I absolutely don't buy into 'silver bullet' evidence shown world wide to be of a type that is 'planted' and found in subsequent searches. Such evidence needs to be vigorously and independently investigated - that is what this Minister should have ordered before allowing what many consider an 'unsafe' conviction to stand. Three quick instances that are fairly well known, Arthur Thomas and the 'finding' of a shell cartridge on a 'second' search, David Bain a small lens found after hours by officer not tasked with the job and which followed intense earlier searches, the degraded dna that was found 'late' in the investigation of Lundy and which by bad 'science' was found to be 'brain matter' by a now discredited scientist. That's exactly the avenue Minister Collins has allowed the Watson case to enter: 'week,' discredited evidence given support by evidence which may have been planted. This Minister before 'hanging her hat' on such highly suspect evidence should have exercised 'Mercy' and common sense, open mindedness and her duty to the safe administration of Justice and sought independent advice on the passage of those 2 hairs onto the blanket, a credible explanation of how they were 'missed' in a methodical earlier search and their exact and precise potential dna link between that blanket and Olivia. To this point the link has reasonable doubt written all over it. Taken from another point of view if an independent review confirms those 2 hairs having 'properly' arrived on the blanket, and to be Olivia's the case may well be over for Scott Watson.
As it stands there are improper identifications made against Scott, then withdrawn, there is the denial of a ketch being in the Sounds yet proof there was and indications that the police didn't want to know about it, there is patchy at best 'testimony' from prison stoolies, no proof of murder, no bodies and all that held together, according to the Minister of Justice in her 'impartial' view, by 2 hairs never independently tested and which 'arrived' in suspect circumstances on a blanket, yet no blood, no bodily fluids nothing - zilch just an indulgence on the public to believe in 'silver bullet' evidence of the type that convicted Lindy Chamberlain and more recently Amanda Fox. Who said Justice?
The following shows reasons why Judith Collins should order an independent examination of those 2 hairs. Borrowed from a posting on Kiwi Blog by a defence lawyer who uses the non de plume F E Smith and who comments in the last paragraph:
Interesting article on the fallibility of DNA testing in the New York Times (I know, it is the NYT, but the article is an op-ed by a law professor, not something by one of their repeaters):
SAN FRANCISCO — WHEN the police arrived last November at the ransacked mansion of the millionaire investor Raveesh Kumra, outside of San Jose, Calif., they found Mr. Kumra had been blindfolded, tied and gagged. The robbers took cash, rare coins and ultimately Mr. Kumra’s life; he died at the scene, suffocated by the packaging tape used to stifle his screams. A forensics team found DNA on his fingernails that belonged to an unknown person, presumably one of the assailants. The sample was put into a DNA database and turned up a “hit” — a local man by the name of Lukis Anderson.
Bingo. Mr. Anderson was arrested and charged with murder.
There was one small problem: the 26-year-old Mr. Anderson couldn’t have been the culprit. During the night in question, he was at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, suffering from severe intoxication.
Yet he spent more than five months in jail with a possible death sentence hanging over his head. Once presented with Mr. Anderson’s hospital records, prosecutors struggled to figure out how an innocent man’s DNA could have ended up on a murder victim.
Late last month, prosecutors announced what they believe to be the answer: the paramedics who transported Mr. Anderson to the hospital were the very same individuals who responded to the crime scene at the mansion a few hours later. Prosecutors now conclude that at some point, Mr. Anderson’s DNA must have been accidentally transferred to Mr. Kumra’s body — likely by way of the paramedics’ clothing or equipment.
This theory of transference is still under investigation. Nevertheless, the certainty with which prosecutors charged Mr. Anderson with murder highlights the very real injustices that can occur when we place too much faith in DNA forensic technologies.
In the end, Mr. Anderson was lucky. His alibi was rock solid; prosecutors were forced to concede that there must have been some other explanation. It’s hard to believe that, out of the growing number of convictions based largely or exclusively on DNA evidence, there haven’t been any similar mistakes.
In one famous case of crime scene contamination, German police searched for around 15 years for a serial killer they called the “Phantom of Heilbronn” — an unknown female linked by traces of DNA to six murders across Germany and Austria. In 2009, the police found their “suspect”: a worker at a factory that produced the cotton swabs police used in their investigations had been accidentally contaminating them with her own DNA.
Contamination is not the only way DNA forensics can lead to injustice. Consider the frequent claim that it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for two DNA profiles to match by coincidence. A 2005 audit of Arizona’s DNA database showed that, out of some 65,000 profiles, nearly 150 pairs matched at a level typically considered high enough to identify and prosecute suspects. Yet these profiles were clearly from different people.
There are also problems with the way DNA evidence is interpreted and presented to juries. In 2008, John Puckett — a California man in his 70s with a sexual assault record — was accused of a 1972 killing, after a trawl of the state database partially linked his DNA to crime scene evidence. As in the Anderson case, Mr. Puckett was identified and implicated primarily by this evidence. Jurors — told that there was only a one-in-1.1 million chance that this DNA match was pure coincidence — convicted him. He is now serving a life sentence.
But that one-in-1.1 million figure is misleading, according to two different expert committees, one convened by the F.B.I., the other by the National Research Council. It reflects the chance of a coincidental match in relation to the size of the general population (assuming that the suspect is the only one examined and is not related to the real culprit). Instead of the general population, we should be looking at only the number of profiles in the DNA database. Taking the size of the database into account in Mr. Puckett’s case (and, again, assuming the real culprit’s profile is not in the database) would have led to a dramatic change in the estimate, to one in three.
One juror was asked whether this figure would have affected the jury’s deliberations. “Of course it would have changed things,” he told reporters. “It would have changed a lot of things.”
DNA forensics is an invaluable tool for law enforcement. But it is most useful when it corroborates other evidence pointing to a suspect, or when used to determine whether any two individual samples match, like in the exonerations pursued by the Innocence Project.
But when the government gets into the business of warehousing millions of DNA profiles to seek “cold hits” as the primary basis for prosecutions, much more oversight by and accountability to the public is warranted. For far too long, we have allowed the myth of DNA infallibility to chip away at our skepticism of government’s prosecutorial power, undoubtedly leading to untold injustices.
In the Anderson case, thankfully, prosecutors acknowledged the obvious: their suspect could not have been in two places at once. But he was dangerously close to being on his way to death row because of that speck of DNA. That one piece of evidence — obtained from a technology with known limitations, and susceptible to human error and prosecutorial misuse — might mistakenly lead to execution at the hands of the state should send chills down every one of our spines. The next Lukis Anderson could be you. Better hope your alibi is as well documented as his.
Bingo. Mr. Anderson was arrested and charged with murder.
There was one small problem: the 26-year-old Mr. Anderson couldn’t have been the culprit. During the night in question, he was at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, suffering from severe intoxication.
Yet he spent more than five months in jail with a possible death sentence hanging over his head. Once presented with Mr. Anderson’s hospital records, prosecutors struggled to figure out how an innocent man’s DNA could have ended up on a murder victim.
Late last month, prosecutors announced what they believe to be the answer: the paramedics who transported Mr. Anderson to the hospital were the very same individuals who responded to the crime scene at the mansion a few hours later. Prosecutors now conclude that at some point, Mr. Anderson’s DNA must have been accidentally transferred to Mr. Kumra’s body — likely by way of the paramedics’ clothing or equipment.
This theory of transference is still under investigation. Nevertheless, the certainty with which prosecutors charged Mr. Anderson with murder highlights the very real injustices that can occur when we place too much faith in DNA forensic technologies.
In the end, Mr. Anderson was lucky. His alibi was rock solid; prosecutors were forced to concede that there must have been some other explanation. It’s hard to believe that, out of the growing number of convictions based largely or exclusively on DNA evidence, there haven’t been any similar mistakes.
In one famous case of crime scene contamination, German police searched for around 15 years for a serial killer they called the “Phantom of Heilbronn” — an unknown female linked by traces of DNA to six murders across Germany and Austria. In 2009, the police found their “suspect”: a worker at a factory that produced the cotton swabs police used in their investigations had been accidentally contaminating them with her own DNA.
Contamination is not the only way DNA forensics can lead to injustice. Consider the frequent claim that it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, for two DNA profiles to match by coincidence. A 2005 audit of Arizona’s DNA database showed that, out of some 65,000 profiles, nearly 150 pairs matched at a level typically considered high enough to identify and prosecute suspects. Yet these profiles were clearly from different people.
There are also problems with the way DNA evidence is interpreted and presented to juries. In 2008, John Puckett — a California man in his 70s with a sexual assault record — was accused of a 1972 killing, after a trawl of the state database partially linked his DNA to crime scene evidence. As in the Anderson case, Mr. Puckett was identified and implicated primarily by this evidence. Jurors — told that there was only a one-in-1.1 million chance that this DNA match was pure coincidence — convicted him. He is now serving a life sentence.
But that one-in-1.1 million figure is misleading, according to two different expert committees, one convened by the F.B.I., the other by the National Research Council. It reflects the chance of a coincidental match in relation to the size of the general population (assuming that the suspect is the only one examined and is not related to the real culprit). Instead of the general population, we should be looking at only the number of profiles in the DNA database. Taking the size of the database into account in Mr. Puckett’s case (and, again, assuming the real culprit’s profile is not in the database) would have led to a dramatic change in the estimate, to one in three.
One juror was asked whether this figure would have affected the jury’s deliberations. “Of course it would have changed things,” he told reporters. “It would have changed a lot of things.”
DNA forensics is an invaluable tool for law enforcement. But it is most useful when it corroborates other evidence pointing to a suspect, or when used to determine whether any two individual samples match, like in the exonerations pursued by the Innocence Project.
But when the government gets into the business of warehousing millions of DNA profiles to seek “cold hits” as the primary basis for prosecutions, much more oversight by and accountability to the public is warranted. For far too long, we have allowed the myth of DNA infallibility to chip away at our skepticism of government’s prosecutorial power, undoubtedly leading to untold injustices.
In the Anderson case, thankfully, prosecutors acknowledged the obvious: their suspect could not have been in two places at once. But he was dangerously close to being on his way to death row because of that speck of DNA. That one piece of evidence — obtained from a technology with known limitations, and susceptible to human error and prosecutorial misuse — might mistakenly lead to execution at the hands of the state should send chills down every one of our spines. The next Lukis Anderson could be you. Better hope your alibi is as well documented as his.
We also know that DNA matches can be faked, and that there is also room for an unscrupulous scientist to falsify results with a very good chance of getting away with it. In NZ, there is very little verification of DNA testing, and obtaining funding from legal aid to do so is pretty difficult, whilst doing it privately is very expensive.
It follows that if there can innocent transfer there can be deliberate transfer of DNA. Also is shown the 'odds' Juries are told as per 1 in a million and so on are demonstrably inaccurate. However, the point most clearly made that other evidence needs to be looked at to support suspect dna evidence. In the Watson case suspect evidence is being used to support suspect evidence. Time to call this case out.
I don't understand this comment: "Taken from another point of view if an independent review confirms those 2 hairs having 'properly' arrived on the blanket, and to be Olivia's the case may well be over for Scott Watson."
ReplyDeleteSecondary transference of hair is not uncommon. We are all shedding hair all the time and other people's hair can be picked up at bus stops, pubs, and anywhere people gather. It's true that a hair from Olivier getting onto Watson's boat in this fashion might seem highly unlikely, but it is far too late for an independent review to establish anything. It was only after a second search when hairs off Olivia's hair brush had been collected that the hairs were found on Watson's yacht. Why weren't they found the first time? Had those who carried out the second search had contact with the hair brush? Then there are claims that proper methodology wasn't followed in that hairs from the brush and the blanket were in the lab together. The DNA in this case isn't acceptable. That it was not found on the first search and only after items had been collected from the hair brush makes the possibility of innocent (let alone malicious) contamination possible. The slit in the bag, too, even if it had got there by an innocent accident, destroys the validity of the test. And I thought I read in the Christchurch Press that the hairs were tested in three labs -- one in Australia, one in Britain, and one in NZ, with the tests in Australia and Britain being "inconclusive". Other reports have said only the British report was conclusive but only concluded the hairs were probably from Hope or her sister but not certainly from them.
DNA testing is not infallible. New Zealand testing once put a person known only as "N" at two crime sites, but it turned out that he had absolutely watertight alibis for both. An investigation of the ERA was undertaken over this.
This story about the fallibility of DNA testing is interesting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/opinion/high-tech-high-risk-forensics.html?hp&_r=1&