In my Autopsy of a Crime Lab book, I talk about the risks of error in forensics, including when police agencies take lab work into the field, using kits that are often of uncertain reliability. Deep into the book, I describe how that in some police departments, one type of field test being increasingly used is “rapid DNA.” I describe some of the concerns with it, including reliability of the test results, and that the evidence can be consumed, making it impossible for a crime lab to later conduct an accurate DNA test.
And then I make a truly embarrassing error of my own, in discussing a wonderful article by Erin Murphy, titled “DNA in the Criminal Justice System: A Congressional Research Service Report* (*From the Future).”
Murphy’s great article is hypothetical (as the title makes clear) and discusses a range of scenarios that could occur if these uses of DNA, along with expanding DNA databases, continue through the next decade.
Two of the compelling hypotheticals that Murphy gave involved a pop star being falsely connected to unsolved murders in Hawaii by rapid DNA test results that were erroneous, and a state senator in Ohio being falsely connected to a series of child sexual assaults after giving a similar field DNA testing. Both were hypothetical scenarios designed to illustrate how a quick and dirty field DNA test could lead to real injustices.
But in discussing the issues those examples raise, my paragraph begins with a glaring error in its first sentence: “This is not hypothetical; already police have falsely arrested and jailed people due to mistaken rapid DNA results.” And I ended the paragraph, noting, “One wonders how often rapid DNA mistakes occur in cases of people who are not well known and who cannot afford lawyers.” These hypotheticals are well-put for sparking discussion—but again, they were not real events and were purely hypothetical.
There is much to read about the issues raised by rapid DNA technology; the Policing Project has written an excellent primer. I strongly recommend Murphy’s article about the future of DNA in our criminal system and the dangers of rapid DNA errors. However, my own error in citing to those hypotheticals could not be more obvious. I wish I had caught it earlier. A culture of acknowledging and transparency surrounding error is exactly what I call for in crime laboratories, and in the same spirit, I wanted to point out my own mistake as soon as I discovered it.