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...
Related Articles
By Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi, MIT Technology Review | 03.25.2025
Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation...
By Anna Louie Sussman, The New York Times | 03.25.2025
On June 24, 2022, the same day the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I received a call from the fertility clinic where I’d been undergoing in vitro fertilization, informing me that seven of...
By Dalton Conley, The New York Times | 03.13.2025
Since Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences.
Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter...
By Staff, The Medicine Maker | 03.21.2025
"The Promise and Peril of CRISPR" cover by Johns Hopkins University Press
As a paediatrician taking care of children with sickle cell disease, Neal Baer, a Harvard Medical School graduate, was in awe of the power of CRISPR technologies. Later...
