Tag Archives: DNA

DNA Identifies Remains of Murdered Jane Doe

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension announced yesterday that a woman who was murdered 35 years ago in Blue Earth has finally been identified.

Michelle Yvette Busha of Bay City, Texas, was 18 years old when she was murdered in Minnesota and had been missing ever since.

On May 30, 1980, Busha’s nude and decomposing body was discovered badly beaten in a ravine off Interstate 90, east of Blue Earth, MN, in Faribault County. A cord was wrapped around her neck, indicating that she died of strangulation. Busha was reported missing in Texas on May 9.

Nine years later Robert Leroy Nelson, a former Minnesota State Patrol trooper, confessed to her murder. Authorities say Busha was hitchhiking when Nelson picked her up. Nelson was given a life sentence in Texas for Busha’s murder and for other charges stemming from child molestation.

On Aug. 12, 2014, as part of the BCA’s effort to ID unidentified human remains, “Jane Doe’s” body was exhumed. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children created a new sketch based on a new scull scan and x-rays from the original autopsy. BCA forensic scientists obtained a complete mitochondrial DNA profile and a partial nuclear DNA profile, which led to Busha’s identity.

Credit must also be given to her parents who submitted a DNA sample to the FBI’s National Missing Person DNA database years ago. The program was initiated in 2000 to assist in the identification of missing persons and unidentified remains. Without that sample, a match could not have been made.

The message is clear. Parents who have missing children should submit a DNA sample to the FBI’s national database.

Guilty or Innocent

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In 1989, drifter Billy Glaze was convicted of killing three Native American women, nineteen year-old Kathy Bullman, twenty-one year-old Angela Green, and twenty-six year-old Angeline Whitebird-Sweet. The murders took place between July 1986 and April 1987. All three women were found nude with their bodies positioned in ways that suggested a serial killer was on the loose. Glaze’s conviction was based primarily on testimony from witnesses and jail inmates along with a note that Glaze had allegedly written confessing to the crimes.

However, after reviewing the case and evidence, attorneys for the Minnesota Innocence Project concluded that no biological evidence linked Glaze to the crimes and that witness testimony was unreliable.

One witness has recanted his testimony that he saw Glaze with Bullman. Others who testified that they saw Glaze near the Green crime scene were relatives or close friends of Green, who had been raped and strangled six weeks before Bullman’s murder. The transient who testified that he had witnessed Bullman’s murder claimed to have witnessed sixty murders. And the jail inmate who produced Glaze’s note admitting that he had killed the women because he was angry, later admitted he was looking for a deal.

In 2009 DNA testing of sperm collected from a vaginal swab of Green excluded Glaze but matched another Minnesota man in the FBI database. DNA testing of a cigarette butt collected a few feet from Whitebird-Sweet’s body also excluded Glaze and matched the same Minnesota man. This suspect had been in and out of jail and was out at the same established times as the victims and is still alive.

Billy Glaze is now seventy years old and suffering from mental illness. He has spent more than twenty-five years behind bars, having been found guilty of first and second-degree murder in the deaths of the three women. Not exactly a choirboy, Glaze confessed ten years ago to a number of murders in California, though he was never prosecuted because his details didn’t match the crimes. His attorneys believe the confessions were false. Also, at the time of his conviction, Glaze adamantly denied he had anything to do with the murders and never wrote the note.

Whatever one might think of Billy Glaze, if he is truly innocent, then he should be freed and compensated for a terrible miscarriage of justice––and the true killer found and prosecuted for these horrific crimes.

DNA Paranoia

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The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Monday that police could collect DNA from people arrested but not yet convicted of serious crimes. The decision allows police to take a quick swab inside a suspect’s cheek when he’s arrested for a rape or a murder.

Twenty-six states already collect DNA from those arrested for felonies or other serious crimes and upload it into a national database run by the federal government. The purpose is, of course, to find matches with unsolved crimes.

The court found that swabbing for DNA was no different under the Fourth Amendment than taking fingerprints. Justice Antonin Scalia, in an unusual coalition with three of the liberal judges, wrote an angry dissent, using the all-purpose slippery-slope argument that the decision will lead to an increased use of DNA testing in violation of the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches.

It’s the same argument used against background checks for gun buyers at private sales. Pretty soon all gun owners could be registered, and then all guns could be confiscated. But the facts regarding swabbing for DNA don’t support that argument.

The portion of DNA that gets stored in law enforcement databases doesn’t reveal anything about one’s particular genetic traits or propensity for disease, despite what the conspiracy theorists assert. It’s simply an identifier, similar to fingerprinting —but much more accurate. Also, DNA is stored by barcode, not by name, with criminal penalties for anyone who violates the rules — just like any forensic evidence used in countless trials in our country.

Last year, Congress passed the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act, which President Obama signed in January. It creates a grants program to help states pay for the expanded system. Katie’s parents have led that effort through the organization DNA Saves. She was brutally raped and strangled at the age of 22 a decade ago. By the time her killer was identified through DNA evidence, he had committed other crimes.

Because DNA is so reliable, it has exonerated hundreds of innocent people and taken many murderers and rapists off the streets. It would have been a crime if the Supreme Court had ruled otherwise.

Why Do The Innocent Confess?

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On September 28th, Damon Thibodeaux, 38, became the 300th prisoner nationwide to have his conviction overturned based on DNA evidence, and the 18th death row prisoner freed based on such evidence according to the Innocence Project. Thibodeaux served 16 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, most of them on death row.

While the above numbers are startling, Thibodeaux was also one of the approximately 25% of wrongfully convicted defendants cleared by DNA evidence who made false confessions, admissions or statements to law enforcement officials.

He was convicted in 1997 and sentenced to death after he confessed to the July 19, 1996, rape and murder of his 14-year-old step-cousin, Crystal Champagne, in Westwego, near New Orleans. DNA testing later showed that he was not the murderer and that the victim had not been raped.

So why in the world would Thibodeaux or any innocent person confess to a crime they did not commit?

Studies have shown that the decision to confess is often seen as a way to avoid an immediate consequence, even though the confession likely increases the risk of incurring a future consequence. Other studies have found that those who are truly innocent naively believe that the truth will come out in a fair trial and that justice will prevail.

Personality traits can be another factor. Some people are simply more malleable and suggestible than others, allowing experienced interrogators to lead them into a false set of beliefs. Police have also been known to present false evidence or misinformation, thus increasing a person’s willingness to confess.

How do we decrease the number of false confessions? The Innocence Project believes the single best reform is the electronic recordings of interrogations from the moment Miranda rights are read to a suspect.

In 2003, Illinois became the first state to require that all police interrogations of suspects in homicide cases be recorded.

The Supreme Courts of Alaska and Minnesota have declared that, under their state constitutions, defendants are entitled as a matter of due process to have their custodial interrogations recorded.

Three hundred people have served a combined total 4,013 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. It’s long past time the rest of the states required the video recording of all interrogations.

False Convictions

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Researchers estimate the total number of felony convictions in the United States at nearly a million a year. The vast majority of those who are tried, convicted, and sent to prison are guilty, despite their claims to the contrary. But what percentage is actually innocent? A report released yesterday sheds some light on the issue.

According to a new archive compiled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, more than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years. As appalling as that statistic looks at first glance, less than 100 people a year are falsely accused. That’s a pretty good record, unless you were one of the unfortunate 2,000. In which case, you’d spend a lot of time in prison.

Eight hundred seventy-three of the exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each. Nine out of 10 of them are men and half are African-American. Nearly half of the 873 exonerations were homicide cases, including 101 death sentences. Over one-third of the cases were sexual assaults.

Not surprisingly, DNA evidence led to exoneration in nearly one-third of the 416 homicides and in nearly two-thirds of the 305 sexual assaults. It seems clear that without DNA, most of the exonerated individuals would still be serving time for crimes they didn’t commit.

So how did these innocent people end up in prison in the first place? The most common factor leading to false convictions was perjured testimony or false accusations. Mistaken eyewitness identification and false or misleading forensic evidence were the other major contributors. Defense lawyers, police officers, prosecutors, and judges all share some of the blame in whenever there is a miscarriage of justice. Far too often the rush to find a perpetrator outweighs the search for truth. And the consequences are devastating.

That’s why even one false conviction is one too many.

DNA Frees Another Innocent Man

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Cornelius Dupree with his wife Selman Perkins. Photo courtesy of the AP and The Innocence Project

Texas leads the nation in the number of wrongly convicted inmates, having freed 41 wrongly convicted inmates through DNA testing since 2001—more than any other state.

Cornelius Dupree Jr., sentenced to 75 years in prison in 1980 for the rape and robbery of a 26-year-old Dallas woman a year earlier, was the latest to be declared innocent Tuesday after spending 30 years in prison. Dupree, who always maintained his innocence, holds the dubious distinction of having served more time in prison for a crime he didn’t commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.

He is the 21st inmate exonerated by DNA evidence in Dallas County, which maintains biological evidence decades after a conviction. Craig Watkins, the Dallas County DA, and the first black district attorney in Texas history, has cooperated with innocence groups in reviewing hundreds of requests by inmates for DNA testing. Watkins has reversed what he calls “a convict-at-all-costs mentality” that he says permeated his office before he arrived in 2007.

Dupree spent over half his life behind bars because of mistaken identification, which is not unusual considering 75% of wrongful convictions of people later cleared by DNA evidence resulted from misidentifications, according to the Innocence Project. They recommend that all law enforcement agencies be required to have written policies for identification procedures based on scientific research on eyewitness memory to increase accuracy and reliability.

A Department of Justice study found that even the most experienced officer could inadvertently give subconscious hints to the witness to identify the suspect, resulting in false identification. Thus, an officer who doesn’t know the identity of the suspect should conduct the line-up. Also, under traditional simultaneous lineups, some witnesses will inadvertently begin to compare photos to one another, or persons in live lineups, instead of comparing one photo or one person to their memory. Consequently, the identifications are not as reliable as those conducted sequentially. Photos or persons should be viewed one at a time and presented in random order.

Fortunately for Cornelius Dupree, Texas also has the most generous compensation laws for the wrongly imprisoned in the country. He is eligible for $80,000 for each year he was behind bars, plus a lifetime annuity. He could receive $2.4 million in a lump sum that is not subject to federal income tax. The Texas Legislature passed the compensation law in 2009, after dozens of wrongly convicted men were released from prison. But I’ll bet if you asked him, no amount of money could ever compensate for the thirty lost years of his life.

The Grim Sleeper

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The recent arrest of Lonnie Franklin Jr. may have finally brought an end to the serial killer who targeted African American women known as the Grim Sleeper. Franklin had avoided LAPD police for 25 years. Franklin is believed to be responsible for at least 11 murders and one attempted murder in Los Angeles since 1985. He was called the “Grim Sleeper” because he apparently took a 14-year break from his crimes from 1988 to 2002. Franklin has been charged with ten counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

Franklin had several run-ins with the law over the years, yet his DNA was never logged into the criminal database. It was only after Franklin’s son 31 year old Christopher John Franklin was arrested and ordered to submit a DNA profile that the connection to Lonnie Franklin was made. Detectives used a piece of discarded pizza with Franklin’s DNA to make the link.

But Franklin’s arrest raises an interesting question regarding the use of DNA.

As James Fox, Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern University, pointed out on his Crime and Punishment blog, “Privacy concerns raised by the use of familial DNA to crack the Grim Sleeper murders may create significant problems for the prosecution, should a defense attorney challenge the evidence. Laws permit the collection and storage of DNA data on certain convicted offenders for use in potentially linking future crimes to these same criminals, but not to their blood relatives who happen to have a similar genetic profile. This is not so much a concern for the slippery slope of privacy invasion, but a case of legal quicksand.”

DNA offender database policy is rapidly changing in states. All 50 require that convicted sex offenders provide a DNA sample, and states are increasingly expanding these policies. To date, 47 states require that all convicted felons provide a DNA sample to the state’s database. At least 15 states include certain misdemeanors among those who must provide a DNA sample. DNA databases in all states today are connected to the National DNA Index System, which is run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for federal and state information sharing.

While lawmakers and police agencies would like to expand the use and scope of the DNA database, the ACLU believes DNA data is different from photos and fingerprints of suspects and violates the U.S. Constitution’s ban against unreasonable government searches and seizures.

Last May the U.S. House overwhelmingly passed the “Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act of 2010,” which increases federal funding for DNA testing. Sepich, 22, was raped, strangled and set on fire near her New Mexico home in 2003. DNA recovered was matched three years later to a career criminal when his DNA was entered into the national database after his conviction. This enhancement to “Katie’s Law” — under which DNA is tested in all felony arrests — would increase funding by 5 percent to 10 percent for states to conduct DNA testing and help reduce the backlog of DNA testing.

It would be a real tragedy to see Franklin’s case thrown out of court over issues of DNA collection if he is, in fact, a serial killer. Expect to see more lawsuits filed challenging the growing use of DNA as Congress and politicians seek to expand the scope of the database.

CSI Myths

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The use of forensics in television dramas has created a legal phenomenon known as the “CSI effect.” Jurors today often view forensics as gospel based on what they see on their favorite shows. The August issue of Popular Mechanics magazine attempts to dispel some myths in a cover story entitled, “The Truth About Forensics”.

In real life, many forensic labs are understaffed and have a huge backlog of requests for services. Some state and city forensic departments have mishandled evidence, and since no advanced degree is required for a career in forensics, personnel with minimal credentials staff many of the labs around the country.

But a more serious issue emerged last February when the National Academy of Sciences issued a report noting that, “apart from DNA, there is not a single forensic discipline that has been proven with a high degree of certainty to be able to match a piece of evidence to a suspect.”

While DNA is considered the gold standard of identification, a debate is growing between defense attorneys and forensic experts concerning the scientific validity of fingerprints, footprints, tire tracks, bite marks, blood-splatter patterns, ballistics, hair, fiber, and handwriting analysis. Evidence such as voiceprint analysis and lead analysis of bullets already has been completely discredited.

According to the article, despite the widespread belief in the accuracy of fingerprints, “no studies have proved definitively that fingerprints are unique, and it’s unclear if prints change over time or vary depending on the amount of pressure applied.” Studies quantifying the probability of error in ballistics matching also should be done. Currently, it’s impossible to say with certainty that the marks made on fired bullets are unique to an individual gun.

Alternately, paint analysis has a relatively strong scientific backing and can provide reliable results. While fiber analysis has a foundation in chemistry, more research is needed to determine the criteria for a match. The article points out that current methodology is only sufficient to conclude that fibers could have come from the same type of garment or carpet. Research has also shown that matching hairs using subjective analysis can be highly inaccurate.

Software to help quantify the certainty of fingerprint matches is currently being developed, as well as a database of microscopic tool marks to give statistical significance to the identification of burglars’ tools. But it appears that more forensic research needs to be done. As a writer of police procedurals, forensics often plays a role in the solution of my fictional crime stories. Since I want my novels to be as accurate and believable as possible, I’ll continue to follow the latest research. Hollywood should do the same.

You can read the full article at:

Forensic Fiction

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CSI, CSI Miami, and CSI New York are consistently three of the most watched shows on television. In a recent Nielsen ratings period, both CSI and CSI: Miami finished in the top ten. NCIS, The Mentalist and Criminal Minds also finished in the top ten. Clearly, viewers are fascinated with crime shows, particularly those dealing with forensic science and how it is used to conclusively solve crimes.

But last February, the National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report citing “serious problems” in the scientific evidence being presented every day in courtrooms around the country. The academy found “no forensic method has been rigorously shown able to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.”

And the Supreme Court recently ruled that crime lab reports may be introduced as evidence in court only if defense attorneys can cross-examine the persons who prepared them. The 5-4 decision involved a cocaine trafficking conviction that was based, in part, on evidence obtained from plastic bags found in a car in which the defendant was riding.

Defense attorneys wanted to interview the forensic analyst about how the evidence was collected and tested, but a Massachusetts court turned down their request. Later, the National Innocence Network argued that the testimony was vital because of errors in crime labs across the country.

I’ve written in the past about DNA evidence and how it has been used to free the wrongly convicted. But often DNA and other evidence such as hair, bite-mark comparisons, fingerprints, firearms, tool marks and shoe prints are used to convict individuals in real life, just as in those highly rated, fictional television crime shows.

Take the case of Philip Scott Cannon, a convicted murderer serving three life sentences in an Oregon prison for a 1998 triple homicide. A former Oregon State University researcher in the university’s Radiation Center testified that tests showed bullets found at the crime scene matched those found in Cannon’s garage. He told jurors there was only a 1 in 64 million chance of getting that match. Cannon was convicted primarily on bullet lead analysis. However, the FBI no longer uses bullet lead analysis and considers it unreliable. Cannon’s defense lawyers are challenging the accuracy of his conviction in a hearing scheduled for July 7^th.

It’s anyone’s guess as to how many cases or convictions have resulted from flawed forensic science. The Innocence Project reported that approximately 50 percent of the wrongful convictions overturned with DNA involved invalidated or improper forensic science.

It’s unlikely CSI will offer episodes in which their forensic scientists make mistakes and convict an innocent individual. But viewers who believe that CSI shows are gospel better think again. It’s apparent that the criminal justice system is just beginning to face the fact that many of those sitting in prison today, may have been convicted using discredited forensic science.