More on Crime Scene DNA

From an editorial in Nature:

Despite how it is often portrayed, in the media and in courts, the forensic science of DNA is far from infallible. Particularly concerning is that police and prosecutors now frequently talk of 'touch DNA' — genetic profiles of suspects and offenders that have been generated in a laboratory from just a handful of skin cells left behind in a fingerprint.

Research done by me and others at the University of Indianapolis in Indiana has highlighted how unreliable this kind of evidence can be. We have found that it is relatively straightforward for an innocent person's DNA to be inadvertently transferred to surfaces that he or she has never come into contact with. This could place people at crime scenes that they had never visited or link them to weapons they had never handled.. . . .

Given the power of modern forensic techniques to pull a DNA profile from a smudge of cells, secondary DNA transfer is no longer a purely theoretical risk. In California in 2013, a man called Lukis Anderson was arrested, held for four months and charged with murder after his DNA was found under the fingernails of a homicide victim.

Anderson had never met the victim and was severely intoxicated and in hospital when the man was killed. The same paramedics who took Anderson to hospital responded to the murder. Most likely, the paramedics were covered in Anderson's DNA, which they then inadvertently transferred. The charges were dropped.

The combination of dubious forensic science and over-zealous prosecutors is a danger we all ought to worry about.