Here is a fascinating article from Wired about the use of DNA analysis to determine the likely race of criminal suspects.
On July 16, 2002, a survey crew from the Department of Transportation found Pam Kinamore’s nude, decomposing body in the area along the banks of the Mississippi known as Whiskey Bay, just west of Baton Rouge. The police tested the DNA and quickly realized that they were dealing with a serial killer: the same man who had killed two other white, middle-class women in the area.
The FBI, Louisiana State Police, Baton Rouge Police Department and sheriff’s departments soon began a massive search. Based on an FBI profile [I wonder if it was the same profiler who declared that the Beltway Sniper was a white neo-Nazi? Ed] and a confident eyewitness, the Multi-Agency Homicide Task Force futilely upended South Louisiana in search of a young white man who drove a white pick-up truck. They interrogated possible suspects, knocked on hundreds of doors, held frequent press conferences and sorted through thousands of tips.
In late December, after a fourth murder, police set up a dragnet to obtain DNA from some 1200 white men. Authorities spent months and more than a million dollars running those samples against the killer’s. Still nothing.
In early March, 2003, investigators turned to Tony Frudakis, a molecular biologist who said he could determine the killer’s race by analyzing his DNA. They were unsure about the science, so, before giving him the go-ahead, the task force sent Frudakis DNA swabs taken from 20 people whose race they knew and asked him to determine their races through blind testing. He nailed every single one.
Still, when they gathered in the Baton Rouge police department for a conference call with Frudakis in mid-March, they were not prepared to hear or accept his conclusions about the killer.
“Your guy has substantial African ancestry,” said Frudakis. “He could be Afro-Caribbean or African American but there is no chance that this is a Caucasian. No chance at all.”
There was a prolonged, stunned silence, followed by a flurry of questions looking for doubt but Frudakis had none. Would he bet his life on this, they wanted to know? Absolutely. In fact, he was certain that the Baton Rouge serial killer was 85 percent Sub-Saharan African and 15 percent native American.
“This means we’re going to turn our investigation in an entirely different direction,” Frudakis recalls someone saying. “Are you comfortable with that?”
“Yes. I recommend you do that,” he said. And now, rather than later since, in the time it took Frudakis to analyze the sample, the killer had claimed his fifth victim. The task force followed Frudakis’ advice and, two months later, the killer was in custody.
…You would think that proven success in solving these types of horrific crimes would make this technology popular with police, scientists, defense attorneys and prosecutors alike. But it hasn’t.
The most obvious obstacle is price. Cmdr. Tromley, for example, has a positive opinion of DNAWitness but adds that this does not necessarily mean his department will use it very often. “This is a pretty niche product. An in-depth analysis could run from $1500 to $3000. If you don’t need that, then you probably won’t go that far,” he says.
Besides the expense, many people who might benefit from DNAWitness either don’t know it exists or are extremely skeptical that it works. William C. Thompson, Chair of the Department of Criminology, Law & Society at UC Irvine is a prominent expert on the use of DNA in criminal trials but was only marginally familiar with this technology. When I tried to describe how it works, he literally screamed at me, calling Frudakis a hack and a charlatan who obviously did not understand statistics.
But even those who believe this can be done are conflicted about whether it should be done. History is replete with examples of injustices and inequities that were conscripted into law based on racial classification. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s succeeded in ending legal racial discrimination, in large measure, by downplaying the significance of race and racial differences. By the mid-1990s prominent academics and sociologists even went so far as to say that race did not exist at all.
“Race is a social construct, not a scientific classification,” said an editorial in the May 3, 2001 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, adding that “In medicine, there is only one race — the human race.”
Then, along comes Frudakis with a science that seems to be saying the opposite.
The Inconvenient Science of Racial DNA Profiling
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