How DNA evidence creates victims of chance
By Linda Geddes,
The New Scientist
| 08. 18. 2010
CHARLES RICHARD SMITH has learned the hard way that you can prove almost anything with statistics. In 2009 a disputed statistic provided by a DNA analyst landed him with a 25-year jail sentence.
Smith was convicted of a sexual assault on Mary Jackson (not her real name) in Sacramento, California, which took place in January 2006. Jackson was sitting in a parking lot when a stranger jumped into her truck and made her drive to a remote location before forcing her to perform oral sex on him. When police arrested Smith and took a swab of cells from his penis, they found a second person's DNA mixed with his own.
The DNA analyst who testified in Smith's trial said the chances of the DNA coming from someone other than Jackson were 1 in 95,000. But both the prosecution and the analyst's supervisor said the odds were more like 1 in 47. A later review of the evidence suggested that the chances of the second person's DNA coming from someone other than Jackson were closer to 1 in 13, while a... see more
Related Articles
By Aminah Elster, The Daily Californian | 04.02.2021
Between 1909 and 1979, California forcibly sterilized over 20,000 people of color, people with disabilities and imprisoned people. Based on white supremacist eugenics laws and ableist conceptions of who was “unfit to reproduce,” people with disabilities and women of color...
By Caitlin Ashworth, The Thaiger | 02.07.2021
An alleged illegal transnational surrogacy ring, posed as a cleaning company, was busted by Thailand’s cybercrime police after surrogate mothers were unable to deliver the children to buyers overseas due to travel restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic, investigators say.
Officers...
By Carl Zimmer, The New York Times | 02.11.2021
In recent years, scientists have figured out how to grow blobs of hundreds of thousands of live human neurons that look — and act — something like a brain.
These so-called brain organoids have been used to study how brains...
By Oliver C. Huang, Ms. | 02.10.2021