
How DNA Transfer Framed Lukis Anderson for Murder - cafogleman
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2018/04/19/framed-for-murder-by-his-own-dna
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jacquesm
This is one of the reasons I'm categorically against any kind of DNA
databases. Yes, they can be useful. But if a crime is a bit harder to solve
and there is a nice & convenient match against a DNA database of for instance
known offenders (or babies whose blood was sampled right after birth...) then
policework will shift from 'whodunnit' to 'howdidtheydoit'. Rationalization
after such a detail comes up is a path that is a lot more tempting than to
come up with suspects for which there is no evidence at all.

> a limp handshake relays less DNA than a bone-crushing one

Bowing seems to make good sense in this context.

Finally, shocking he wasn't compensated for spending a long time in jail.

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gwern
'Hard cases make bad law', as the saying go. We know they won't lead to a
massive crime wave of false convictions because DNA databases generally aren't
abused like that, and the effects on crime are enormous: "The effects of DNA
databases on the deterrence and detection of offenders"
[http://jenniferdoleac.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/DNA_Den...](http://jenniferdoleac.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/03/DNA_Denmark.pdf) , Anker et al 2017.

~~~
ubernostrum
Part of the problem is that as the size of the database grows -- i.e., as
every police encounter turns into a mandatory sample collection -- the false-
positive rate will also go up.

Remember: DNA "matches" are probabilistic, and most of their utility has been
based on the low probability of a sample taken from a crime scene "matching" a
sample taken from a suspect. Prosecutors (committing the prosecutor's fallacy,
of course) love to tout the "one in a billion" type statistics for a match
being a false positive, but it doesn't take a very large database at all for
"one in a billion" coincidences to start occurring.

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gowld
A sampling of nice good articles about Forensic Pseudoscience, courtesy of
Google search:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=forensic+pseudoscience](https://www.google.com/search?q=forensic+pseudoscience)

This is a broad-based problem.

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flippyhead
> The participants unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the
> lover they kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus
> grip, or the barista who handed them their afternoon latte.

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noja
Another conspiracy theory that became true. Is there a list already?

