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Forensic Science Knowledge Quiz

1.  In what year was the first major article on firearm identification published in the United States?

2.  Approximately how many members make up the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD)?

3.  In what year was the first commercial mass spectrometer put to use?  What was it used for?

Answers at the bottom of this page.  Email us with ideas for future forensic science trivia questions.

From the Associate Managing Editor

Dear Subscribers:

Please join me in congratulating Chief Managing Editor John Collins for being chosen as the first Executive Director for the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD). John served on the ASCLD Board of Directors from 2004-2007 and chaired the Communications Committee, where he created the Crime Lab Minute newsletter, a weekly report on current issues facing crime laboratory management. John brings a unique perspective to the position since he has worked in federal, state and local crime laboratories during his career. Most recently, he has been speaking to members of the criminal justice community about contemporary issues and policies in forensic science.  John also continues to serve as the Director of the DuPage County Crime Laboratory in Illinois. 

Congratulations John!

Jay Jarvis
Associate Managing Editor of Crime Lab Report 

Forensic Science News Headlines

Colorado
Unique Bacteria 'Fingerprint' To Catch Criminals?
Researchers have discovered that each individual possesses a unique bacteria 'fingerprint'.

California
Police waited 2 months to investigate lab tech
It took San Francisco police two months to launch a criminal probe into a drug lab technician suspected of stealing cocaine evidence. 

Maryland
City police crime lab is swamped
the Baltimore Police crime lab is amassing a troubling backlog of cases due to short staffing and a notable uptick in requests from detectives. 

California
SF judge gives prosecutors a week to retest drugs
A San Francisco judge has given prosecutors a week to retest drug samples in 35 pending narcotics cases following allegations that a technician at the police department's drug lab stole cocaine evidence. 

Canada
The dark side of DNA
Contaminated samples, inept analysts and genetic quirks have led to miscarriages of justice 

Indiana
Person shot in Marion Co. crime lab mishap
A man was injured during ballistics testing in the police crime lab downtown when a bullet ricocheted and grazed him in the head. 

North Carolina
SBI to review old cases
The State Bureau of Investigation will examine thousands of oldcases analyzed in its forensic lab two decades ago to look for crucial evidence that may have been withheld from defendants.

Michigan
Lansing must deal with rape kit backlog
OPINION: We need a law that requires law enforcement to notify victims of the status of the DNA testing in their case.

Forensic Science Meetings and Symposia

Forensic Science Knowledge Quiz  (Answers)

1.     1900 in the Buffalo Medical Journal

2.     600

3.     1942
 
The Mass Spectrometer was used by the Atlantic Refining Corporation for petroleum analysis.  It is now now used heavily by crime laboratories in the identification of drug samples and other trace materials.

Media and public policy analysis for the forensic science community

DNA fixation is harmful to justice system and offensive to crime victims

“In a system that often relies heavily on high-tech DNA testing, it was fingerprinting, a practice more than a century old, that succeeded where DNA failed.” – ABC News 

Wednesday, March 17, 2010 by Crime Lab Report                Click here to print

Donald Smith, 51, vigorously claimed his innocence in the 2008 carjacking and murder of a preschool teacher in suburban Atlanta.

But investigators were convinced of his guilt, and they had every reason to be.  Smith, after all, closely matched eyewitness descriptions of a man seen after gunshots resonated through the late evening air.  His image was also captured in a video taken by a surveillance camera positioned near a parking lot where the victim read her bible while waiting for her daughter to finish her shift at a Red Lobster restaurant.

But it was the “match” of Donald Smith’s DNA to a cigarette butt discarded in the deceased woman’s car that solidified the case for investigators. 

According to Andria Simmons writing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “the odds were about 10 billion to one that they had the right guy.”

Armed with DNA evidence and other information on file from a previous drug charge, police located Smith at an Atlanta homeless shelter.

In somewhat typical fashion, Smith denied his involvement in the murder, arguing that his twin brother, Ronald, was probably the real killer. 

“Most people say ‘it wasn’t me,’ or they’ve got some other kind of excuse,” admitted Detective Gilberto Lorenzo to the AJC.  “This time it was true.”

That’s because police, to their credit, acted quickly on Smith’s statements and discovered that he, in fact, did have a twin brother named Ronald. 

Because the DNA profiles of identical twins are indistinguishable from one another, police relied on fingerprints recovered by investigators inside the car owned by the victim, Genai Coleman.

The latent prints were reported as being conclusively identified as belonging to Ronald Smith.  The innocence of Donald Smith was now apparent.

For two decades, DNA testing has earned a reputation as having a monopoly on the exoneration of innocent people and the unparalleled delivery of justice to crime victims and their families. 

But in reality, it was never a monopoly at all.

Tragically, Genai Coleman, 40, did not survive the multiple gunshots from her assailant’s 357 Magnum revolver.  If she had, she might have emerged as a new and powerful voice for the many forensic science disciplines that perpetually aid our society’s pursuit of justice.

ABC News later reported what could very well have been Genai Coleman’s own testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee had she lived to tell her story.

“In a system that often relies heavily on high-tech DNA testing, it was fingerprinting, a practice more than a century old, that succeeded where DNA failed.” 

Let’s be clear, though.  According to reports of the investigation of Genai Coleman’s murder, the DNA evidence was accurate.  Donald Smith’s profile did, in fact, “match” the profile on the previously mentioned cigarette butt.  Fortunately, fingerprint evidence helped investigators confirm that another man, Donald’s twin brother Ronald, had different fingerprints, which were reported as being found inside the victim’s car.

The inside truth is that forensic science laboratories operate most effectively as a cohesive team of specialized practitioners.  No one specialty, including DNA, is more valuable than the team.  When the team operates as a single unit, each forensic specialty can act as a check and balance to the others and can afford the most critical physical evidence an opportunity to be fully understood. 

Rape Victims and DNA Funding

Victims of criminal sexual assault usually survive their attack.  But for some, survival is perhaps only physical because the wounds may never completely heal.

In 2008, an advocacy center called Hope Exists After Rape Trauma (HEART), celebrated Congress’s funding of the Debbie Smith Act, a part of the 2004 Justice for All Act that authorized over a billion dollars to reduce DNA backlogs.  The $147 million initiative was the highest level of funding seen since the passage of the act four years earlier.

According to a communication distributed to its supporters early that year, HEART committed itself to “move [the] legislation forward so we can get more DNA funding out to the states to not only solve more crimes, but to prevent even more.”

Crime Lab Report knows how important DNA testing is to our criminal and civil justice systems.  Moreover, we are thankful that DNA testing is now a critically important tool with which some of our most complex and terrifying cases can be solved.  HEART and other similar advocacy groups are justified and wise to fight for the resources that are necessary to reduce forensic case backlogs.

But an unhealthy and myopic fixation on DNA testing, especially when allowed to influence legislation on Capitol Hill, serves nobody.  Worse, it does little to honor the memories of victims like Genai Coleman whose killer was identified with fingerprints.

It is also offensive to other victims whose cases are solved with the aid of forensic specialties other than DNA testing.  The following are just a few examples that recently received press coverage: 

• Fingerprints found on several objects at a 1994 rape and murder scene in Sacramento, California were used to identify the killer of 21-year-old Sherri Farrar.  Farrar was found dead, naked, “with her throat slit, along a road less than four miles from a warehouse where the defendant worked,” according to a report by the Metropolitan News-Enterprise on March 2, 2010.  The defendant, who was the boyfriend of the victim, claimed he was innocent but that he and the victim had recently had consensual sex.  His statements significantly increased the value of the fingerprint evidence.

• A boot impression in snow and tire-track impressions from a Nissan Pathfinder recovered at a homicide scene in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada) helped police to identify a serial sex-killer.  When police arrived at the home of Russell Williams, they found “trophies” of his victims, including “a thong, bra, panties, and baby blankets,” according to reports from The Ottawa Citizen on February 15, 2010.

• Hair and fiber evidence were cited by the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas on February 10, 2010, as it upheld the conviction of Larry Ray Swearingen for the 1998 kidnapping, aggravated sexual assault, and capital murder of Melissa Trotter.  DNA evidence collected from underneath the victim’s fingernails failed to yield probative results.  The hair and fiber evidence, on the other hand, provided strong evidence that Trotter may have been locked and bound in Swearingen’s truck.

• Fingerprint evidence was used in conjunction with DNA evidence to identify a serial rapist who was later convicted and sentenced to 430 years in prison, according to a New York Daily News report on February 23, 2010.  “You say you are not a monster, but you are a predator intent on hurting young children,” Justice Vincent Del Giudice responded to the defendants claims of innocence.  “You are evil, you are a sociopath, you are a pathological violent criminal.”

These are just four examples of countless instances where the full capabilities of forensic science laboratories allow justice to be served more accurately and efficiently.

As the United States now emerges from a crippling recession, asking for money is about as popular in Washington, D.C. as five feet of snow.  But the pleas for help coming from our nation’s forensic science community should command immediate attention. 

Crime laboratories, though accreditation and improved professional standards, have revolutionized themselves and their quality assurance systems over the last thirty years with scant funding and a lot of hard work.  For fiscally conservative legislators who prefer to help those who help themselves, investments to build the capacity of the forensic science infrastructure in our country are highly justified and well deserved. 

In order to fully achieve the vision of advocates seeking to streamline our justice system, this capacity must be expanded across the board, not just for DNA. 

According to the Department of Justice, fewer than 12% of the approximately 3 million cases worked in America’s public crime laboratories involve DNA testing.  As potential funding for forensic science gains momentum in Congress, legislators will demonstrate either expertise or ignorance of what is really needed to make forensic science work optimally in the coming decades. 

During the four hours it took Crime Lab Report to write this article, over 1,200 cases were worked by public crime laboratories in the United States.  Less than 150 of those cases relied upon DNA testing. 

Congress must pay attention to the work of laboratory scientists like the fingerprint experts in Georgia who brought justice, and some closure, to the memory of a schoolteacher slain in a parking lot while waiting to give her daughter a ride home from work.

Genai Coleman is not a statistic.  She is a life, and a mother, needlessly taken from her family and friends forever. 

It’s time to get real, and honest, about achieving our vision of a healthy and productive forensic science profession.  Anything less is an insult to crime victims and a disservice to our entire criminal justice system. ***** 

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This report expresses opinions that are solely those of Crime Lab Report, an independent organization.  These opinions do not reflect those of Crime Lab Report's sponsors, partners, affiliates, or any other persons or organizations with whom Crime Lab Report's editors are employed or affiliated.  While every effort is made to ensure accuracy and contextual honesty, all opinions should be corroborated with independent research before being construed as factual.  Crime Lab Report will quickly correct and/or retract any information demonstrated to be erroneous.  We welcome opposing viewpoints and will publish responses from our readers, which may be edited for economy and clarity.