Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Evidence
"False But Highly Persuasive": How Wrong Were The Probability Estimates In Mcdaniel V. Brown?, David H. Kaye
"False But Highly Persuasive": How Wrong Were The Probability Estimates In Mcdaniel V. Brown?, David H. Kaye
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
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. The letter from Laurence Mueller, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, identified two obvious mistakes in the state's expert testimony. …
Trawling Dna Databases For Partial Matches: What Is The Fbi Afraid Of?, David H. Kaye
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 …