Transcripts For CSPAN Forensic Genetics 20131130

Night, atord, monday nine eastern, live on cspan. Next, using genetics and forensics in crimes and in society at large. The 10th circuit bench and bar hosted a conference in colorado springs. They met for about three hours. Let me try the experiment with the microphone. Ok. Hows this . Great. Well, good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to be here with you today. I would like to thank the organizers for inviting me to come to this very beautiful place. What i would like to talk with you about his morning about this morning as hank mentioned, we will start with a very basic review of dna, what is dna, how it works, why you , andd be interested in it focus on an important intersection between dna and the law, and that is forensic genetics and forensic applications. I will illustrate some of the points with case studies in which the na has been used inference of context. In which dna has used has been used in forensic context. Cells,almost all of our in the nucleus of the cell, we can find dna. The dna is organized along chromosomes. We can observe these under a microscope. If we look very closely at these doubleomes, we see this helix structure, the classic structure of the dna molecule. Dna are these bases, a, t, c, and g. Have 21,000 genes and each gene encodes an important component of our body, an important protein or enzyme treated or enzyme. We can think of the dna sequence as the bodys instruction manual, it is the shock menu for the human body. I will show you a sequence here. This is about 3000 basis dna bases. Each of our cells has about 3 billion dna base pairs. What im showing you here is one millionth of the entire human genome. If i were to show you a picture like this one every second, it would take me 12 days to show you the entire human genome. That is the amount of information we are looking at when we try to sequence the whole human genome and is one of our major goals today, to provide whole sequences of humans and other animals, as well. That sequence allows us to understand more about our diseases. Tions to with 90 accuracy, if i had your dna sequence i could predict your eyecolor. If we had a saliva or blood samples from a crime scene, we can predict certain physical traits with some degree of accuracy from the dna sequence. For a long time, the barrier to obtaining the sequences was cost. This slide shows you the cost of the first human genome, sequenced in 2000 three. The cost of the human genome project, altogether, was about 3 billion. Thats a lot of money. If you think about what we spend on Health Care Every day in this country, that is about 10 hours of health care spending. That helps put it into perspective. A few years later, in 2007, a second genome was sequenced, still at the cost of 100 Million Dollars punitive when we started sequencing human genomes in 2009, the cost came down to 29 thousand dollars because of technological developments. As of the end of last year, we went down to three house and dollars to 4000 3000 to 4000. That represents a million full decline in price in less than a decade. I dont think there is any other technology that can boast that kind of decline in cost in so little time. For the cost of an mri, we can get your entire dna sequenced. Unlike an mri result, your sequence wont change. This gives us a tremendous amount of information about each and every human who is sequenced. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are being sequenced in various biomedical studies. Family toirst human be completely sequenced is a family from utah. That just happens to be my wife and her children. For me, we had an exercise in personal genome that turned out to be very fulfilling. Occasionally, in our dna sequence here is a sequence shown on this slide. A couple of helix, the bases, and an occasionally and occasionally a mutation occurs. This is what we learned from sequencing that one family. We were able to estimate the rate of mutation, how often do these occur . Each time we reproduce, we transmit about 30 new mutations to our offspring. Most of these are in the 99 of dna that is noncoding, it means it does not actually make proteins, structural components in the body. Of occasionally occasionally these mutations do affect the genes, and they can actually cause disease. This was a great quote from Lewis Thompson from lewis thomas, the capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of dna that is a lovely quote because it tells us the introduction of genetic variation, this is what allows us to adapt to a changing environment. This gives us the wonderful physical diversity we see in a room full of people like this. Although these mutations can cause disease, they also allow us to adapt. Natural question that comes up in this context is how much do we differ . If these mutations happen each time we reproduce, how much variation is there among humans . If we look at identical quote at identical twins, these are natures clones. We identify them at zero dna aces dna bases. We look at unrelated humans, do you have any guesses as to how much an unrelated pair of humans differs at the dna level . One in what . It is not very much, one in a thousand. At the dna level, this most fundamental unit of our biology, we are 99 point nine percent identical. There is an Important Message therapy if we compare ourselves to the nearest ilog correlatives , the champ, we are 99 identical to the chimp. This is for dna sequences we can actually line up and compare. If we compare ourselves to the mouse, we differ at about 1 6 to one third of our genes. If you compare this to broccoli, we are mostly different from broccoli at the dna level. [laughter] have 3think about it we billion dna bases. 3 million dna bases. Differencesmillion on average between each pair of humans. Provides the basis for forensic identification. Of us is genetically unique, unless we are an identical twin. To 4 are roughly 3 million million differences between individuals, which means there are two to the 3 millionth power possible combinations of these differences. This ensures that all of us are genetically unique. The implication, then, is if isugh genetic variation tested, each of us can be uniquely identified. And we dont need to look at every difference. We just need to look at a subset of those differences. In, as you know, is found nearly all cells of the body. Letter, semen, hair, and even quite often in fingerprints. Blood, semen, hair, and even quite often in fingerprints. Dna from an evidentiary sample can be matched and compared with dna from a suspect to implicate or exonerate that person. That is what we will be talking about for the next several minutes. We have some celebrated examples of dni of dna identification. One of the questions was, was this really saddam or was this a decoy . The na had been extracted from his two sons earlier that year. Froma had been extracted his two sons earlier that year. From thee was created suspected saddam and compare with his two sons. There was a match between his two sons and Saddam Hussein for a number of locations, helping to prove that this was in fact Saddam Hussein. Last month this article was published, where the last victim of the Boston Strangler dna was identified on that victim mancould be traced to the who had accused who had been accused of being the Boston Strangler, but who was killed in prison before he was tried on those charges. We have this famous example, the worlds most famous Navy Blue Dress. The one on which a dna sample turned a he said she said case into a president ial impeachment. The na evidence has served very important roles in a number of high profile cases and in everyday crime as well. What are we actually looking at when we try to identify people from their dna . These something called short tandem repeat. I am illustrating that here. Here is part of a sequence. Ist of this sequence repeated over and over again. That is why it is called a tandem repeat. It is a short one, it is only four bases. The important thing is these repeats tend to bury in their number from individual to individual. Chromosome five they may have one repeat from the mother and to repeats from the father. Dna, we cant hanks see he has six copies on his paternal chromosome and four copies in his maternal chromosome. You would be able to tell his dna apart based on the number of these repeats at a specific location in the genome. Here are some specific locations. Coded these4 are the core short tandem repeats. They are typically used in friends at applications. They are on different chromosomes that ensure they are independent of each other, that is an important property, we will talk about that in a minute. Suppose we want to look at a couple of these. We can label them with a blue and green label here. And then what we have to do is make lots of copies of just that little piece of the chromosome that has that repeat in it. Of the use a technique called pcr to do that. So this is sort of our xerox machine for dna. This is a pcr machine in my lab. Individual,from an we load it into that pcr machine , and what comes out our dna just the ones with interest, just the ones that contain a repeat we want to examine. Importantly, from individual to individual the sizes of those fragments are going to be different. A are going to be different in length because of this variation they are going to be different in length because of this variation of the repeat tandem number. We use a process called electrophoresis for dna products. In this case it is pcr products from five individuals. We load them into a gel i can this. We into a gel like this. We apply a electrical current. Ones with the shorter fragrance, with the fewer repeats, can we go through this gel very rapidly. If they are larger it takes them longer. We can start to see patterns. These are five different individuals, five different patterns. St ours. Two different you can see there is a lot of variation from individual to individual and the pattern of these str lengths. Lets take an example. Here we have several dna samples that we are going to load into the gel. We have the victims he na, an evidentiary sample, and three suspects. Dna, an evidentiary sample, and three suspects. Find that suspect 1, 2, or three left dna at the crime scene. None of them left for treatable dna at the crime scene. May have leftcts dna or the data could be inconclusive. From thehe dna sample victim and evidentiary sample and from the three suspects. We load them into our gel. Those are the pcr products appear. Run and look at the patterns. Betweenone see a match the evidentiary sample and any of the suspects . Shout out if you seize which suspect matches the evidentiary sample. One, thats exactly right. He look for a pattern match between the evidentiary sample and any one of the suspects. If you were looking at a crime lab report, you would get something that looks like this. This is a essentially what i showed you turned on its side. Each peak represents the position of one of those fragrance fragments that i mentioned. We are looking at 10 different rs all at once. What we look at are the positions of these peaks and for d16le, the16 here here, would you say that is a match . No, its inconclusive. Let me take you to how we use this as a real practice. What he years ago, Michael Scott was accused of a homicide case in salt lake city. There was a note the na evidence. He was identified ultimately through a fingerprint on a piece of duct tape. He was also accused of the rape of 214yearold girls in salt lake city. The question was does the dna sample match the suspect . At that time the crime lab was using what our card what are called rf lps. The same principles i showed you apply here. What we have loaded into this gel, he have the victims dna, andave the defendants dna, then we have free samples from the evidentiary sample loaded at different concentrations. Pattern in the defendant, heres the pattern in the evidentiary sample. Is this a match or not . What do you think . I see some heads nodding. This was established as a match at the time. Is this sufficient to put him in jail . To convict him . We have tot because ask the question how common would this profile be in the general population . We do some statistics, that i will not talk about here, and we estimate the frequency of this profile in the population of in thencestry, population of european ancestry is one in 50. It is not convincing enough to establish the identity of that evidentiary sample. We look at another repeat system at another chromosomal location. Evidentiary sample and are defendant, is that a match . Yeah, it is a match. Again, we asked how frequent is this profile in the general population, in our reference population. It is one in 70. We have two pieces of information, one with a frequency of one and 50 and a nether with a frequency of one and 70. 50 and another with a frequency of one in 70. Now we have more information. We looked at a third system. Again, a match. The estimated frequency was one in late 90. 90. Urth system one in a fourth system, in this case the suspect got the same length of tandem repeats from both his parents. The frequency of that is about one in 10. All four of those frequencies, we multiply them together and we say how how often would someone in the general population have the first profile, the second one, the third one, and the fourth one . That turned out to be one in 3 million. Time the crime lab was using four of the systems. This gave us a probability of someone else in the general population having this profile of one in 3 million. That was sufficient to convict him of the rapes of the two teenage girls. He was convicted of the homicide and now he is serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. This just shows several cases that i have been involved in over the years. A year after the decorso case this was a multiple rape place. Rape case. Sere were five of these rflp ystems and tandem repeats. The point, the root probability that someone else had that same profile went to one in 400 million. By 1999, we were using the pcr rs. Ed st ar with nine of the systems putting all that information together, we had a random match in 215lity of one billion. Of one of the questions a prosecutor asked was how many people are there on the face of the earth. Gives the jury the idea that it is pretty unlikely that anyone else would have that same profile. The important thing here is as we incorporate more information, these probabilities tend to get smaller and smaller. This case was exceptional because in this case the endant was a member of some conservative assumptions had to be used in estimating the probability. As you can see, we get down to some probabilities here, in the case of the Navy Blue Dress the random match probability was one in 8 trillion. Used toence can be exonerate the innocent. This is a case i worked on a few years ago where a man had been the murder of a former girlfriend. He spent 19 years in prison. His ychromosome dna was examined and it was an exclusion. As of this month, 300 convicted him americans convicted americans have been exonerated read they have spent 13 and a half years in prison. Not only did dna evidence excluded them, it identified the actual perpetrator. Are issues, of course, that come up in dna analysis. Dna is not magic. Becan be altered, it can inaccurate. We haves of questions to address is the chain of custody, was there the potential of the innate contamination, or was the dale analyst appropriately and interpreted accurately . The reference population, it is sufficiently matched for ancestral background. I think this is another important question. Was the expert really an expert in the area under consideration . Is useda evidence routinely as tens of thousands of criminal cases over the year. Contains dnase profiles of more than 12 million americans. Therell there were also arrestees in that eight obese and that database. From dakotas database, something that is controversial, when you have an have an and evidentiary have an evidentiary sample there are more than 200,000 criminal investigations. The use of this kind of evidence is becoming increasingly common, even in everyday burglaries. Dna testing is sometimes used at a cost of 1000 to 2000 per case. Number ofa interesting ongoing developments in this field. It is possible to estimate approximately the ancestry of the contributor of a dna sample. This is another controversial area but has been used in a number of investigations now. Take the dna sample and try to figure out the ethnic background of the person who contributed to it. As i mentioned earlier, predict certain physical features. There is a specific gene] three look where i can specific gene where i can look at three variants and identify people who have red hair am a sometimes referred to as the red hair gene. We can predict eye color accurately in a 90 of cases. We can even estimate age. An estimate of the age of the contributor of the sample. The book are working on rapid ena typing at the crime scene. People are working on rapid dna typing at the crime scene. Helping to decide what is appropriate, how can we best use these elements . One thing i always enjoy about talking to groups of judges, this group has the collective wisdom to help figure out how we can use this information, use this information to its best possible best purposes and avoid any potentially harmful outcomes. I would be happy to address any questions. [applause] we have time for two or three questions. Please come up to the microphone in front and remember you will be immortalized on cspan. Likes [indiscernible] [indiscernible] how accurate are those predictions and is it worth the money . The question was direct to consumer testing, were you send a saliva sample into a company, they type your dna using a dna chip, and you get bad get back a wad of information about your possible ancestry and risk of disease conditions. Is fought that it is important that companies refer recall as they dont they dont claim that these results have a sufficient accuracy for biomedical applications or for diagnostic purposes. Did send my saliva off to one of the companies. Theas interesting to get results back. The charge was 400 at that time. If you take it with a large grain of salt where it gets problematic is the diseases we are most interested in, things like diabetes, heart disease, common cancers, because they will give you some risk information for those conditions. In theblem is we genetics community has not identified most of the genetic causes of those diseases. They have gotten different results depending on which methods those companies happen to use. I would take it with a grain of salt. Its ultimately recreational. Sometimes, in criminal cases, there are accusations in which you would collect samples from a suspect. Was is a sample that somehow taken and claims to be the evidence sample. Is there a difference between the evidence sample and the collective example . If there really was too much similarity, would that be a suggestion that there actually has been some contamination of the collected sample with the suppose it evidence sample . The question was if you are and evidentiary sample collected at the crime scene with a sample you have taken from the suspect, could there be suspiciously too great a resembles between them . Yes. Typically what we see is if rs are of those core st successfully typed, all 13 of them are going to match. That is not really a surprise. Is a veryportant here accurate accounting of the chain the whole and sequence. There have been contamination issues, sometimes two to lab errors sometimes due to lab errors. It there are several known cases in which the dna case the dna evidence didnt turn out to be correct. We think the rate in general is very low. Thank you. Ofwe will have a half hour q a with the entire panel at the overall session. , shenandoahaker back, is on her way up. We are moving from genetics to anthropology but moving but staying in the area of forensics. She will talk about her great expertise. As soon as we find the right powerpoint. Excellent. Thank you to the organizers for inviting me to speak to you today. I think i am the anthropology of this section. Everybody was talking about dna. Whendelighted to be here we want to do is use a wonderful set up lynn 30 save death when jordi gave us. Amazing simple code in our body that manifests in such interesting ways. Bodies,ve out to actual putting those genes into bodies and then the interface between the gene, the genotype, the phenotype, but we actually see how they impressed hims cells. The interface with the as they interface with individuals behavior. Although professor jordi may talk may have talked about we have a gene that can predict hair and eye color, there is so much we do not understand about those genes and how they come to express themselves. Domain of us into the anthropology. Trying to put those genes that have a long evolutionary history and looking at them across space and through time. Again, anthropology, this wonderful discipline that allows us to not only consider cultural behaviors but the physical itselfment and the body and how that has changed over time and across space. Of the core of anthropology is the one of comparison and looking at variation. Again, across time and space. We will will see is move from different biogeography biograph ifferent geo ies to look at those changes that have taken place. Im sorry. To be able to move deep time, 6 million years ago, we cannot study those soft tissues and those bodies we see around us. Although the genome is helping us understand the time. Is return to the skeleton and human means. Us that our biological anthropologists study the human remains, the heart tissue that was left over. Paleoanthropology repair leo or paleoecology paleoanthropology or paleoecology can tell us about with the ancestors ate, how they attracted with their environment, but also their evolutionary relationship between each other. Most recent work on skeletal remains. This is what i trained in. This is what i was particularly interested in, a small group fremont, that lived in the basin about 1000 years ago. These people that lived around the margins of this complex society saw what it was like to live in that countryside. The interactions in particular between groups and households physical anthropology, in dealing with stop with soft tissue and living people and look at just how a modern environment and how that is they areowth still interested in the underlying skeleton. Folks that work with living peoples have been called into friends ework more recently, in particular to look at age in. Ndividuals thats enough type is interesting. What we are here for today is forensics. I have been using this lovely chart tothis lovely teach rented. This lovely chart. Critics has been added to forensics has been added to it. Hearing about masquerades and the analysis of these remains that are coming from that to make that started their way into the Public Perception of the kind of work we do behind the scenes. So, what is forensic anthropology . You will probably get a different definition from all forensic anthropologists. They havent decided what they what they are yet. They are trying to carve out a niche for themselves, folks that specialize in just dealing with issues ind legal temporary events. , those arepack individuals working on hawaii. Servicemen. Fbi employs a few anthropologists. Most anthropologists are employed by medical examiners and there are few and far between. He students are coming racing. N, trying to get these jobs and there really arent that many. I put a couple of urls appear urls up here. They are trendy come up with the standards for data that is collected in most folks involved in frantic anthropology and in have an application with their work. Of research we do has applications to medical context. It is us minding our own business. And then the medical examiner will contact us or we are called in for human rights six for human rights. Are recovering remains, creating biological profiles from those remains. We can be of some use to the medical examiners. The kind of weains we often work with, are working with complete skeletons at time to mull whether we are frantic specialists or applied forensic folks. Excavating remains within their maintaining control of artifacts or evidentiary traces, whatever they may be. Also skilled with working very fragmentary remains. Or severely altered remains. Here we see a severely burned individual. Something is remains that were recovered from archaeological site, we seem in todays systems we see many of the different skills. We are being drawn into severely or remainsremains for mass disasters. This is from the former yugoslavia, which i will talk about my work over there just a little bit today to just show we havethings that learned in archaeological to more are applicable recent mass killings and disasters. Whether we are specialists or dealing with the application of forensic techniques, we Start Building a biological profile of the individual. Fragmentary are the most. Rastically decomposed we create something called a biological profile, where he asked a series of nested questions, moving from putting them into big categories of as large as, is it a bone, is it human . That may seem silly but any but 30 of ourat work is it is not bones, it is rocks. Like ws come in common as human hands that come in as human hands during hunting season. How many are there . Removeling, trying to that set of body or multiple bodies, sorting out howdy folks are in there, it is something we do it very small fragments. Stars by where dna is helping us these days immensely. If we can get dna out of the collagen, bones, or if we. Re allowed to take samples Party Relations dont want samples taken from the remains. We have this great working relationship that helps us. Now that we put our individuals and these broad demographic categories, now we try to pull them out. What is unique about their lives that tells us something about them . This individual, you can see, has some extensive dental work. We use with frantic to solve the time. Had was us that the kind of foods they are eating. You can see there is an exit left eye, with a large radiating fracture. Marks on the bone about horse modem events, was the body moved about postmortem events, was the body moved . What animals have gotten to it . How has the via how has the environment altered . If we are working in contemporary events, ideally a positive identification. This is where the dna allows and and a person to be found. In Prince George context we do not have those names. Of what i wanted to turn to mama the remainder of the talk is that area of trauma. It is an area that forensic or biological anthropologists have a loss to fish reached to the legal system. My interests started, once again , looking at violence in the past couple warfare in the past, as well as gender conflicts. It is marks on the bone. Long history of studying, in anthropology. We are interested in human theirors when they used own tools and cut meat off the bones, when they start to break bones open. Work, lookingntal at the small marks on fragments there is a long history of anthropology and paleoanthropology. How far back does collective violence go and warfare . Can we really see conflict between individuals and groups . How does it change . When we get different settlement patterns how does it change . When we get two different kinds of weapons this is a finely honed skill that has great application. Is understanding of trauma based on the biomechanics of own. We are able to predict a fair amount of how bone will fracture. Own is this wonderful composite material. It is both rigid and flexible because it is made of organic and inorganic materials. It allows a great deal of flexibility. At certain points it fails. We understand how bones fail under tension and compression. This is what we have used to understand the nature of what we are seeing in the bone. The other questions we ask about trauma, the timing of the event. I am not going to talk about antimorgan trauma and taymor more to him trauma. Case of thishe individual, she has a well heeled nasal fracture, this line right here in it was a broken nose and you can see how smooth the bone is in the area. It is wellheeled. She survived whatever it was that broke her nose. Prehistoric of our fremont females that i was interested in in gender violence. Perimotembe trauma and postmortem events. What is carnivores, insects, plants . Thean start to distinguish classes of weapon. Was it a sharp, course weapon . A projectile type of weapon . How quickly was it coming in . Plasticastic and properties of the film, the bone, theof the faster it comes in it feels like it would glass. These areas are fairly predictable about fractures. Here, looking at around such as the head . Long tubes as the backbone . Those will have different Biomechanical Properties and the physics will change. The age of the individual. Lost bone density will fracture fracture in a different way than a toddler who has a lot of collagen in his bones. Covering and protection, even the amount of hair on the head has been shown to influence. Ow that weapon can penetrate of course, being humans and learning to protect ourselves can alter how we predict. If when i was first asked to give this talk, and i have to would be five minutes and judge matheson has heard this talk and a variety of different forms i said i am going to get rid of all of my historic cases and judge matheson said, own know, i love them. It, the i thought about more i thought how this illustrates really nicely how we hone our skills in working in cases that are prehistoric or historic in context, how we bring those skills into more in manylegal cases, and way what we learned from those forensic context actually help ando back to these historic prehistoric cases and understand, interpret what we see better. It is this wonderful process, and ability to work in both of these worlds. We are learning in both contexts. Illustratesf talton a couple of cases of violence interpretation. It tells a really nice one, to be able to illustrate blunt force, sharp force, projectile before we take it to a more recent setting. 1461attle of talton from was supposed to have been one of the most bloodiest battles on english soil. It was a battle of the war of the roses, the longrunning civil war. It occurred on palm sunday in 1461. Reportedly 100,000 men were on the field and some 20,000 killed. We do know there were thousands of men killed that day. When i was doing my dissertation work onto mystic violence in england, the university i was working out at bradford got called in to excavate a max a masquerade. Folks were expanding a garage on this manor house on earth as they were excavating out. Individuals that had extensive trauma. They were comingled. These ande sorting the jewels out was quite a challenge. Wonderful folks that worked with excavation and gp are. You can see the mapping and the angles on the side. We have to understand the historical and social context that we are dealing with. Man. Is that evil wounded we have Sharp Force Trauma with blades, hammers, projectiles. We knew we could be looking for a variety of different wounds. Here is a good example of Sharp Force Trauma. This individual has a broadsword that went through his left eye, through his nose, and down into the mandible. M has been a wonderful tool for us, being able to say the type of sharp one force trauma and type of blade. Blunt force is more difficult to see. It is more nondescript. It gives us this nice radiating andture, both radiating circumvention will. Eye. Ives us a bulls some blunt force, if it is very localized, we get some nice shapes such as these nice squares and doing wound profiles we are able to see these were the top spikes from a whole ask probably ased finishing blows. This individual had multiple injuries and these holes are in the top of the head. Wounds many projectile of the square hole in the head, it is not so square if you look closely. It was a diamond with a hole in the middle. I is what happens when this it is what happens when this diamond tech goes all the way through. Notice the radiating fractures that extend out in extend out. The energy is being dissipated and those fractures. Of we can we can determine the velocity. While i was working on towten, i was on a team with the Smithsonian Institution that went in to do some human rights work in former yugoslavia. We were asked to work in croatia because he had so many mass graves come out that the path ill just asked for our help in training in both excavation and some severely decomposed remains. Mass graves of a different sort but nonetheless ealing with familiar features that we saw. U. N. Oversight by the working with them on how to excavate the graves and how to deal with massive bodies and try to get i logical profiles. Here you see something that looks like it is a body. A leg and heres a lake and here is a head and here are some arms. Now,happened, that we know is that many graves were exchanged, which damaged the remains. I have been given one minute so i will finish up. We did not see much trauma beyond the head, but we saw extensive trauma in the grave,. Hich is not surprising notice the shattered in the lake notice the shatter in the leg. Things back together again, you can actually find entrance wounds, exit wounds, trajectories that will help you identify at least which direction that force was coming in through. The heads, unlike talton, were shattered again. Theforce was much greater, bone could not recover from the elastic properties. Once again, reconstructing them we see our entrance and exit wounds. In this case what they want to know was were these just losions that had cost caused the bodies to go into multiple pieces or actual or are we actually seeing executions . What we have is an execution. This is the base of a skull with a knife entrance wound right here, nice and clean and the exit wound through the top of the head. This individual was down with his head bowed down and had been executed. The other thing we learned a lot about that we have taken back to our archaeological context is about postmortem events. My time is up so i will finish on this. Those more events, what can happen with bodies and differentiating between what happens perimortem and postmortem. Everyone gets excited by holes in the head. Are these gunshot wounds, are these other kinds of torture . That the armyd is was using probes, they dont have penetrating radar to use. At the time they were using probes with ball bearings to find these graves. The were very very good at it. You test the sensitivity of the soil, smell the soil, and these guys would find them. It also creates damage on the bone. Able toontext, being distinguish between antimore dumb injuries that tell us who that person was,. More dumb person was, antemortem d it is where forensic anthropologists have been most helpful. Thank you. [applause] we have time for one or two questions at this point. If you have questions please come forward to the microphone. I know it wasnt the worlds most uplifting and encouraging and optimistic hesitation but certainly there must be questions. Veryank you for that interesting presentation. I have had the opportunity to talk to a number of physicians that treated the victims of the shooting in our aurora last year. Traumatized by being exposed to what many of them had not seen before, which were the wounds caused by these highpower not seen before, the world by the assault weapons. I wonder if you can describe what you observed as the difference to what happens to bone or bodies with an assault opposed to more conventional strike. That is a very good question. We are used to seeing this but when you get these volunteer the fastered in, something goes through it, the more sad or going to have it. Shatter you are going to have. I can only imagine what they saw and aurora. You have very interesting mashable indistinguishable parts. Ideally, the soft tissue and things contain bones a little bit. Had executionsou with highpowered rifles. You have something that looked very much like a human body but not really a head. You have a little pile of bits and bones because most of the hat had not made its way in. I do not know if that answers your questions. Very difficult questions. Recovery and excavation is key. Mapping every little piece that you can and then reconstruction. You can put the parts back together but it does mean recovery. ; i have worked extensively on the montana up ariel burial act. I am wondering if you can discuss what means you have to investigate the sites that are nativesle to american that are not invasive . Question. A lovely i wouldnt have liked to give it a whole talk on would have liked to give a whole talk on these issues. It is a very contentious, emotional law when it passed. That many of us who horked closely with indigenous populations have gotten much better at communicating with each other about the process. Who knewhe problem is what went on. We found more interaction with the elders, tribal groups, bringing them in to see what we are doing. I have worked in cases where they burned sage or insisted doing theof those analysis of curve before or after. I am totally cool with that. It was great. Again, communication. Coming from working in human rights cases as opposed to medical cases, examiners do not see the work we do behind the scenes. We are on the ground, we are often interacting very closely with families and relatives. We are working with different cultural practices. Has been in the press more. They understand how much it can help them. It is a matter of negotiation and conversation and educating each other. [applause] a fascinating talk. Im glad we did not schedule her just before lunch. We have had genetics, anthropology. We are now moving to a deeper mystery, u. S. Supreme court. Is the leading experts on forensic dna in the courts. He is going to tell us what he thinks they have been doing with foreign debt dna. David . Forensic dna . David . I want to thank you for allowing me to talk about something that i am still writing about. You do not have to believe everything i say. I need to find my slides. Here we are. I am going to talk about two cases only. I will refer to others that were on the docket and decided by the Supreme Court most recently in june. King is a case which arose when alonzo king was arrested for waving a shotgun at a number of people. His thing ofk i prints, photographs, and dna in the form of cheek swabs. After it waslater, determined through a database search that his dna profiled the , matched that in a rape case about four years. Arlier he was charged and convicted of n to the head of a 50 three rd woman as he raped her. They held that the states law off the rising authorizing superstitious suspicious dna was almost applied unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. Even before the Supreme Court , he issuedto discuss a stay of the maryland judgment. They wrote that there was a fair likelihood that this was on reverse. It please the court. Dna samples charged with violent crimes. There have been 200 25 matches, 75 prosecutions and 42 convictions. That is good. I bet if you conducted a lot of unreasonable searches and seizures you would get more convictions true. That proves absolutely nothing. Immediately i knew this was not going to be a unanimous court. The court split by the narrowest of margins, meeting the chief justice predictions. To the kennedy wrote majority opinion. When he announced it in court, Justice Scalia to be stepped of reading from the dissent. For 11 minutes he excoriated his breathern and suggest it strained the credulity of the credulous and that it lacked minimal competence and the english lake went and paved the way for a genetic area in which thernment could peer into dna of nearly all of us. What did the court actually hold . It was indeed a search. It was not an issue in the case. The constitutionality turns on the balance of state and individual interests. What is remarkable about the majority opinion is that its focused almost exclusively on in interests of the state pretrial processing of detainees, saying if someone might be guilty of another crime not to convict them of that crime but to help make decisions like should they get bail or not. Focus asks why does it seem that Justice Kennedy is the last person on earth to have seen law and order . [applause] [laughter] the fourthsteeped in amendment, answer should be clear. For the halfcentury the court that the Standard Approach to the Fourth Amendment is a role with categorical exceptions for certain kinds of searches. It makes the search unreasonable of aself in the absence war of probable cause. There are a handful, at most three cases in which the court has moved directly to a test of interests like the one i described. The question became how to law. D the im going to suggest there are a number of ways that could have been done. One could have applied the sectionk but found an an exception. The only exception is the special needs exception which is a source of immense confusion. The idea is that there are some needs above and beyond the normal Law Enforcement acquisition of evidence for prosecution or investigation that warrants a bouncing to get away from the absolute rule because they were not really attending an absolute rule in these situations. The problem with applying that here were cases that i will not go into which said if the primary purpose of the program was really Law Enforcement, you cannot use this exception. I believe there are ways around it. Calabrese did it some years ago. I have left reprints of my article. Please take the site do not have to carry them on the plane. Not looking into what someone is thinking but only the kind of physical traits the physical anthropologists might be interested in peer that would apply to fingerprinting and arguably dna. The court did not do that. The court argued that. They could have balanced outside of the framework. Thisght have abolished a yale professor that has been urging for years. General matter. The court did not do that. To narrow it to a somewhat narrow cast class of cases. As for the balancing itself, there is interest in pretrial processing. As for the individual interest, it is said to be minor. There is minimal intrusion and the impact on privacy was small given statutory safeguards. I want to spend a moment on the scientific safeguards the court was referring to. Enforcement, since the first , has beena testing assuring us that the ones that nonthreatening, nonrelevant to anything else. Not every judge believes them. Is a short segment of the oral argument with a ninth circuit case. This is a severe intrusion. This is almost the full history of your ancestors. Junk dna is important. That is right. I read that in the New York Times. As much as we loved the New York Times that is not part of the record. They are reporting that a isent consortium of research a successor to the human genome project and had found that 80 of the genome was functional. The headlines had appeared. There was criticism of the times and other papers as well as the scientists for their party. Welcome to the special edition. Im sitting here today with my coeditor of the blog. The big headline they came up with was at best misleading. They all know this is misleading. I have trouble with that. They know it is not true. They should not say it. They are saying it gets them in the headlines. You should never do that. Says he do not distort the science to get into the headlines. If you want to follow more of i will make this brief. It because i was involved with it. We recruited a number of distinguished scientists. We could have used more. Is tempted to simply explain what the relatives issues on junk dna were. Some said it was not a scientific term and should drop out of the debate. Anyway, it is an interesting brief. It is easily obtained. The flick of the brief. Im going to skip over this where you hear judge kaczynski argued that he does not really care that theres a statute of making this. They can be changed. The Supreme Court clearly rejected that view. Once the statutes are in place, we will give a presumption that they are followed. What is left . Work the sameng in cases that are not serious offensive . Times you see the phrase seriously defense never defined. Is it offensive . If it is vital, the federal law is unconstitutional. You go into a campsite. You get arrested. Your dna is supposed to be taken under federal law. About uniform application. That is something that the courts addressed. Idea that this was a reasonable kind of search. Is it not u if the Police Arrest someone because they want to get the dna sample . Even if they do have probable cause . Wants to goate after smaller matters and build up the database . Can it do so by changing the way dna is collected . Cut in this. This was the point of concern. This was the fathers of our country that would not have welcomed a real cheek swab. Little cheek swab . They were doing exactly that for forensic uses. Directed tohis other members of the family and isan be done strongly favored in denver by the District Attorney . A different balance of interests . What if it is done before any charges made before an arraignment . This is how britain build up the database. It is criminally active. There is a lot of lots of work left for the lower courts. Good luck to you. Now to williams versus illinois. Justice alito has this into cases this morning. The first case is williams versus illinois number 108505. Involves dna evidence and the confrontation clause of the sixth amendment. Sandy williams was convicted in state court in illinois for abducting, raping, and robbing a young woman. The victim identified williams asked her attacker. It matched the friends are the forensic sample. Williams objected to the testimony by the dna expert who testified for the state. After the petitioner was convicted, he fouled an appeal fouled anhat appeal claiming that it violated laws. Anyone interested in understanding the holding will have to have our opinions. Justice breyer has fouled a concurring opinion. Justice thomas has this occurring in the judgment. Notice the same lineup but in a but more refracted fractured court. Justice alito refuses to explain the basis. I am expected to do that in seven minutes . Courtssnt he give the holding . Because there is no holding. Read the opinions, the majority of the Court Rejects every. That is offered. It talks about the right to be confronted with the witnesses against an individual. They have struggled with the application of that as defined in a cropper case in 2012. In the crawford case in 2012 that everything turns in the statement of the testimonial. The court struggled to find that concept to work now in three cases. We know from the first case that a laboratory cannot simply produce a notarized form that and that that can be introduced in evidence in a criminal case for the prosecution. Without a witness to lead to aat result dissent by judges that said what the court ought to be doing is in fact not applying normal confrontation privileges to Laboratory Work because they are different than ordinary witnesses. The second case of the trilogy, Justice Ginsburg wrote an opinion in a case in which the state of new mexico used as a on alcohol a dui measurement, someone from the same laboratory who had not been involved in the testing at all. The person who did the testing was on administrative leave for unclassified reasons. Only one agreed with the court and that was Justice Scalia. Justice sotomayor or stressed the limits of the opinion. , aslimited being the report to which there is no live nevers for, was introduced into evidence. The question becomes what if it is not introduced into evidence . That is the williams case. In williams, this is off to a firm in maryland. The firm deduced the rapists profile that often requires a judgment, mixed samples, or producing real issues. Especially when there are low quantities of dna. They wrote a report and sent it back to the state. An analyst from illinois punched in the profile to the computer which search the database, that a hit and she also use another to come up with a probability even lower than the ones we heard this morning. This is 12 zeros for an picked atperson random. Not attemptte did to introduce the report. Instant it called the illinois analyst to describe her database. There is noor said confrontation because i am not getting what another lab did. The prosecutor referred to the male dna profile found in the semen which the analyst had no direct involvement either. I am going to go through the main theories. Y opinions isurality that it is not a confrontation issue because they laboratory was not being an accuser. This is a witness. This gives very complex. You have to be a lover of hearsay. It involves the truth of the matter asserted. Isn the alito group said it to eliminate this. All these words are taken. We modified our view in the treatise. He had an interesting point. There are cases in which seven of three might work. It is not the williams case. They offer this purpose. It is not fully satisfactory. Things are a mess. It is very hard for lower courts to know what to do. Is reallyental issue rather the courts are in the business of trying to guess what five justices would do for inconsistent reasons and say that is the law or c. K. Coherent. To apply in dealing cases or seek a coherent theory to apply in dealing cases. To and whimsically. En