News Biology - Florida Forensic Science

DNA Database Hacked

Genealogy databases have become popular tools for law enforcement. GED Match is one of those databases. It allows users to upload DNA profiles from various testing services, such as 23andMe. On July 19, hackers accessed this database and allowed police to search profiles that were not previously accessible.

A DNA Mix-Up Involving a Washing Machine Kept a Man in Jail for 3 Years

June 29, 2020/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

As washing machines go, the one that contributed to Roy Verret’s capital murder charge was pretty average. White, Whirlpool, reliable. When detectives investigating a murder in Jeanerette, Louisiana, swabbed a dark spot on the lid in January 2017, he thought they were wasting their time.
I wasn’t stressing,” Verret said in an interview. “I knew it wasn’t anything to do with Howard.

FREE Webinar: Pediatric Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners: Roles, Responsibilities and the New National Pediatric SAFE Protocol – July 15 at 2 PM

June 18, 2020/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

Sexual violence involving a child is a particularly grievous issue, impacting the health and well-being of the victim. Having a compassionate, multidisciplinary, child-centered response to sexual assault can be a critical first step to promote the safety and healing for the child. The medical forensic examination is an integral piece of that coordinated response and this webinar will describe the new National Protocol for Sexual Abuse Medical Forensic Examinations: Pediatric. These Pediatric SAFE Protocols, released in April 2016 by the Department of Justice, Office on Violence Against Women, address the healthcare needs of the child, promote their healing, and cover gathering forensic evidence for potential use in the criminal justice system.

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Yogurt Shop Controversy: Privacy vs. Science

February 15, 2020/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

Thirty years after the high-profile murders of four teenage girls at a North Austin yogurt shop, the case’s long-awaited closure could hinge on a single strand of DNA. That DNA, and samples like it, have fueled a growing national debate pitting scientific advancement against personal privacy concerns.
That’s all we’ve ever done is ask for help,” said Bob Ayers, whose daughter, 13-year-old Amy, was among those killed in 1991 in one of the city’s most infamous cases. “And now that we’ve found something, we can’t get it.”

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Ninth Circuit Public Defender Presents Our Spring Schedule

February 14, 2020/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

13 States Have Never Exonerated a Prisoner Based on DNA Evidence. Here’s Why.

December 19, 2019/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

Hundreds of state prisoners have successfully used DNA evidence to win exonerations in the past three decades — except in 13 states.

The states are Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Vermont. Exonerations have occurred in the 13 states, but none in which DNA evidence was central to proving innocence, according to the Innocence Project and the National Registry of Exonerations.

A DNA Firm That Caters to Police Just Bought a Genealogy Site

December 11, 2019/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

Just two years ago, GEDmatch was still an obscure genealogy website, known only to a million or so hobbyist DNA sleuths looking to fill in their family trees. The site was free, public, and run by two guys with a knack for writing algorithms that helped relatives find each other. All in all, it was a pretty controversy-free place.

That all changed in April of 2018, when news broke that police had used GEDmatch to identify a suspect in the 40-year-old Golden State Killer case. As the site emerged as a crime-fighting tool, some users and privacy experts began to worry about how people’s genetic data might ensnare them in criminal investigations, when all they wanted was to learn about their family history. The transition has been rocky for GEDmatch. One drama after another has engulfed the website: Police searches have grown increasingly invasive; the site’s owners tried to react with changes to its terms of service that ended up backfiring; and white-hat hackers pointed out glaring security flaws. But starting Monday, that’s all someone else’s problem.

Making Sense of Science XIII – April 2-4, 2020

November 22, 2019/in Attorney, Biology News, Chemistry News, Crime Lab News, Digital Forensics News, Medical Trauma, News, Patterned Evidence News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

Big Names. Big Science; a Big-Time CLE Experience!

Don’t miss this great opportunity for a no-nonsense, national networking CLE featuring the leading faculty in their respective fields. This two-day event is produced in partnership with the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice (CACJ).

PD9 and GCD Host Capital Defense Conference in Orlando: Telling the Client’s Story

November 1, 2019/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

The Georgia Capital Defenders had scheduled a great October CLE program in Savannah captioned “Telling the Client’s Story,” but had complications which prevented them from going forward. We contacted GCD and offered to put on their program in Orlando with the always helpful Barry School of Law as hosts. Next, our partners at the National Center for Forensic Science joined the party with their support. The final, special ingredient came with friend of PD9, Professor Richard Rogers, agreeing to join us on Friday.

So, with all this energy and collaboration we are presenting this program on Friday, Nov. 8, all day Saturday, Nov. 9 and a Sunday, Nov. 10 morning closing session. Please review the agenda. You will find a very thorough Daubert program as well as the modified Georgia program.

Pricing will be in the $200 range for the entire event. CLE credit calculations are pending. To register, please click here.

Lubricants and Glitter: Revolutionizing Sexual Assault Investigations – October 23 at 6 PM

August 27, 2019/in Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

Sexual assaults are an unfortunate reality in modern society. While DNA is the go-to forensic evidence in sexual assault cases, the reality is that the use of condoms is increasing in an effort to minimize the type of DNA left at the crime scene, e.g. sperm/semen. Therefore, in the absence of DNA, it is necessary to identify other types of evidence that could be used to link the three points in the criminal triangle, i.e. victim, suspect and crime scene.

One such type of evidence that has not been explored is lubricant analysis. Identifying novel capability that assist laboratories in making determinations in lubricant analysis would aid the crime lad to make connects to the assailant. Another type of evidence that commonly overlooked are cosmetic particles that may transfer during physical contact, e.g. glitter and shimmer particles.

This talk will discuss current efforts that we are conducting to understand the evidentiary value of lubricant and cosmetic evidence and appropriate analytical methods to analyze and characterize unknown samples collected in a sexual assault or physical assault cases.

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N.Y.P.D. Detectives Gave a Boy, 12, a Soda. He Landed in a DNA Database

August 20, 2019/in Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

New York City detectives questioning a boy facing a felony charge last year offered him a McDonald’s soda. When the boy left, they took the straw and tested it for his DNA.

Although it did not match evidence found at a crime scene, his DNA was entered into the city’s genetic database. To have it removed, the child’s family had to petition a court and file an appeal, a process that took more than a year. The boy was 12.

The Role of Scientific Forensic Evidence Questioned in Pending Texas Execution

August 19, 2019/in Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

Larry Swearingen is scheduled to be executed Wednesday by the State of Texas.

It was 19 years ago that Swearingen was convicted of the abduction, rape and murder of Melissa Trotter. This is the sixth time that Swearingen had a date with death in the Texas prison system. But lingering questions about his guilt have caused the courts to repeatedly step in.

In an Apparent First, Genetic Genealogy Aids a Wrongful Conviction Case

July 16, 2019/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

It started as a way to trace family history. It evolved into a tool to help solve decades-old cold cases. Now, for apparently the first time, a genealogy database is expected to lead to charges being dropped against an Idaho man convicted in a decades-old rape and murder case.

There is “clear and convincing evidence” that Christopher Tapp, who served 20 years in prison, was wrongfully convicted in the 1996 killing of 18-year-old Angie Dodge, Bonneville County Prosecutor Daniel Clark wrote in a court filing last week.

State Supreme Court Blasts Renowned Forensic Scientist Henry Lee and Throws Out 1989 Murder Convictions of Two New Milford Men

June 19, 2019/in Attorney, Biology News, News, Patterned Evidence News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

In a unanimous decision released Friday afternoon, the state Supreme Court threw out the 1989 murder convictions of two New Milford men and delivered a stinging rebuke to renowned forensic science expert Henry Lee, whose inaccurate testimony put them in prison for decades.

Both Sean Henning and Ralph Birch were convicted in separate trials for the bloody murder of Everett Carr, who was stabbed 47 times, his throat slit and his blood tracked through the house. They were convicted partially based on the testimony of Lee who told jurors that a towel in the bathroom of Carr’s home had a spot on it that he had tested and found was “consistent with blood.”

The Genealogy Site That Helped Catch the Golden State Killer is Grappling with Privacy

May 30, 2019/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

Since April 2018, when police announced they had apprehended Joseph DeAngelo, the man they alleged to be the long-elusive Golden State Killer, the floodgates have opened.

The key insight responsible for DeAngelo’s arrest came courtesy of a then-little-known forensic technique known as genetic genealogy: a method in which investigators try to link crime scene DNA to DNA from biological relatives in the hopes of generating leads for identifying suspects or remains. The science behind the technique has been around for a while. Yet the real potential to get hits in these searches has only been made possible by the recent advent of online, easily accessible DNA databases like GEDmatch (where police got a match for a distant relative of DeAngelo’s) and FamilyTreeDNA—sites that now boast more than 1 million user profiles each. Many of these come from individuals who uploaded their own genetic data from popular consumer DNA testing kits like 23andMe and AncestryDNA.

The Myth of Fingerprints

March 22, 2019/in Biology News, News, Patterned Evidence News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

At 9:00 a.m. last December 14, a man in Orange County, California, discovered he’d been robbed. Someone had swiped his Volkswagen Golf, his MacBook Air and some headphones. The police arrived and did something that is increasingly a part of everyday crime fighting: They swabbed the crime scene for DNA.

Normally, you might think of DNA as the province solely of high-profile crimes—like murder investigations, where a single hair or drop of blood cracks a devilish case. Nope: These days, even local cops are wielding it to solve ho-hum burglaries. The police sent the swabs to the county crime lab and ran them through a beige, photocopier-size “rapid DNA” machine, a relatively inexpensive piece of equipment affordable even by smaller police forces. Within minutes, it produced a match to a local man who’d been previously convicted of identity theft and burglary. They had their suspect.

A New Method of DNA Testing Could Solve More Shootings

March 12, 2019/in Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

POLICE FOUND 19 spent shell casings scattered in the San Diego street where Gregory Benton was murdered on April 12, 2014. Benton and his cousin had gone to buy cigarettes, a witness later said. As they returned to a family party, two men pulled up in a car behind them. They got out, and at least one of them opened fire.

Witnesses didn’t get a good look at the men or the car, so when police sat down to review their leads, the shell casings were the best evidence they had. They sent the casings to the San Diego Police Crime Lab, which just happened to be trying out a new DNA testing technique.

One Twin Committed the Crime — But Which One? A New DNA Test Can Finger the Culprit

March 11, 2019/in Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

One night in November 1999, a 26-year-old woman was raped in a parking lot in Grand Rapids, Mich. Police officers managed to get the perpetrator’s DNA from a semen sample, but it matched no one in their databases.

Detectives found no fingerprints at the scene and located no witnesses. The woman, who had been attacked from behind, could not offer a description. It looked like the rapist would never be found.

Orlando Police Seek Money for Rapid DNA System to Solve Crimes, but Some Fear ‘Guilty by Machine’

March 5, 2019/in Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

The Orlando Police Department is seeking state funding to buy a new DNA-testing technology that would allow officers to test and compare evidence in less than two hours, without shipping it to a state lab.

In its pitch for $250,000 to Orange County’s legislative delegation, the agency said the technology, known as Rapid DNA, “has the potential to change the paradigm for law enforcement and its capacity to solve cases,” including by identifying suspects or linking crime scenes.

Webinar: DNA Dystopia

February 25, 2019/in Attorney, Biology News, News /by Public Defender 9th Circuit

March 5, 2019 @ 2:00 p.m. Eastern, 60 minutes

This session will focus on helping your client navigate the landscape of DNA dystopia. Learn about DNA collection of minors; expansion of rogue databases; spread of Rapid DNA; the mining of genealogical databases by law enforcement; and the linking of forensic databases with genealogical ones. Attend this session and learn how to fight these threats to your clients’ privacy rights in the age of genetic surveillance.

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