Managing Evidence: Forensics Under Fire Again
Since the February release of the National Academy of Sciences report on the state of forensic science, it is well known that forensic labs need better funding, should be accredited, and scientists should be certified. The following article is from NPR News and is a good example of the NAS report. Your comments matter! Thanks to Dave Khey for sending the article.
In Milwaukee, police say a mislabeled DNA sample made it possible for a suspected serial killer to avoid arrest for more than a decade.
The man — now charged with seven murders — might have been arrested before some of the murders occurred if state officials hadn’t lost his DNA sample.
The error revealed a gaping hole in Wisconsin’s DNA data bank and is spurring state officials to gather and verify thousands of DNA samples they thought were already in the system. In all, as many as 12,000 samples may be missing. In addition, other states are searching for similar flaws in their system for collecting and storing DNA.
A DNA sample from a crime scene can be a double-edged sword. If it’s matched correctly to a murderer, justice can be done. But if it’s lost or mislabeled, an innocent man may end up in prison.
In 2000, when Wisconsin began collecting DNA samples from all convicted felons, Walter Ellis was serving time for beating his girlfriend with a hammer. He managed to avoid having his sample taken by bribing another inmate to have his mouth swabbed instead and claim to be Ellis.
By the time the fraud was discovered, Ellis had left prison and the state did not have his DNA on file. Milwaukee prosecutors now say Ellis went on to murder at least seven women over the next decade.
Years Of Error
Wisconsin Department of Corrections Secretary Rick Raemisch says the deadly error resulted from a breakdown in communications between the two agencies responsible for handling DNA samples.
“Within a very short period it was discovered that a sample was given under another individual’s name,” said Raemisch. “Unfortunately that information was not given back to us by the Department of Justice — so it basically sat there, frankly, for years.”
This September, Milwaukee police linked an unknown DNA sample to nine different murders in the same Milwaukee neighborhood over the past 20 years. Ellis’ name kept coming up in the investigations, so his DNA sample was taken.
It matched DNA found on the bodies of nine women.
Ellis is now charged in seven of the murders. Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle says the fatal glitch was the result of too few people trying to gather too much DNA.
“There were large sweeps of the prison system. In one month they took 19,000 samples,” said Ellis. “DNA [examiners] don’t just go and take a little sample and throw it in a machine and have a number — it’s a process that I think back in the early 2000s took several months to do.”
Link to the full NPR article
For link to previous posts about Forensics Under Fire click here and here
- Performance verification of the maxwell 16 instrument and dna iq reference sample kit for automated dna extraction of known reference samples
- Stable isotope analysis of human hair and nail samples: the effects of storage on samples
- Application of environmental magnetism on crime detection in a highway traffic accident from Yangzhou to Guazhou, Jiangsu Province, China.
- Application of environmental magnetism on crime detection in a highway traffic accident from Yangzhou to Guazhou, Jiangsu Province, China
- Age estimation by pulp/tooth area ratio in canines: Study of a Portuguese sample to test Cameriere’s method
