no matter the question our scientists claim to have answers, as the society demands them to be all knowing. And not just for the past and the present, but to know everything about the future too.

So the scientists carry out some ritual that no one but them understands, and tells the awestruck people 'the truth'. Anyone who questions the scientists is a horrible heretic.

Patrix's idea is a good one, like for a ruling group in some country that wants to find out the what the real state of the technology is.
anonjedi2
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Re: DNA Technology

Unread post by anonjedi2 »

Twins take DNA ancestry tests, hilarity ensues.


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isa5c1p6aC0
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