History and your DNA can get you wrongfully sent to prison

November 10, 2:00 AMLA History ExaminerCharles Nichols

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AP Photo/George Nikitin

DNA testing is a wonderful thing.

It can prove a person innocent of a crime.  Many people have been released from prison thanks to DNA testing and despite the best (or should I say worst) efforts of prosecutors to keep them in prison; even death row.

The problem is that DNA testing can also be used to convict an innocent man and the problem isn’t with the science it is due to the ignorance of jurors as to how DNA works.  Prosecutors don’t care of course how it works.  Guilt or innocence is irrelevant in their code of ethics.  They only question a prosecutor asks of himself is “Can I convince twelve people who can’t get out of jury duty that the defendant is guilty?”

The chemistry of DNA is complex.  The concept is simple.  Every human being, with the exception of twins (triplets, etc) has a unique genetic code.  This genetic code can be written down as a very long sequence of four letters (A, C, G, and T).  If at any point in this sequence, there is a mismatch between you and the DNA collected at the crime scene, then it isn’t your DNA.  It belongs to somebody else.

Sounds great doesn’t it?  It is.  Unfortunately, it currently costs about $300,000 to generate a single person’s complete genetic sequence and the courts won’t pay to have it done.  Instead, prosecutors test a very small sample of the defendant’s DNA and if it matches, the DA pays an “expert witness” to say that there is a one in gazillion chance that it doesn’t match the defendant.

Jurors, even the smartest of them, say to themselves “Wow! That is a big number.  He must be guilty.”  And so they convict.  Never mind that this expert witness would never have been called to testify for the prosecution, and certainly would never be paid, unless he says what the prosecutor wants him to say.

You may recall that some years back DNA testing was done on a black man who claimed to be descended from Thomas Jefferson, author of our Declaration of Independence.  The press widely proclaimed that it was a match.  What the mainstream press failed to mention is that Jefferson had no male descendents so they compared a sample of DNA from the male descendents of Jefferson’s uncle and the family members claiming to be descended from Jefferson.

One out of approximately every 4,000 people on the planet shares the same genetic markers.  In other words, there are millions of people on Earth who have the same genetic markers and who are not descended from Thomas Jefferson.

Therein lies the problem with DNA testing.  Over half of the human DNA is also found in a banana.  If one chooses to, he could purposely choose a set of genetic markers that would show a 100% match between the banana and any given human.

The Federal government maintains a database of DNA samples which consist of 13 areas of the human DNA they compare with suspects.  They refuse to make the database contents public for a very good reason.  With a database of nearly seven and a half million offender genetic profiles and only 13 markers it is almost a scientific certainty that two or more different people (not twins) in the database match.

Around a decade ago, I had a 25 marker DNA test performed on myself.  I matched on 25 of those markers with a cousin so distantly related, our most recent common ancestor was born nearly 300 years ago (1712).  I had to upgrade to the 37 marker test before there were any differences discovered between our two genetic sequences.

The male descendents of this one ancestor, after 300 years, could number into the thousands.  Presumably, one or more still living could have committed a crime and left his DNA at the scene.  One day I could find the police kicking down my door demanding to know where I was the evening of June 3^rd 1980?  I was standing six feet in front of Ronald Reagan watching him give a speech.  Can I provide an alibi?  Not likely, the cameras were at the back of the room on an elevated platform and Reagan was on the other side of the room also on an elevated platform.  The only thing the cameras most likely caught was the back of the cowboy hat on my head.

California now wants to reduce the number of markers down to 8.  Out of curiosity, I checked the much smaller Family Tree DNA database which shows that I match 502 separate men using just 12 markers.  An even smaller database shows me matching over 100 people using just the 8 markers.

DNA is a wonderful thing, but in the hands of prosecutors and poorly educated jurors; it is like giving a loaded gun to a chimpanzee.  The DNA of chimpanzees, by the way, matches with human DNA more than 98% of the time.

Something to think about the next time you are on a jury.  Demand that the court spend the $300,000 to sequence all of the DNA of both the victim and the defendant.  The government won’t but at least you will have found a way to get kicked off the jury.