Forensic science has helped law enforcement solve many crimes which, otherwise, would
have remained a mystery, but as technology advances for collecting DNA samples at crime
scene, so does the possibility of error.
Experts in the field say that your DNA can be collected from a crime scene you've never
even been at, and in the case of Lukis Anderson, it led to murder charges.
Joining me to talk about this is RT correspondent, Brigida Santos.
Brigida, let's talk about the case of Lukis Anderson.
How did his own DNA frame him for murder?
In 2012, a homeless alcoholic man named Lukis Anderson was charged with first degree murder
when his DNA was found on the body of a murder victim who had been killed in a home invasion.
Now, his DNA was specifically on the murder victim's fingernails, and the way that they
got there was through a process called secondary transfer.
All that means is that, as humans, we leave our cells everywhere we go.
In fact, we shed about 50 million skin cells per day, and those cells, or DNA, can then
get picked up and moved around by a third party, so that's all that means.
It turns out that on the nights of this murder, Lukis Anderson had been passed out drunk in
a hospital, and he could not remember where he was that night, so, police, when they asked
him about his whereabouts, he said he had no recollection.
He also had a previous history and one conviction for a home invasion, and that's how this man
was murdered, so it did not look good for him, but his lawyer did retrace his steps,
and she was able to find out that he was actually innocent of this crime and that he had never
met the murder victim or even ever been to the crime scene.
Brigida, what led investigators to question the DNA evidence that implicated Anderson
in that crime?
What was it about?
Anderson's public defender, as she was building his defense, came across some files, including
his medical records, and they proved that, on that night when the murder was taking place,
he was in the hospital.
Now, experts believe that his DNA, Anderson's DNA, made its way onto the victim's fingernails
through some of the paramedics equipment, mostly likely through a finger oxygen reader
that they had used on Anderson and then later on used on the victim.
It was an Australian forensic scientist who first revealed that DNA could be collected
from fingerprints, but he also cautioned everybody that you could collect DNA from items a person
never touched.
Who was this scientist and how did he prove that?
What's the significance of that?
The forensic scientist's name is Roland van Oorschot, and he discovered this process of
secondary transfer back in 1997 after conducting a series of experiments.
Now, in the experiment, he placed a jug of juice on a table.
It had been sterilized previously, and he had a group of participants sitting around
the table, each with their own glass to put the juice in, and all of those glasses were
sterilized ahead of time, and what he found after swabbing everybody's glasses and the
jug and their hands was that one-third of participants had the DNA of other participants
on their hands.
Now, none of these people touched each other during the experiment or previous to the experiment,
and he also found that one-third of the juice glasses had the DNA of participants who had
never touched some of the glasses, so everyone had their own glass and people's DNA were
showing up on each other's glasses even tough they had never touched each other's glasses.
They also found foreign DNA on glasses, on the chairs, on the table from people who had
nothing to do with the experiment and, because they had set the controls and sterilized everything
beforehand, they realized that that DNA had been brought into the experiment by those
participants through secondary transfer.
One of the concerns that come up with this topic is the Rapid DNA Act of 2017.
What does this law do and why is it concerning in so many levels?
The Rapid DNA Act allows law enforcement departments to now use Rapid DNA testing technology, which
will allow them to find a match if somebody's already in the system in about 90 minutes.
Now, this is a process that normally used to take days, so this can speed it up very,
very quickly.
Privacy advocates worry that this is going to increase invasive biometric collection
with things like stop-and-spit policing where cops ask anybody they pull over to give them
a sample of their DNA through their saliva, and this is something that has already been
happening in places like Florida and in Connecticut, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and, because
DNA is not infallible as we have seen with this Anderson case, privacy advocates worry
that it's going to cause a lot more people to be implicated in crimes that they may not
have had anything to do with.
The case of David Butler is another example of how DNA is believed to have convicted an
innocent man of murder.
Could you talk about that case just a little bit?
Back in 2011, David Butler, a cab driver, was charged with murder because his DNA was
found on the victim's body, a woman.
Now, he had a skin condition that caused him to shed excessively and, in fact, in the community
where he drove those cabs, other cab drivers gave him the nickname "Flaky" because his
skin was always flaking off.
Now, he said that he had never met the victim, and his lawyer argued that it was very possible
that he may have actually given a ride in his cab to the actual murderer and that's
how his DNA could have ended up on the victim's body.
Now, in this case, it was enough to get his sentence thrown out, so he was able to go
free, and that is also what happened in the case of Lukis Anderson when their lawyers
brought up the issue of secondary transfer.
Scientists say that transferring of DNA is a phenomenon that has not been properly studied,
and, as far as you can tell, is law enforcement aware of this, and what are the investigators
in Anderson's case saying after their experience?
It's unclear whether law enforcement agencies are aware of the issue of secondary transfer.
I do know that, in the United States, there are very few labs that actually studied the
phenomenon of secondary transfer, but it is, indeed, a very real process, and it's something
that's only now starting to be acknowledged, and it is the backbone, DNA, DNA is the backbone
of so many convictions, and it's very likely that other innocent people have been convicted
for crimes that they didn't commit, but it can also now be used as a defense by guilty
people who may have committed crimes.
If their DNA does get onto the bodies of someone, they can now say that it was secondary transfer,
so, while it might clear up cases for some people, it could actually complicate others.