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Full-Text Articles in Law

Identification, Individualization, Uniqueness, David H. Kaye Jan 2009

Identification, Individualization, Uniqueness, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Criminalists and many forensic scientists concerned with the identification of trace evidence have distinguished between identification and individualization, but they have not distinguished as precisely between individualization and uniqueness. This paper clarifies these terms and discusses the relationships among identification, individualization, and uniqueness in forensic-science evidence.


Rounding Up The Usual Suspects: A Logical And Legal Analysis Of Dna Trawling Cases, David H. Kaye Jan 2009

Rounding Up The Usual Suspects: A Logical And Legal Analysis Of Dna Trawling Cases, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Courts are beginning to confront a problem that has divided the scientific community - whether identifying a defendant by fishing through a database of DNA types to find a match to a crime-scene sample reduces the significance of a match. For years, the problem seemed academic. Now that the U.S. has more than five million DNA profiles from convicted offenders and suspects in a national, computer-searchable database, the question has assumed more urgency. Increasingly, individuals are being charged with crimes as a result of a match between their recorded profile and the DNA from a victim or scene of a …


'False But Highly Persuasive:' How Wrong Were The Probability Estimates In Mcdaniel V. Brown?, David H. Kaye Jan 2009

'False But Highly Persuasive:' How Wrong Were The Probability Estimates In Mcdaniel V. Brown?, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

In McDaniel v. Brown, the Supreme Court will review the use of DNA evidence in a 1994 trial for sexual assault and attempted murder. The Court granted certiorari to consider two procedural issues - the standard of federal postconviction review of a state jury verdict for sufficiency of the evidence, and the district court's decision to allow the prisoner to supplement the record of trials, appeals, and state postconviction proceedings with a geneticist's letter twelve years after the trial.

This essay clarifies the nature and extent of the errors in the presentation of the DNA evidence in Brown. It questions …


Trawling Dna Databases For Partial Matches: What Is The Fbi Afraid Of?, David H. Kaye Jan 2009

Trawling Dna Databases For Partial Matches: What Is The Fbi Afraid Of?, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

DNA evidence is often presented as the “gold standard” for forensic science. But this was not always the case. For years, eminent scientists complained that the estimates of the tiny frequencies of DNA types were unfounded. It took scores of research papers, dozens of judicial opinions, and two committees of the National Academy of Sciences to resolve the dispute by the mid-1990s. Since 2000, however, reports have surfaced of shocking numbers of “partial matches” among samples within large DNA databases, and some scientists have complained that the infinitesimal figures used in court to estimate the probability of a random match …


Diminishing Probable Cause And Minimalist Searches, Kit Kinports Jan 2009

Diminishing Probable Cause And Minimalist Searches, Kit Kinports

Journal Articles

This paper comments on recent Supreme Court opinions that have used phrases such as "reasonable belief" and "reason to believe" when analyzing intrusions that generally require proof of probable cause. Historically, the Court used these terms as shorthand references for both probable cause and reasonable suspicion. While this lack of precision was unobjectionable when the concepts were interchangeable, that has not been true since Terry v. Ohio created a distinction between the two standards. When the Justices then resurrect these terms without situating them in the dichotomy between probable cause and reasonable suspicion, it is not clear whether they are …