A quick update to the disgusting DNA report of last March (The Whooper Stopper). Following up on a report from KOAT-TV in Albuquerque, the Associated Press reported that a man helped himself to $250,000 worth of jewelry from a home while the owners were on vacation and neglected to flush whatever he left behind in the toilet. Is there is a lesson to criminalists here: swab toilet seats and handles to catch more considerate burglars as well? Probably not. Cf. Peter Gill, Misleading DNA Evidence: Reasons for Miscarriages of Justice (2014) (discussing the interpretation of touch DNA).
Far more offensive is a case reported by the same TV station in 2011. It seems that a 31-year-old Sunflower Market employee offered a woman what he said was a free yogurt sample. Incredibly, it was his semen. After pleading guilty, he was sentenced to a two-year prison term.
Showing posts with label unusual. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unusual. Show all posts
Thursday, 30 October 2014
Saturday, 15 March 2014
MDNA
According to Wikipedia, "MDNA may refer to
I have heard that the Secret Service collects the plates, silverware, and drinking glasses or cups the President uses when he is on tour.1/ How about the rest of us? Do we have a reasonable expectation that police will not collect our shed DNA? No court has held that the investigative technique is a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Note
-Mitochondrial DNA (mDNA or mtDNA), the DNA located in organelles called mitochondriaAdditional research reveals an unexpected relationship between the first and third expansions of the acronym. If Madonna has anything to say about it, her fans seeking unusual souvenirs will have neither mDNA nor any other DNA from the aging pop star on the MDNA tour. She has a "sterilization team" to extirpate any DNA in her dressing room after shows. In fact, the team is concerned with much more than DNA. They remodel the dressing room to include "fake ceilings and fake walls, so they can ensure that no one has hidden a camera somewhere." [1] No "genetic exceptionalism" here.
-MDNA (album), a 2012 album by Madonna
-MDNA Tour, 2012 concert tour by Madonna."
I have heard that the Secret Service collects the plates, silverware, and drinking glasses or cups the President uses when he is on tour.1/ How about the rest of us? Do we have a reasonable expectation that police will not collect our shed DNA? No court has held that the investigative technique is a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Note
- The newsletter, DNA: Focus, available from the ACLU of Vermont at http://www.acluvt.org/pubs/focus_dna.pdf, attributes this claim "to the British newspaper, The Sunday Mirror," but a quick web search failed to confirm that the Sunday Mirror or any other publication has made such a statement.
- Bang Showbiz, Madonna Has DNA Cleaning Team for Tour, Winnipeg Free Press, June 22, 2012
- A "Ridiculous" Fourth Amendment Argument in the Grim Sleeper Case?, Forensic Science, Statistics, and the Law Blog, Mar. 15, 2014
- Michael Y. Park, The Murky Legal World of the DNA You Leave Behind at Restaurants, Bon Appetit, Jan. 18, 2015
Saturday, 27 July 2013
Contamination or Sasquatch in Forensic Laboratories -- Which Is it?
DNA Diagnostics, Inc., is “a laboratory that provides multi-species testing including human as well as animal DNA testing for individuals, law enforcement, breed associations, and state regulatory agencies.”The lab
These attributes are what one would want in a forensic laboratory, and the work of this laboratory is nothing short of amazing. Last November, it issued a press release that “calls on public officials and law enforcement to immediately recognize the Sasquatch as an indigenous people.”
The Sasquatch? As in Bigfoot?
Absolutely. A “team of experts in genetics, forensics, imaging and pathology, led by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum ... sequenced 3 complete Sasquatch nuclear genomes and determined the species is a human hybrid” living in North America. The team discovered that “the legendary Sasquatch is a human relative that arose approximately 15,000 years ago as a hybrid cross of modern Homo sapiens with an unknown primate species.” Mitochondrial and “next generation sequencing [of] 3 whole nuclear genomes ... indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.”
This might seem amusing, but the study director’s responses to other scientists who interpret the results, not as proof of a hybrid species, but as an indication of contaminated samples, sound eerily like what one hears in court. John Timmer, a science writer and molecular biologist, describes what he found when he examined the “genomes” and conferred with her:
References
- “participates in both human and animal proficiency testing”
- has staff who are “eminently qualified to provide superior DNA testing services” and of “unquestionable quality,” and
- performs “testing ... of the highest quality” (including “high volume genetic testing”) with “state of the art instrumentation and modern facilities .. on the cutting edge of technology in DNA testing.
These attributes are what one would want in a forensic laboratory, and the work of this laboratory is nothing short of amazing. Last November, it issued a press release that “calls on public officials and law enforcement to immediately recognize the Sasquatch as an indigenous people.”
The Sasquatch? As in Bigfoot?
Absolutely. A “team of experts in genetics, forensics, imaging and pathology, led by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum ... sequenced 3 complete Sasquatch nuclear genomes and determined the species is a human hybrid” living in North America. The team discovered that “the legendary Sasquatch is a human relative that arose approximately 15,000 years ago as a hybrid cross of modern Homo sapiens with an unknown primate species.” Mitochondrial and “next generation sequencing [of] 3 whole nuclear genomes ... indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.”
This might seem amusing, but the study director’s responses to other scientists who interpret the results, not as proof of a hybrid species, but as an indication of contaminated samples, sound eerily like what one hears in court. John Timmer, a science writer and molecular biologist, describes what he found when he examined the “genomes” and conferred with her:
In cases where the hair comes attached to its follicle, it's possible to extract DNA from its cells. And that is exactly what the bigfoot team did, using a standard forensic procedure that was meant to remove any other DNA that the hair had picked up in the interim. If everything worked as expected, the only DNA present should be from whatever organism the fur originated from.Timmer’s article on how science went wrong is well worth reading — and chilling if you think about how DNA Diagnostics’ director -- an eminently qualified expert witness -- might testify about contamination in a more mundane case.
And, in Ketchum's view, that's exactly what happened. They worked according to procedure, isolating DNA from the hair follicles and taking precautions to rule out contamination by DNA from anyone that was involved in the work. Because of this, Ketchum is confident that any DNA that came from the samples once belonged to whatever creature deposited the fur in the woods—no matter how confusing the results it produced were. "The mito [mitochondrial DNA results] should have done it," she argued. "It's non-human hair—it's clearly non-human hair—it was washed and prepared forensically, and it gave a human mitochondrial DNA result. That just doesn't happen."
Ketchum was completely adamant that contamination wasn't a possibility. "We had two different forensics labs extract these samples, and they all turned out non-contaminated, because forensics scientists are experts in contamination. We see it regularly, we know how to deal with mixtures, whether it's a mixture or a contaminated sample, and we certainly know how to find it. And these samples were clean."
References
- John Timmer, How the Attempt to Sequence “Bigfoot’s Genome” Went Badly off Track, Ars Technica, July 7, 2013, http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/an-honest-attempt-to-understand-the-bigfoot-genome-and-the-woman-who-created-it/
- History of DNA Diagnostics, Inc., http://dnadiagnostics.com/about.html
- Consulting / Expert Witness, http://dnadiagnostics.com/consulting.html
- Press release, Nov. 24, 2012, http://dnadiagnostics.com/press.html
Sunday, 23 June 2013
Mathematics on Appeal: Hamilton’s Equations in Lapsley v. Xtek, Inc.
Better off Ted is a satiric TV series about wacky scientists and managers at the amoral high-tech company, Veridian Dynamics. In Lapsley v. Xtek, Inc., 689 F.3d 802, 812 (7th Cir. 2012), Meridian Engineering supplied the scientific breakthrough -- about dynamics -- for plaintiff. But the resemblance ends with the company names. There is nothing funny about this case.
In Xtek, a machine at a steel rolling mill accidentally ejected industrial grease with such force that it shot through a worker’s body, permanently disabling him. As the court of appeals explained:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit squashed this argument. The opinion could have been rather mundane. It need only have stated that (1) Dr. Hutter used equations that were not in dispute; (2) defendant raised no question about the expert’s assumptions; and (3) supplementary physical testing was not feasible.
In addition to making these points, however, the court took the opportunity to lecture counsel about science. The lecture began with the advice that
This leaves the lawyers. “For the curious” the court supplied a link to a digitalized version of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophise Naturalis Principia Mathematica. This classic is not written in Sanksrit, but the original Latin is challenging enough. Consequently, the court reproduced and described the equations for force, kinetic energy, and pressure. After a nod to quantum mechanics (but not relativity), it announced that “Newtonian physics still provides a reliable and workable description for the mechanical systems of a steel mill.” Seeing no problem with the expert’s use of these “basic equations of classical mechanics” and invoking Galileo and Descartes in addition to Newton and two of the Bernouillis (Daniel and Johann, whose animosity was such that they would not have appreciated being mentioned in the same sentence), the court concluded that “physical tests of [the] theories with regard to causation (the effect of the spring releasing) and alternate design (the reduction in pressure from the grease grooves)” were not essential.
Despite its unusual historical and mathematical sweep, Xtek has a narrow holding. It does not approve of all mathematical modeling of complex phenomena in lieu of physical tests. To be sure, the opinion asserts that “[a] mathematical or computer model is a perfectly acceptable form of test,” and “that simulation is one of the most common of scientific and engineering tools.” Moreover, it contains the memorable line,“We do not require experts to drop a proverbial apple each time they wish to use Newton's gravitational constant in an equation.” But that analogy only goes so far. The reason physicists need not remeasure G every time they wish to use the inverse-square law of gravitational force is that the value already is known from many experiments. In Xtek, the question is the value of an unknown quantity.
The holding is simply that when the equations (including the constants in them) are familiar and their applicability is unchallenged, an expert can use them to make relevant computations. Additional physical testing may be required under Daubert in some cases, but not when it would be too expensive or dangerous. “Around the world, computers simulate nuclear explosions, quantum mechanical interactions, atmospheric weather patterns, and innumerable other systems that are difficult or impossible to observe directly” (emphasis added). Thus, Dr. Hutter did not have “to try to recreate the binding up of a ten thousand pound spring to produce a potentially deadly jet of industrial grease ... to testify to the results of his mathematical simulations.”
It is not often that one encounters equations in a judicial opinion. Years ago, in Branion v. Gramly, 855 F.2d 1256 (7th Cir. 1988), Judge Frank Easterbrook tossed out a partial differential equation and a few calculations of his own to chastise a habeas corpus petitioner’s lawyers for “fooling with algebra” in their brief. I, 1991, I described that effort as needlessly opaque but basically correct.
In this case, the author of the opinion, Judge David Hamilton, stuck to simpler equations. And that takes me to another similarity in names. Judge Hamilton's equations also are simpler than the elegant formulation of dynamics known to physicists as Hamilton’s equations (invented by William Rowan Hamilton, 1805-1865).
References
In Xtek, a machine at a steel rolling mill accidentally ejected industrial grease with such force that it shot through a worker’s body, permanently disabling him. As the court of appeals explained:
At trial the jury found that the accident was caused by a design defect in a heavy industrial product designed and manufactured by defendant Xtek, and sold and installed in the mill. That equipment contained an internal spring that could exert over ten thousand pounds of force. The jury accepted the theory of plaintiffs' expert witness, Dr. Gary Hutter, that the spring was the culprit mechanism behind the accident and that an alternative design of a thrust plate in the equipment would have prevented the disabling accident. Xtek has appealed, challenging the district court's denial of its Daubert motion that sought to bar Dr. Hutter from offering his expert opinions, which were essential to the plaintiffs' case.Xtek’s Daubert challenge, as described in the opinion, was that Dr. Hutter, an engineer who founded the consulting firm, was performing “the simulation of science, not science,” when he used a mathematical model to infer the cause of the release and to conclude that an alternative design would have prevented it. He did no empirical testing to verify his theories, and to Xtek’s lawyers, the notes attached to Dr. Hutter’s report were the “equivalent of Sanskrit.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit squashed this argument. The opinion could have been rather mundane. It need only have stated that (1) Dr. Hutter used equations that were not in dispute; (2) defendant raised no question about the expert’s assumptions; and (3) supplementary physical testing was not feasible.
In addition to making these points, however, the court took the opportunity to lecture counsel about science. The lecture began with the advice that
Lawyers and judges who were not trained in science can benefit from the famous “Two Cultures” lecture given in 1959 by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow, in which he described the cultural gap between persons schooled in the sciences and those schooled in the humanities:Nowadays, the opinion admonished, “[j]udges and lawyers do not have the luxury of functional illiteracy in either of these two cultures.” The trial judge was not guilty of such illiteracy. There was “no indication, either from the district court's Daubert ruling or its later discussions of the expert evidence during trial, of any deficiency in the court's preparation or in its understanding of the proposed evidence.”A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
This leaves the lawyers. “For the curious” the court supplied a link to a digitalized version of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophise Naturalis Principia Mathematica. This classic is not written in Sanksrit, but the original Latin is challenging enough. Consequently, the court reproduced and described the equations for force, kinetic energy, and pressure. After a nod to quantum mechanics (but not relativity), it announced that “Newtonian physics still provides a reliable and workable description for the mechanical systems of a steel mill.” Seeing no problem with the expert’s use of these “basic equations of classical mechanics” and invoking Galileo and Descartes in addition to Newton and two of the Bernouillis (Daniel and Johann, whose animosity was such that they would not have appreciated being mentioned in the same sentence), the court concluded that “physical tests of [the] theories with regard to causation (the effect of the spring releasing) and alternate design (the reduction in pressure from the grease grooves)” were not essential.
Despite its unusual historical and mathematical sweep, Xtek has a narrow holding. It does not approve of all mathematical modeling of complex phenomena in lieu of physical tests. To be sure, the opinion asserts that “[a] mathematical or computer model is a perfectly acceptable form of test,” and “that simulation is one of the most common of scientific and engineering tools.” Moreover, it contains the memorable line,“We do not require experts to drop a proverbial apple each time they wish to use Newton's gravitational constant in an equation.” But that analogy only goes so far. The reason physicists need not remeasure G every time they wish to use the inverse-square law of gravitational force is that the value already is known from many experiments. In Xtek, the question is the value of an unknown quantity.
The holding is simply that when the equations (including the constants in them) are familiar and their applicability is unchallenged, an expert can use them to make relevant computations. Additional physical testing may be required under Daubert in some cases, but not when it would be too expensive or dangerous. “Around the world, computers simulate nuclear explosions, quantum mechanical interactions, atmospheric weather patterns, and innumerable other systems that are difficult or impossible to observe directly” (emphasis added). Thus, Dr. Hutter did not have “to try to recreate the binding up of a ten thousand pound spring to produce a potentially deadly jet of industrial grease ... to testify to the results of his mathematical simulations.”
It is not often that one encounters equations in a judicial opinion. Years ago, in Branion v. Gramly, 855 F.2d 1256 (7th Cir. 1988), Judge Frank Easterbrook tossed out a partial differential equation and a few calculations of his own to chastise a habeas corpus petitioner’s lawyers for “fooling with algebra” in their brief. I, 1991, I described that effort as needlessly opaque but basically correct.
In this case, the author of the opinion, Judge David Hamilton, stuck to simpler equations. And that takes me to another similarity in names. Judge Hamilton's equations also are simpler than the elegant formulation of dynamics known to physicists as Hamilton’s equations (invented by William Rowan Hamilton, 1805-1865).
References
- David H. Kaye, David E. Bernstein Jennifer L. Mnookin, The New Wigmore: A Treatise on Evidence: Expert Evidence, New York: Aspen Pub. Co., 2d ed., 2011(updated annually)
- David H. Kaye, Statistics for Lawyers and Law for Statistics, Michigan Law Review, Vol. 89, No. 6, May 1991, pp. 1520-1544 (review essay discussing Branion v. Gramly)
Sunday, 24 March 2013
Disgusting DNA
The Whooper Stopper
When my son worked at a pizza restaurant a long time ago, he told me that some of the kids preparing the food would spit into into their handiwork. I tried not to think about it, but the practice, at a Burger King in Vancouver, Washington, has prompted a major decision on the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The employee with the loose lips probably did not expect the Whopper with cheese to go directly to the police, but Clark County Deputy Sheriff Edward Bylsma evidently had a well honed sense for the suspicious. After receiving his burger from a drivethrough window, he stopped in a parking lot, removed the top bun, and uncovered a “slimy, clear and white phlegm glob” on the meat.
According to the Huffington Post, "Deputy Bylsma felt ill all day; he claims that he even vomited on account of his emotional distress. He sent the burger away for DNA testing to try and trace the spit back to an individual person. When the results linked the loogie to Burger King employee Gary Herb, Bylsma moved to sue Burger King. He said that he became unable to eat food from restaurants and lived in fear of contracting a foodborne illness."(How the deputy acquired a reference sample from Mr. Herb is not apparent from news accounts.)
A federal judge dismissed the 2009 case against Burger King for negligence, product liability and vicarious liability because the Washington Product Liability Act [WPLA] does not provide for damages for emotional distress in the absence of physical injury. Or so it thought. The Ninth Circuit asked the Washington Supreme Court to rule on the scope of its tort law, and last month, the state court wrote that "[t]he courts of this state recognize damages for ... emotional distress, and thus, such damages, if proved, are recoverable under the WPLA." It added that "[t]he WPLA permits relief for emotional distress damages, in the absence of physical injury, caused to the direct purchaser by being served and touching, but not consuming, a contaminated food product, if the emotional distress is a reasonable response and manifest by objective symptomatology."
.
Of course, whether the deputy will recover at trial (if it comes to that) remains to be seen. Will Burger King argue that the deputy, whose job may require him to view grisly scenes of human violence and carnage, is overstating his symptoms?
Moving Violations
In England, the national DNA database has been employed to curb spitting on transit workers. As part of Operation Gobstopper, bus drivers in northwest London received 2,500 evidence collection kits. Tube staff in central London and train wardens in Scotland were similarly equipped, the BBC reported in 2004.
The kits helped prosecute about 100 people on the Tube in 2007. Reportedly, 7 out of 10 samples yielded a match to DNA profiles in the national database of criminal offenders and arrestees.
Update of Mar. 25, 2013: The Whopper case, Bylsma v. Burger King Corp., 293 P.3d 1168 (Wash. 2013), did not involve a database search. Only two employees, an Herb and a McDonald, had been working in the restaurant.When police visited the restaurant that night and asked for saliva samples, the two refused. The state crime laboratory determined that the saliva on the burger was of human origin. The police returned with search warrants, and the laboratory named Herb as the source of the spit. Herb pleaded guilty to felony assault (although the spit was not initially visible and only touched Bylsma because he placed his finger in it to test its consistency) and was sentenced to 90 days in jail. (Thanks to Jeremy Gans, whose comment provided a link to the civil complaint setting forth these facts).
When my son worked at a pizza restaurant a long time ago, he told me that some of the kids preparing the food would spit into into their handiwork. I tried not to think about it, but the practice, at a Burger King in Vancouver, Washington, has prompted a major decision on the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The employee with the loose lips probably did not expect the Whopper with cheese to go directly to the police, but Clark County Deputy Sheriff Edward Bylsma evidently had a well honed sense for the suspicious. After receiving his burger from a drivethrough window, he stopped in a parking lot, removed the top bun, and uncovered a “slimy, clear and white phlegm glob” on the meat.
According to the Huffington Post, "Deputy Bylsma felt ill all day; he claims that he even vomited on account of his emotional distress. He sent the burger away for DNA testing to try and trace the spit back to an individual person. When the results linked the loogie to Burger King employee Gary Herb, Bylsma moved to sue Burger King. He said that he became unable to eat food from restaurants and lived in fear of contracting a foodborne illness."(How the deputy acquired a reference sample from Mr. Herb is not apparent from news accounts.)
A federal judge dismissed the 2009 case against Burger King for negligence, product liability and vicarious liability because the Washington Product Liability Act [WPLA] does not provide for damages for emotional distress in the absence of physical injury. Or so it thought. The Ninth Circuit asked the Washington Supreme Court to rule on the scope of its tort law, and last month, the state court wrote that "[t]he courts of this state recognize damages for ... emotional distress, and thus, such damages, if proved, are recoverable under the WPLA." It added that "[t]he WPLA permits relief for emotional distress damages, in the absence of physical injury, caused to the direct purchaser by being served and touching, but not consuming, a contaminated food product, if the emotional distress is a reasonable response and manifest by objective symptomatology."
.
Of course, whether the deputy will recover at trial (if it comes to that) remains to be seen. Will Burger King argue that the deputy, whose job may require him to view grisly scenes of human violence and carnage, is overstating his symptoms?
Moving Violations
In England, the national DNA database has been employed to curb spitting on transit workers. As part of Operation Gobstopper, bus drivers in northwest London received 2,500 evidence collection kits. Tube staff in central London and train wardens in Scotland were similarly equipped, the BBC reported in 2004.
The kits helped prosecute about 100 people on the Tube in 2007. Reportedly, 7 out of 10 samples yielded a match to DNA profiles in the national database of criminal offenders and arrestees.
Update of Mar. 25, 2013: The Whopper case, Bylsma v. Burger King Corp., 293 P.3d 1168 (Wash. 2013), did not involve a database search. Only two employees, an Herb and a McDonald, had been working in the restaurant.When police visited the restaurant that night and asked for saliva samples, the two refused. The state crime laboratory determined that the saliva on the burger was of human origin. The police returned with search warrants, and the laboratory named Herb as the source of the spit. Herb pleaded guilty to felony assault (although the spit was not initially visible and only touched Bylsma because he placed his finger in it to test its consistency) and was sentenced to 90 days in jail. (Thanks to Jeremy Gans, whose comment provided a link to the civil complaint setting forth these facts).
Sunday, 4 November 2012
Lies/Fibs, Damned Lies, and Experts/Statistics
Perhaps the most famous quotation about statistics is the most annoying—the one that Mark Twain mistakenly attributed to Benjamin Disraeli: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This tripartite classification of mendacity is quoted with great frequency (I won’t give a statistic) by writers criticizing some dubious statistic or other. For example, one self-styled “critical thinker” uncritically accepts the 19th-century British Prime Minister as the originator of the aphorism. [1]
According to Yale Law Librarian Fred Shapiro, “the first known use of the famous words ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ was quoted in the Leeds Mercury, June 29, 1892. The source was a speech by Arthur Balfour—yet another prime minister.” [2] But comparable words, often with “experts” in place of “statistics” appeared in print before then, and Balfour referred to it as “an old saying.” [3] The results of more sleuthing can be found on a webpage maintained at the University of York’s mathematics department’s website.
References
According to Yale Law Librarian Fred Shapiro, “the first known use of the famous words ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ was quoted in the Leeds Mercury, June 29, 1892. The source was a speech by Arthur Balfour—yet another prime minister.” [2] But comparable words, often with “experts” in place of “statistics” appeared in print before then, and Balfour referred to it as “an old saying.” [3] The results of more sleuthing can be found on a webpage maintained at the University of York’s mathematics department’s website.
References
- Jim Baird, How Statistics Can Lie: Are You Impressed by Remarkable Claims in Product Ads? Here's Why You Might Want to Be Skeptical, http://turf.unl.edu/extpresentationspdf/BairdStats.pdf
- Fred R. Shapiro, You Can Quote Them, Yale Alumni Mag., Sept.-Oct. 2012, at 56.
- Peter M Lee (?), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics, July 19, 2012,http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/lies.htm
Sunday, 5 February 2012
Genetic Geneology: Is Sarah Yarborough’s Killer a Mayflower Descendant?
In The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence, I remarked that “[s]urname prediction is a concept that has yet to be implemented in forensic science . . . ” (1, p. 211). Now, cold-case detectives investigating the 1991 rape and strangulation of a 16-year old girl in Seattle are looking for “a distant relative of Edward and Samuel Fuller, who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620 [and who] might even share their last name” (2).
Sarah Yarborough left home to take part in a dance-team competition one morning in December. She never returned. Six people had seen a man in his 20s, with shoulder-length blond hair, a trench coat and dark pants speaking with her or leaving a brushy area where her body was found. In the succeeding months, more than 3,000 tips poured in. DNA analysis excluded some suspects, but trawling offender DNA databases for an exact match produced no leads, and the killer remains unidentified.
Yet, other databases can be searched. “Genetic geneology databases” (3, p. 384) that use the paternally inherited Y-STR haplotypes that are of interest in anthropology are growing in popularity. Indeed, some are available on the web. At the suggestion of a scientist at the state crime laboratory, police turned to Identifinders of Huntington Beach, California. Presumably, the firm combed through the online databases to arrive at its conclusion that “there's a good chance the killer's last name is or was Fuller” (4) because “the killer is a descendant of Robert Fuller, who arrived in Salem, Mass., in 1630. Fuller was not himself on the Mayflower, but he was related to three passengers: Edward Fuller, as well as Edward Fuller's brother, Samuel, and 12-year-old son” (2).
The value (and accuracy) of this surmise remains to be seen. None of the tips the police received involve a Fuller (2), and many Fullers had nothing to do with that historic voyage. Moreover, the Mayflower Fullers may be multitudinous. After all, “there are tens of millions of people descended from the 102 passengers and about 25 crew members who arrived on the Mayflower . . .” (2).
Acknowledgment: Thanks to Gene Johnson for telling me about the case.
References
Sarah Yarborough left home to take part in a dance-team competition one morning in December. She never returned. Six people had seen a man in his 20s, with shoulder-length blond hair, a trench coat and dark pants speaking with her or leaving a brushy area where her body was found. In the succeeding months, more than 3,000 tips poured in. DNA analysis excluded some suspects, but trawling offender DNA databases for an exact match produced no leads, and the killer remains unidentified.
Yet, other databases can be searched. “Genetic geneology databases” (3, p. 384) that use the paternally inherited Y-STR haplotypes that are of interest in anthropology are growing in popularity. Indeed, some are available on the web. At the suggestion of a scientist at the state crime laboratory, police turned to Identifinders of Huntington Beach, California. Presumably, the firm combed through the online databases to arrive at its conclusion that “there's a good chance the killer's last name is or was Fuller” (4) because “the killer is a descendant of Robert Fuller, who arrived in Salem, Mass., in 1630. Fuller was not himself on the Mayflower, but he was related to three passengers: Edward Fuller, as well as Edward Fuller's brother, Samuel, and 12-year-old son” (2).
The value (and accuracy) of this surmise remains to be seen. None of the tips the police received involve a Fuller (2), and many Fullers had nothing to do with that historic voyage. Moreover, the Mayflower Fullers may be multitudinous. After all, “there are tens of millions of people descended from the 102 passengers and about 25 crew members who arrived on the Mayflower . . .” (2).
Acknowledgment: Thanks to Gene Johnson for telling me about the case.
References
- David H. Kaye, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence (2010).
- Gene Johnson, Awkward Twist over DNA Link in Teen's Slaying, Seattle Times, Jan. 12, 2012
- John M. Butler, Advanced Topics in Forensic DNA Typing: Methodology (2011).
- Gene Johnson, Mayflower Relative Sought in '91 Wash. Killing, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 11, 2012
Cross-posted from The Double Law Blog
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