Once in a while I catch one of those Bill Curtis shows on TV. He's the guy that does American Justice and Cold Case Files. In virtually every one of the Cold Case stories, the crook is done in by his DNA: a cop will go through a 20-year-old file, find a stained pair of underwear, send them to the lab, and bingo, a match is discovered and the quiet weird guy at the end of the street is put away for life.
Whenever I see the show, I always think, "Man, if it wasn't for DNA they'd never get any of these guys." That's because the DNA is all the cops and prosucution have, and it's virtually all they need. There's a one in a zillion chance that the DNA belongs to somebody else, so if it's your spit on the beer bottle then you're done like dinner.
But what if that wasn't the case? What if you needed more than just DNA to pin somebody down?
From the NYT:
“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
Dr. Frumkin is a founder of Nucleix, a company based in Tel Aviv that has developed a test to distinguish real DNA samples from fake ones that it hopes to sell to forensics laboratories.
The planting of fabricated DNA evidence at a crime scene is only one implication of the findings. A potential invasion of personal privacy is another.
Next question: who says it hasn't been done a hundred times already?
1 comment:
Well, for the cold case files it certainly has not been done, as the perpetrators were not aware that their DNA was even an issue at the time the were committing the crime. But what about someone setting someone up for a fall?
Have you ever seen Out of the Past, with a young Robert Mitchum and an even younger Kirk Douglass (his second movie, and already moving with tremendous confidence and presence). It is my favorite Film Noir, and I like a lot of film noir.
There could be a screen play to develop, making use of some of these ideas from the sick, criminal side of your mind.
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