Law Commons^™

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 …