DNA May Not Always Catch the Culprit
We’re relying more and more on DNA evidence to catch rapists and murderers, but there’s evidence that psychological bias plays a part in how this evidence is interpreted. Labs aren’t always as objective as we’d like them to be.
Recently, we’ve seen cases where DNA evidence freed innocent people from prisons, but sometimes, contaminated DNA evidence causes police to create a perpetrator in their minds who doesn’t really exist. This happened in Germany in 2007, when some contaminated swabs caused them to search for–as Vaughan Bell writes in the Observer–an "invincible, transsexual, border-hopping serial killer just to keep the story coherent with the genetic evidence."
read more