Phylogenetic analysis: getting its day in court
Vogel, G.
Science 275(5306): 1559-1560
1997
ISSN/ISBN: 0036-8075 PMID: 9072818 Document Number: 477291
Later this spring, prosecutors in Lafayette, Louisiana, will try to prove that gastroenterologist Richard J. Schmidt attempted to murder his ex-lover by injecting her with HIV-infected blood from one of his patients. As part of his case, the district attorney is seeking to introduce phylogenetic analysis, a technique that compares DNA samples from various sources to see how closely they are related. The prosecution hopes to show that the virus infecting Schmidt's accuser, Janice Trahan Roberts, is most likely to have come from one of the doctor's patients. Schmidt's lawyers have challenged the technique's admissibility, however, arguing that it is inherently more uncertain than DNA fingerprinting, which is widely accepted in the courts as a way of matching DNA samples. They also argue that there are serious flaws in both the controls used and the laboratory work in this case.