Evidence on trial
By Martin Enserink,
Science/AAAS
| 03. 11. 2016
Untitled Document
On 27 February, a court ordered the District of Columbia to pay $13.2 million to Santae Tribble, who spent 28 years in prison based on bogus science. After a taxi driver was murdered in Southeast Washington in 1978, a witness had seen the killer wearing a stocking mask. In a stocking found a block away, police found a hair that matched Tribble's “in all microscopic characteristics,” an analyst for the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified. Chances that it came from someone else were “one in 10 million,” a prosecutor told the jury. Tribble was convicted.
But a DNA analysis 31 years later showed that the 13 hairs in the stocking came from three different people, none of them Tribble, and from a dog. His incarceration wrecked Tribble's life: The judge in this year's decision found that it contributed to severe depression, heroin addiction, and HIV and hepatitis infections, according to The Washington Post. His story is just one of many. Forensic hair analysts have systematically overstated their evidence for decades, the Department of Justice has found, landing...
Related Articles
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Meagan Parrish, PharmaVoice | 10.10.2025
When CEO Ben Lamm steps into the spotlight, it’s usually to talk about his efforts bringing extinct animals back to life. Once a far-flung idea, Lamm and the company he heads, Colossal Biosciences, have proven they can pull it off...
By Jessica Mouzo, El País | 10.03.2025
DNA is the molecule of life: this double-helix structure, present in every cell in the body and organized into fragments called genes, stores the instructions for making organisms function. It is a highly precise biological machine, but sometimes it breaks...
By Katherine Bourzac, Nature | 09.25.2025
A judge in New York rejected a request on 23 September to disqualify the use of cutting-edge DNA sequencing as evidence in a case against an alleged serial killer. The ruling paves the way for a type of DNA analysis...