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1 Introduction Science in the Courtroom  Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and Jessica Fletcher spent careers tracking down suspects responsible for committing crimes. The fact they are fictional characters is of little significance. Their tools—like those used by real-life detectives and investigators—saw little change from the nineteenth century to modern times. Revolutionary changes to the world of detectives and investigators are rare. Interrogation, eyewitness identification, and other police techniques have been honed and improved. But few dramatic changes have taken place in the world of solving crime. Fingerprints were universally hailed as one of the most significant new weapons placed at the disposal of law enforcement. But their utility is limited to the relatively few cases in which fingerprints are left at crime scenes and can be discovered. Tests to determine whether guns have been fired by a suspect, hypnosis, and even voiceprints have been used in investigations with mixed and controversial results. But when science joined with law enforcement and the legal system in 1986, the justice system began a transformation like no other it had ever experienced. Any thought prior to that time that nucleotide sequences, restriction enzymes, and capillary electrophoresis would hold the key to solving murders and rapes would have been beyond fantasy. Yet each would later prove to be a critical element in determining whether a suspect, defendant, and even a convicted prison inmate could have been responsible for a serious crime. The reopening of old criminal cases—both those unsolved and those in which a defendant convicted years earlier claimed innocence—suddenly became possible. Examination of those cases would often provide dramatic and surprising results. R4400.indb 1 R4400.indb 1 8/24/07 11:46:11 AM 8/24/07 11:46:11 AM 2 Justice and Science The development of techniques based on life and physical sciences was the easy part. The formal scientific method taught in schools and universities led to the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), its structure, and its function in the human body. Intense research bore fruit in the form of methods to detect DNA and to identify differences among people. (Scientific terms are defined in the Glossary at the end of this book.) But a scientific transformation of the legal system doesn’t occur easily. Trial judges, governed by precedent-setting decisions of higher courts, are naturally slow to react to changes in the real world. That reaction is magnified when a technology developed in the world of science arrives on the court’s doorstep with a power never before seen in the justice system. Judges are told, for the first time, that a witness will take the stand and declare that a spot of blood, a human hair, or a saliva stain came from the defendant seated at the counsel table in the judge’s own courtroom. The worry? That science will take over the responsibility of a jury to decide what happened. Courts may be afraid that if a jury hears the testimony of an expert scientific witness that appears to point without mistake or doubt to a defendant as the person who left rape evidence on a victim, that jury will ignore the other evidence in the case and decide the defendant must be guilty. The contrary argument can be compelling: jurors are mature adults who can consider and weigh all the evidence presented in a case and decide guilt or innocence accordingly. The power of DNA evidence—matched against a legal system built on the principle of precedent—led proponents of the science to victories, to defeats, and, perhaps most important, to change. This book chronicles that experience in San Diego, California, and in one county to the north, Los Angeles . It is an account of cases that showcased this new science, the problems associated with the interface of science and the courtroom, and the role of the ultimate fact-finder, a jury of twelve members of the community. With little warning, I would be thrust as a young prosecutor into the eye of a scientific and legal hurricane that would ultimately define my career in the law. The cases that formed the path of that storm would prove to be fascinating , challenging, and often heartbreaking. And, ironically, they would begin with the unlikeliest of crime victims: a DNA scientist. R4400.indb 2 R4400.indb 2 8/24/07 11:46:11 AM 8/24/07 11:46:11 AM ...

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