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56 By the end of 1988,the results of DNA profiling had been admitted as evidence without reservation or doubt in more than eighty trials across the country and had been used to obtain confessions of guilt in countless more. Judges were inclined to repeat the claims of prosecution witnesses verbatim in their decisions while dismissing the protestations of defense witnesses as being irrelevant to the issues at hand.The prosecution ’s uncontested proclamation that DNA typing would produce the right answer or no answer at all showed up in most published judgments during this period.1 The early success of the technique lies at least in part in the deep pockets of both Lifecodes’ and Cellmark’s multinational parent corporations. Both took in billions of dollars in revenue each year and were eager to capitalize on the biotech boom of the 1980s. Thus, they were willing to bankroll efforts to get DNA profiling into as many jurisdictions as possible, as fast as possible. After failures in Andrews and Wesley-Bailey, the defense community realized that in order to successfully challenge DNA evidence, they could not rely on the strategies used in those cases. Defense attorneys desperately needed expert witnesses from the academic science community who could match the qualifications, reputation, and enthusiasm of prosecution witnesses. However, because the technique was not yet well known outside of the two private companies, there was not a pool of molecular biologists, population geneticists, or forensic scientists who were willing to testify on behalf of the defense. This trend led one legal commentator to describe DNA typing as the “unexamined ‘witness’ in criminal trials.”2 This situation would finally change in early 1989, when a few defense attorneys around the country succeeded in locating academic molecular biologists and population geneticists who were willing and able to help them challenge DNA evidence in court. Yet locating these individuals was not enough—lawyers also had to convince judges that they possessed knowledge and experience relevant to the admissibility of a new forensic technique. This task was not easy in the face of intense prosecutorial opposition. This chapter will examine the defense community’s Challenging DNA  c h a p t e r 4 Chap-04.qxd 6/28/07 9:57 AM Page 56 challenging dna 57 efforts to create a network of experts who could challenge the testimony of the prosecution’s experts. Particular attention will be paid to the emergence of a new expert identity in the case of People of New York v. Castro (545 N.Y.S.2d 985, 1989): that of the academic scientist who was knowledgeable enough about forensic science to be considered an expert by the judge even though he was not considered to be part of the forensic science community. Defense challenges moved courtroom discussion from the certainties of DNA profiling in medical and diagnostic contexts to the uncertainties of forensic casework . This shift meant that new kinds of experts became relevant to the admissibility of the technique. Defense challenges to DNA evidence also catalyzed debates in the scientific community. Beginning in this chapter, and continuing throughout the remainder of this book,I will chart the growth of these various debates and follow them as they were transported from the narrow confines of the courtroom into the scientific community, various political arenas, the mass media, and, eventually , the general public. In the remaining chapters of this book it will become clear that because these debates were generated through interactions among science , law, politics, corporate culture, and popular culture, they were resistant to attempts by any single institution to end them. Despite the clamor taking place over DNA profiling, however, the legal system remained fairly well insulated from the disputes. For the most part, judges declined to declare that the technique itself was flawed and not ready for use in the legal system. Instead, they handed down remarkably conservative rulings that critiqued only single instantiations of forensic DNA analysis, rather than the technological system as a whole. Scheck, Neufeld, and the Castro Case Defense attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld had recently taken over the defense of Joseph Castro from a court-appointed lawyer who felt overwhelmed by the DNA evidence in the case.3 Castro was on trial for the February 1987 stabbing murders of twenty-year-old Vilma Ponce, who was six months pregnant at the time, and her two-year-old daughter.4 Castro worked as a...

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