Sunday August 30, 2009
Even DNA tests prove fallible
By Jim Taylor
When 31-year-old Suaad Hagi Mohamud got stranded in Kenya, only a DNA test got her back to Canada.
Mohamud is a Canadian citizen who went to Kenya to visit her mother for three weeks. But when she went to the Nairobi airport for her return flight to Canada, a Kenyan immigration official stopped her. He said she didn’t resemble her four-year-old passport photo.
Considering the current regulations for passport photos – no smiles, no glasses, no personality – that’s hardly surprising. I look more like a cadaver than my usual sunny self.
Canadian consular officials voided her passport and urged Kenyan officials to prosecute her. Charged with identity fraud, she spent eight days in jail.
The Canadian High Commission claimed it had carried out "conclusive investigations" and confirmed the woman was an "impostor."
Eventually, the DNA test proved them wrong. Mohamed was who she claimed to be. She returned to Canada after a three-month exile.
The gold standard of evidence
DNA testing has become what the New York Times called the “gold standard of proof.”
In the six years after Canada’s parliament authorized a national DNA data bank, the data bank generated more than 5000 matches between incident and offender.
But DNA tests have been equally crucial in exonerating at least three men convicted of murder – David Milgaard, Guy Paul Morin, and Simon Marshall.
Like James Driskell, Thomas Sophonow, Donald Marshall Jr., William Mullins-Johnson, Romeo Phillion, and Stephen Truscott, these three were victims of over-zealous law enforcement officers obsessed with getting a conviction. Officers fabricated some evidence, ignored other evidence, and concealed still more evidence. Prosecutors failed to ask the right questions.
A study by Bruce MacFarlane, Q.C., claimed that DNA testing has exonerated more than 127 convicted persons in the United States and Canada.
Fabricating evidence
DNA, it seems, trumps everything else – eye witnesses, confessions, circumstantial evidence…
But now, according to the New York Times, “Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence…”
Writer Andrew Pollack stated: “The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor…”
According to Pollock’s story, the experiments “also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database” (such as the records of the Canadian DNA data bank) “they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile, without obtaining any tissue from that person.”
If the tale is true, it casts doubt on the “the gold standard of proof.”
“You can engineer a crime scene,” claimed Dan Frumkin, lead author for the original paper that was published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics.
I’d like to believe that police forces would never fabricate evidence to get a conviction. History suggests I’m being naive.
According to Doug Schmeiser, professor of law at the University of Saskatchewan, tunnel vision is a common factor when criminal investigations go wrong. "Police investigators zero in on a particular individual, form the conclusion that person is guilty, and then view evidence from that perspective," says Schmeiser. "In the process, other evidence is disregarded or overlooked that doesn’t fit the police theory.”
Calgary lawyer Greg Rodin, who worked on David Milgaard’s case for five years, concurs. "The police develop a theory on who committed a crime, and then work to build evidence that supports it,” he says. “Other theories are ignored and other evidence is dismissed."
Standards evolve
If I can’t believe that they wouldn’t fabricate evidence, I’d like to believe that police forces are not smart enough to create false DNA. But Dan Frumkin suggests that’s not realistic either: “Any biology undergraduate could perform this,” he argues.
I suppose it’s an inevitable progression.
In biblical times, the testimony of two reliable witnesses – adult males, of course – was sufficient to condemn someone to death by stoning. To reduce frivolous accusations, those two witnesses then had to take the victim’s life by hurling the first, hopefully lethal, rocks.
But in one of the stories about the prophet Daniel, the Bible itself acknowledges that reputable witnesses can lie.
So courts have customarily required physical evidence to support oral testimony for either an alibi or an accusation.
But as we now know, physical evidence can also be planted and tampered with.
For a while, photographs formed incontrovertible evidence. Then PhotoShop was invented. Now you can insert almost anyone into any setting – or take someone out. As Forrest Gump demonstrated, even historic newsreels can be falsified.
So most recently, we’ve put our faith in DNA testing. Since each person’s DNA is unique, we’ve believed that it offers unchallengeable proof.
But apparently it isn’t foolproof either.
I wonder what’s next? What new technical process will we put our faith in – only to find that it too can be corrupted by unscrupulous persons?
I don’t envy judges and juries. It’s hard enough to determine when individuals are lying. But how do amateurs assess the credibility of laboratory tests and professional expertise?
The more complex things get, the more trouble I would have getting “beyond any reasonable doubt.”
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
In last Sunday’s column, I tried to argue that certain factions in the U.S. were deliberately distorting the current health care debate. That hit a responsive chord with Joan Mistretta of Hammondsport, NY.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she wrote. “I have been thinking about asking one of my relatives in Canada to write something like this for me. This is so needed down here. I usually send things out only to folks that I am pretty sure want to hear from me or who I think will agree with what I’m sending. This, I think, is the first thing that I am sending to everyone on my list. What is going on down here is stunning. The degree to which large corporations (in any field) have strangleholds on the imagination of citizens of the U.S. cannot be exaggerated and we are really finding this out now. Believe me, I could go on and on, but won’t.”
Mo Rajabally of Kelowna liked my column so much he sent it on to the on-line Daily Beast.
I expected Steve Roney to disagree with me, and he didn’t disappoint. Unfortunately, his letter is too long to quote in full.
He felt I had distorted the incidents I reported, to suit my own slant – true for any writer. But he had some interesting comments on intelligence and politics: “I’ve been a member of Mensa since the early eighties…I think it is significant that the membership of Mensa, for at least the last twenty years, has been distinctly to the right of the general population in politics, though you can find individual Mensans all over the political map. I think there is almost a necessary connection between high IQ and libertarian leanings in politics. Since libertarianism is currently placed on the right, though it used to be on the left, that makes bright people distinctly more likely to be classed currently as right-wing.”
I got diametrically opposite views on Geoff Wilkins, whom I mentioned in a column two weeks ago.
Suzanne Edgar wrote, “Thanks for the background on Geoff Wilkins. I was so incensed when I read his ideas on why the UCC has declining numbers, I had to write a response. He says we don’t believe in anything. We believe in love so strongly that we allow him and his likes to live in this church.”
Suzanne sent along a copy of her letter to the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix.
But George Maaren from North Vancouver disagreed, “To attack Geoff Wilkins as ignorant does the man a great disservice. While I may not agree with Geoff on the issue of the ordination of gays and lesbians, Geoff is neither ignorant nor stupid. I feel you have lost your effectiveness when you stooped to a personal attack on Geoff. This column shows your rage and intolerance of the opinions of others.”
In that column I wrote, “A fundamental law of all social organizations is that they may alter course; they may even set a new course; but they never-never-never go into reverse."
To which James West replied, “If that is true, any hope that there will be a change down the road is a false hope because media outlets are social organizations. I hold out hope because as a former junior high school student of 1969, I remember Woodstock. People will once again turn on, tune out, and drop out of the media circus. With apologies to Timothy Leary, media must find an audience to sell products and produce an income. Once people stop paying attention, they will have to change. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have become audible wallpaper in my work setting. It’s the 21st Century version of elevator music.
“Speaking of elevator music, I recently had a crown made for a molar. I noticed the elevator music. It’s really quite good. All my favourites from the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Middle age is great!”
Finally, Ruth Zenger had a comment on the coming shortage of clergy. Ruth recently moved from Blind Bay, a small community in the interior of the province, to Victoria, the capital. “If mainline churches are struggling in any community why not investigate a ’shared parish’ There are a number across the country of UC, Anglican, Lutheran, and others. Each one is a bit differently structured, but it is a viable alternative to closing a church in a community. This is especially true in small towns, but can be an alternative in bigger towns and cities as well. I have just left an Anglican/UCC shared parish, after 12 years because I have moved, but I will miss the inclusiveness of working with both denominations and the input from those with varied backgrounds and theology.”
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Dan Strizek’s Gathering Place for Creation Spirituality
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not terribly religious, but they are fun; write [email protected] to get onto her mailing list.
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