DNA matching from a decades old mixed tissue slide is not an exact process and many factors from handling to a desire to close the case can lead to a wrong conclusion.
The most that can be said is that the detectives are satisfied enough to stop digging, not that the case is solved. Let's remember that a posthumous process allows for zero defense and criminal justice depends on defense.
And besides all of that, it strikes me as wildly unethical to burden the family with this information just to satisfy detective curiosity and desire for closure. I see zero benefit to going through the final steps after they determined that their suspect had already died. The corpse's ashes can't go to prison. The family just lives with this now. That's a negative outcome.
If the victim has living friends & family, it provides closure. Additionally, solving cases, however old, boosts public confidence that crimes will not go unpunished, which in turn acts as a deterrent for future crime.
But in this particular case, the family of the suspect was really the only one to get “punishment”, not the actual suspect (which now had no way of defense as others have pointed out).
EDIT: I would have thought this was a well-known issue by now, but for those who are disagreeing, "punishments do not deter crime" is also the opinion of the National Institute of Justice: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterr...
B. It's true sperm doesn't equal murder. But in this case the victim was asexually assaulted and then murdered. The likelihood of both crimes committed by the same person is way higher than two different persons.
The fall guy they pulled in for a raped and murdered jogger in NYC was willing to confess and then was like "woah woah I didn't do the rape where did that charge come from"
There could just as easily be a Brock Turner in the woods seeing an incapacitated girl and fiddling around, except this time the victim would already be or about to be dead.
Too many examples for me to make that conclusion. So, my reasonable doubt would count if I was on the jury. Convicting/Acquitting someone is one thing, we all pat ourselves on the back, but the thing that really bothers me is when the dangerous person is still out there. Who cares about debating the doubt when there is a greater likelihood of ongoing danger in the community but now the investigation isn't even happening. Its debating someone's freedom versus debating the safety of the community which is a larger group of people, the greater doubt is actually about whether the community is now safe instead of whether I like this person's alibi.
I'm unsure how this potentially positive match would enter databases though, and find it very unlikely that any potentially "solved" case would have DNA tested against such a database.
Publishing the assumed culprit's name and details seems fairly egregious though.
Up until this point they had no idea, they now have to live with that knowledge.
The only people being punished now are the these family members who did nothing wrong.
Please, for the sake of your own mental health, try to separate "closure" from "legal justice".
For example, the Golden State Killer had a whole set of characteristics that should have narrowed it down to him.
I suspect this case is similar.
> although new state legislation restricting forensic genealogy could complicate matters
as if affording important privacy protections is a "complication" that interferes with their goal of a safer world. Much of the article reads like a thinly veiled lobbying piece for why police should be less restricted in how they use this technique.
There is a lot of misunderstandings in this thread so far. For one, on the idea that "sperm does not automatically equal murder," is of course logically true. DNA evidence doesn't equate that point, but it does suggest that there is a putative perpetrator who could be responsible for the crime. It's not up to forensic scientists to decide who committed what crimes. We can tell that the person was "there." It's up to the detectives to argue/figure out, and ultimately the judicial system to decide the outcome/verdict.
She was raped and killed, who's DNA was on the vaginal swab? Most likely the perpetrator.
Secondly, to suggest that modern DNA forensic science is questionable is farce. There have been major issues with interpretation in the past with non-accredited crime labs/analysts/methods/persons making bogus conclusions, but these days, and for the last 15+ years, has just plain not happened. If there were unqualified interpretations they would be thrown out of the courthouse in a nanosecond.
The absoluteness of DNA mixture interpretations is getting better and better. Google "probabilistic genotyping." A human can reasonably look at data and discern multiple DNA profiles up to a few people when it comes to certain limited mixtures. Prob. Gen. software can deconvolute up to about 10 distinct people in a DNA mixture. It's basically brute force computing. I bring this up because some of the examples other's posted here happened when such tech didn't exist and bogus interpretations were going on.
As for the ethics point. I have met with many victims personally. Not one has ever not returned genuine overly emotional gratefulness of our efforts. Many brave victims become spokespeople and support for other victims. They tour my lab all the time in wonder. I can't tell you how many cases we've solved. DNA evidence, investigations, then a line up, then "that's the one!" happen all the time. These would have never happened without DNA evidence.
That is, the science is sound but I feel private citizens (whether accused or accusing) need second and third independent verifying just to be sure.
https://strbase.nist.gov/pub_pres/Coble-ABA2014-MIX13.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/the-dangers-of-dn...
"Researchers [in 2013] from the National Institute of Standards and Technology gave the same DNA mixture to about 105 American crime laboratories and three Canadian labs and asked them to compare it with DNA from three suspects from a mock bank robbery. ... 74 labs wrongly said the sample included DNA evidence from the third suspect, an “innocent person” who should have been cleared of the hypothetical felony."
That 2013 NIST report was not published until 5 years later in 2018.
How "modern" do we need to get, exactly?
Is less than a week ago modern? https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2021/06/nist-publishes...
"KEY TAKEAWAY #4.3: Currently, there is not enough publicly available data to enable an external and independent assessment of the degree of reliability of DNA mixture interpretation practices, including the use of probabilistic genotyping software (PGS) systems."
> If there were unqualified interpretations they would be thrown out of the courthouse in a nanosecond.
All you have to do is search for "DNA lab mishandled" or "forensic lab mishandled" to see that what you're saying is extremely wrong and naïve. And besides this is a case where there's no courthouse, no defense, no chance to determine whether the interpretation is an error.
> There have been major issues with interpretation in the past with non-accredited crime labs/analysts/methods/persons making bogus conclusions, but these days, and for the last 15+ years, has just plain not happened.
Again see the above references to evidence mishandling and _extremely_ recent NIST reports.
You seem to suffer from the misapprehension that statistical algorithms are magic and that DNA analysis happens in a computational vacuum and that there isn't an extremely error-prone physical process involved in collecting, preparing, maintaining, and analyzing specimens and that we don't have a very long and continuing history of falsifying evidence, mishandling specimens, biased interpretation, erroneous conclusions presented as fact, and covering up procedural errors.
> She was raped and killed, who's DNA was on the vaginal swab? Most likely the perpetrator.
First, you mean whose DNA was _allegedly_ on a vaginal swab. You have no reason to believe that a specimen collected in _1956_ has been handled and preserved correctly this entire time. Second, "I think it's most likely so we don't need to worry about defense" is not how criminal justice works.
> I have met with many victims personally.
I notice that you did not say you met with the family of the accused, which is the family I was talking about. I thought that would be clear in context, but maybe not. Anyway it should be clear now.
"I have met with many victims personally" sounds a lot like you work mostly with prosecutors. Unfortunately that role often goes hand in hand with blatant disregard for exceedingly rampant and flagrant due process failures.
> We can tell that the person was "there."
You can't even reliably tell that a person's DNA is present in a mixture at the time of analysis let alone whether a person was in a particular place at a particular time 65 years ago. Believing that you can is why innocent people keep going to prison. The list of utterly bunk forensic techniques that get presented as fact because prosecution relies on juror ignorance and compliance is a mile long. Can we just stop doing that, please?
It seems likely, but calling the case 'solved' just based on that is a bit of a stretch to me. Maybe the article is leaving out some important details.
We don't! We just assume!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suspected_perpetrators...
I think the police then track down each of these individuals and establish a motive or an alibi.
But DNA alone shouldn’t convict someone.
It's also PR against some of restrictions on genealogy data some governments are passing.
I think this needs to be treated as property of the individual as well, or even of an individual's estate, and there must be consent granted for each use and compensation for it. Consent can be revokable and a record of the consent's state should be attached to every piece of data.
It leaves the avenue open for this same kind of investigation to occur.
https://www.propublica.org/article/thousands-of-criminal-cas...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reaso...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/the-dangers-of-dn...
A quote from The NY Times article:
“The first two suspects’ DNA was part of the mixture, and most labs correctly matched their DNA to the evidence. However, 74 labs wrongly said the sample included DNA evidence from the third suspect, an “innocent person” who should have been cleared of the hypothetical felony.”
There were 108 labs tested. 74 of 108 fingered an innocent person.
As long as DNA forensics processes are open source, we should be good, because the questionable component is the implementation, not the base science.
But, closed source DNA forensics is dangerous, I think.
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...
- https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/reversing-legacy-jun...
- http://www.bostonreview.net/books-ideas/nathan-robinson-fore...
