DNA Is Not the Forensic Cure-All

DNA in the Dock

How flawed techniques send innocent people to prison

Nicola Davis
The Guardian

Many juries believe crime-scene DNA evidence is watertight – but this is far from the case. As forensic technology gets ever more sophisticated, experts are only just realising how difficult interpreting the evidence can be.

For David Butler, it began with a knock on the door early one November morning, seven years ago. When he opened it, officers from the Merseyside police were standing on his doorstep. The retired taxi driver was being arrested for murder.  The police said they had evidence connecting Butler to the death of Anne Marie Foy, a 46-year-old sex worker who had been battered and strangled in Liverpool in 2005.

Butler’s DNA, it turned out, had been logged into the UK national database after a 1998 investigation into a break-in at the home he shared with his mother. A partial match had been made to DNA found on Foy’s fingernail clippings and cardigan buttons. This, combined with CCTV evidence of a distinctive taxi seen near the scene, led the prosecutor to tell the jury in Butler’s trial that the DNA information “provides compelling evidence that the defendant was in contact with Anne Marie Foy at the time immediately before she died”.

The case seemed conclusive. Yet Butler was adamant: he had not met Foy.

“You do see an assumption being made that a DNA profile is evidence of contact – case closed – whereas it is actually a lot more complicated than that,” says Ruth Morgan, the director of the Centre for the Forensic Sciences at University College London. “We are only beginning to realise quite how complex it is.”

Shaky Paradigms and Hidden Languages

It Just Got Far More Complex

Over the past forty years scientists in a wide variety of fields have been confronting a material world that is far, far more complex than previous generations had ever thought. This has created consternation amongst the materialists, whose only available engine to produce said complexity is chance working over billions and billions of years.  The more complex the material world is discovered to be, the more difficult the materialists' cosmology is to sustain. 

When life in its most basic forms (for example, at the level of single cells) is demonstrated to be horrendously complex, all sorts of questions are begged, such as where are the less complex mechanisms which produced this extreme complexity in the most primitive of life forms?  The gap in the fossil record (which is damning enough) is nothing compared to the "gaps" at the micro-biological level required by the materialist cosmological theories.

And now, it has been discovered that the work of DNA--complex enough--is much, much more complex than initially thought.  Add another trillion years or so on to the age of the cosmos in order for such complexity to evolve.  What's a few trillion years amongst friends, huh?