The truth will Prevail

How Reliable Is DNA Testing of YFZ Families?

Among the vicious rumors circulated regarding the FLDS families in Texas is the claim that DNA testing was necessary to determine which children belonged to which parents because the parents had been uncooperative when they were questioned and the children, having been raised communally, didn’t even know who their parents were. Although CPS couldn’t seem to understand or to get its records straight, the parents were truthful during questioning and provided the requested information numerous times.

When the rulings by the Third Court of Appeals and the Texas Supreme Court finally allowed parents to gather up their children, no parents had any difficulty identifying their children, and the resulting joyful reunions showed that the children also knew exactly where they belonged. Now that results from the DNA tests ordered by Judge Barbara Walther are coming in, a natural question to ask is how reliable or useful those test results are likely to be.

Most people assume that DNA identification is virtually infallible, and it is true that such tests generally have a high level of reliability. However, mistakes have been made with tragic consequences. As reported in Forensic-Evidence.com, a British case in February of 2000 shows the fallacy of relying too heavily on DNA evidence.

A suspect whose DNA had been placed in the national data base years earlier when he was accused of hitting his daughter in a family dispute was arrested for a burglary because it appeared that his DNA matched samples collected at the crime scene. At the time of the burglary, the man was living 200 miles away from the site and because of advanced Parkinson’s disease was unable to drive and was barely able to dress himself. Still police argued that he had to be the culprit because the chance of an error in the DNA match was only one in 37 million. The man was arrested and spent four months in jail before his solicitor was able to demand a retest, which showed that when additional markers on the DNA molecules were considered, there was not a match.

Another two cases were reported in FirstPost on November 2, 2006:

“In 2004, a woman fingered by DNA as a murderer proved to be a rape victim whose DNA had ended up on clothing in an Australian forensic lab. Last year in the US, a man accused of a sex crime turned out to have received bone-marrow from the true culprit, thus giving him a similar DNA fingerprint.”

The same article mentioned that the inventor of DNA fingerprinting, Sir Alec Jeffreys, now feared that his invention was undergoing “mission creep” and that with the power of the government to take DNA from anyone arrested for a recordable offense and to store it indefinitely, the UK was being turned into a nation of suspects.

The following is from an article by Robert D. McFadden first published August 15, 1989, and reprinted in the New York Times of July 4, 2008:

“In a case with possibly important implications for scores of criminal and paternity cases across the nation, a Bronx judge ruled yesterday that sophisticated genetic tests that had linked a murder suspect to a victim were not scientifically reliable.

“The decision was believed to be the first serious challenge to DNA ‘fingerprinting,’ a technique for analyzing genetic material, like blood, semen, skin or hair, to identify its source. The technique has been used in at least 80 cases of murder and rape in 27 states, and many scientists and lawyers have assumed the tests were infallible.

“In yesterday's ruling, the judge held that DNA tests could be used to show that blood found on the suspect's wristwatch was not his. But the judge said other DNA tests that purported to show it was the victim's blood were flawed and would not be admissible as evidence at the trial, which he scheduled for Sept. 11.”

Another article from Forensic-Evidence.com also calls into question the reliability of DNA results in the courtroom:

“In the recent case of Crawford v. Commonwealth, Record No. 0683-99-1, the Court of Appeals of Virginia held, on September 19, 2000, that instructing the jury that DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) testing is deemed a reliable scientific technique and thus recognized under the laws of Virginia was improper when DNA evidence was used to prove a person’s identity.”

The problem with many DNA identifications is not that the science itself is flawed but that there is a very real chance of human error in gathering the samples, maintaining the records, and performing the tests.

Britain seems to have had more than its share of problems with the use of flawed DNA testing in court cases. As reported in the Times Online of February 11, 2008, Judge Anthony Hayden, QC, revealed serious mistakes made by DNA Diagnostics, a firm that bills itself as “the world’s largest and most experienced private DNA testing laboratory…[performing]…3 out of 4 private DNA paternity tests in the United States.” The company admitted losing from its case files vital identification details in 122 paternity cases so that the findings could not be relied upon.

Judge Hayden also said that Anglia DNA, a second British company, provided misleading results in a case involving the welfare of eight children. The company reported that two of the children likely were half-siblings; however, testing by a third company showed no relationship. When Anglia DNA retested the children, they admitted their error but blamed their mistake on unclear instructions from the lawyer, claiming that they had not been told to consider the possibility that none of the children were related.

The UK maintains a list of government-approved testing services. As a result of these cases, the Ministry of Justice, after a review of paternity testing services, had to remove half of the companies from its approved list because they lacked up-to-date evidence that they met the minimum criteria. Although the U.S. has regulations on laboratories, it has no such list of government-approved testing services and may be in a condition every bit as serious as the UK.

Problems with DNA testing in this country have been found even in government facilities. As recently as one year ago the Massachusetts State Police laboratory was involved in a scandal concerning the mishandling of DNA evidence over the past twenty years. Robert Pino, the DNA database administrator, was fired, but investigation by the U.S Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General found that problems went far beyond Pino’s incompetence. In examining the laboratory’s computerized database, it was determined that incomplete genetic profiles had been entered in 12 cases out of a sample of 100.

In the YFZ case, CPS workers and others have been notorious for jumbling information and reaching unfounded conclusions. Several of these incidents are documented in Marie Musser’s Day by Day Events of the YFZ Ranch Raid. She records under date of April 8 that while she was staying at the Fort Concho Stables, Texas Rangers arrived to serve papers. She received papers for Marie Musser, but when she read them, she found that the last name on the papers was Barlow and that all of the children listed were girls. Marie has three boys.

On April 13 she relates how CPS decided the mothers’ ages according to their own convenience. A 35-year-old mother was not permitted to see an attorney because she appeared to be under 18, but when the older boys were taken away, she was suddenly of age so that her 11-year-old son could be taken. On April 14 a mother with a two-month-old baby was loaded on the bus with mothers of children 5 years old and older. Other ladies who had previously been denied access their attorneys because they looked too young were declared to be of age and sent away with the other mothers. Many YFZ mothers could tell similar stories of incomplete or jumbled records and children unaccounted for.

CPS may have been justifiably confused at times by the sheer number of mothers and children and by the similarity of names. But who is to say that many of the same mistakes were not made in gathering the DNA samples?

Considering these factors, as well as the lack of legal justification for requiring DNA samples in the first place, the test results are, at best, questionable evidence.