DNA Test Jailed Innocent Man for Murder
By Hannah Barnes,
BBC News
| 08. 31. 2012
Scientists, lawyers and politicians have raised new concerns over the quality of forensic evidence testing - so is the criminal justice system too reliant on lab tests without realising their limitations?
"There was a knock at the door, in the early hours of the morning, saying I was being arrested for murder. I asked, 'what evidence have you got?' and they said they thought it was my DNA.
"I thought 'I'll prove I'm not a suspect' but it didn't pan out that way. DNA has become the magic bullet for the police... they thought it was my DNA, ergo it must be me."
David Butler has every right to be cynical about the use of DNA evidence by the police. He spent eight months in prison, on remand, facing murder charges after his DNA was allegedly found on the victim.
"That was when Alice fell down the hole. Everything went upside down. My whole life changed overnight," he told Radio 4's The Report.
"It was hard. The loneliness was the worst, not speaking to your family. I've led a...
Related Articles
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 10.29.2026
At the beginning of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s blockbuster documentary You Can See Everything, Billy Evans (partner of Theranos founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes), says that they decided to do the film for one purpose: “radical transparency.” As they work on “Theranos 2.0,” Evans and Holmes want to show the public that she has been misunderstood –– painted as a liar and a fraud in the public imagination (and the courts) despite, as she claims in the...
By Jennifer Denbow, Guest Contributor
| 10.29.2026
Almost every day I am reminded that we are in the midst of a fertility panic. Whether it’s the Vice President exhorting Americans to have more babies or The New York Times running yet another story about the fertility cliff, fear about falling fertility rates is everywhere. While centrally concerned with declining rates of childbearing, Anna Louie Sussman’s new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, is a welcome antidote to the panic.
Sussman has written...
By Jan Grue, The Guardian | 10.27.2026
For a very long time, I dreamed of being cured. I was born in 1981. I learned to walk early enough, but I stumbled and fell more easily than other children. My parents began to worry that something was wrong...
By staff, We Are Egg Donors | 10.21.2026
Michelle Lambrechts is a police officer and one-time egg donor in Belgium. She is also the founder of Ik Zit Met Een Ei, a Belgian nonprofit that advocates for egg donors. (The name is a Dutch play on words...
