STORY: "The False Promise of DNA Testing: The forensic technique is becoming ever more common—and ever less reliable," by Matthew Shaer, published by The Atlantic in the June, 2016 issue. (Matthew Shaer is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a correspondent for Smithsonian magazine);
GIST: "One evening in November of 2002, Carol Batie was sitting on her living-room couch in Houston, flipping through channels on the television, when she happened to catch a teaser for an upcoming news segment on KHOU 11, the local CBS affiliate. She leapt to her feet. “I scared the kids, I was screaming so loud,” Batie told me recently. “I said, ‘Thank you, God!’ I knew that all these years later, my prayers had been answered.” The subject of the segment was the Houston Police Department Crime Laboratory, among the largest public forensic centers in Texas. By one estimate, the lab handled DNA evidence from at least 500 cases a year—mostly rapes and murders, but occasionally burglaries and armed robberies. Acting on a tip from a whistle-blower, KHOU 11 had obtained dozens of DNA profiles processed by the lab and sent them to independent experts for analysis. The results, William Thompson, an attorney and a criminology professor at the University of California at Irvine, told a KHOU 11 reporter, were terrifying: It appeared that Houston police technicians were routinely misinterpreting even the most basic samples. “If this is incompetence, it’s gross incompetence … and repeated gross incompetence,” Thompson said. “You have to wonder if [the techs] could really be that stupid.”......... Modern forensic science is in the midst of a great reckoning. Since a series of high-profile legal challenges in the 1990s increased scrutiny of forensic evidence, a range of long-standing crime-lab methods have been deflated or outright debunked. Bite-mark analysis—a kind of dental fingerprinting that dates back to the Salem witch trials—is now widely considered unreliable; the “uniqueness and reproducibility” of ballistics testing has been called into question by the National Research Council. In 2004, the FBI was forced to issue an apology after it incorrectly connected an Oregon attorney named Brandon Mayfield to that spring’s train bombings in Madrid, on the basis of a “100 percent” match to partial fingerprints found on plastic bags containing detonator devices. Last year, the bureau admitted that it had reviewed testimony by its microscopic-hair-comparison analysts and found errors in at least 90 percent of the cases. A thorough investigation is now under way. 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 problem, as a growing number of academics see it, is that science is only as reliable as the manner in which we use it—and in the case of DNA, the manner in which we use it is evolving rapidly......... On April 3, 2014, the City of Houston shut down its old crime lab and transferred all DNA-testing operations to a new entity known as the Houston Forensic Science Center. Unlike its predecessor, which was overseen by the police department, the Forensic Science Center is intended to be an autonomous organization, with a firewall between it and other branches of law enforcement. “I think it’s important for the forensic side to have that independence, so we can narrow it down without worrying about which side is going to benefit or profit from it, just narrowing it down to what we think is the accurate information,” Daniel Garner, the center’s head, told a local reporter.
And yet Houston has been hard-pressed to leave its troubled history with forensic DNA behind. In June 2014, the Houston Chronicle reported that a former analyst at the old crime lab, Peter Lentz, had resigned after a Houston Police Department internal investigation found evidence of misconduct, including improper procedure, lying, and tampering with an official record. A representative from the county district attorney’s office told the Chronicle that her office was looking into all of the nearly 200 cases—including 51 murder cases—that Lentz had worked on during his time at the lab. (A grand jury declined to indict Lentz for any wrongdoing; he could not be reached for comment.) “It’s almost 20 years later, and we’re still dealing with the repercussions,” Josiah Sutton’s mother, Carol Batie, told me earlier this year. “They say things are getting better, and maybe they are, but I always respond that it wasn’t fast enough to save Josiah.”"
The entire story can be found at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reasonable-doubt/480747/
See also Scientific American story at the link below:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-dna-implicates-the-innocent/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com;
Harold Levy;
Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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