Daily Archives: October 12, 2018

MADISON, Wis. (WBAY) — Many unsolved crimes are missing one key piece of evidence. Another look at a strand of DNA could lead to the match needed to crack a case.
The State Crime Lab in Madison is now looking for more genetic markers when they analyze DNA. The goal: find a true match.
“We made that little modification in the search parameters which allows us to now see potentially more matches,” says Jenn Naugle, Deputy Director, Wisconsin Crime Lab Bureau.

Xconomy Wisconsin — Ask someone “What’s on your phone?” and he or she might respond with some combination of photos, music, contacts, and mobile apps. But a series of interactive experiments co-led by a prominent geneticist are answering the question in a different way, by swabbing the surface of smartphones and telling their owners what bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other plant and animal matter are detected.
Chris Mason, a genomics professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, was the keynote speaker at the Wisconsin BioHealth Summit, an event held Tuesday in Madison, WI, and organized by BioForward, the state’s flagship life sciences advocacy group. Attendees were encouraged to have the DNA on their phones swabbed and analyzed on site.

Long before he became an internationally known forensic expert, Henry C. Lee’s 1989 testimony in a Litchfield courtroom helped convict two local teenagers of a brutal murder in New Milford.
With his usual dramatic flair, Lee told jurors that a towel he had found in the bathroom of the home where the killing occurred had a spot on it that he had tested and found was “consistent with blood.” The teens were tried separately, and the prosecutor’s closing argument in the first trial cited the bloody towel. While the state presented no evidence that the blood on the towel belonged to the defendant, it argued the towel proved that the reason there was no blood found in his car was that he cleaned it off in the bathroom.

U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Cornyn’s (R-TX) Justice Served Act was signed into law to help prosecute criminals in DNA cold cases, said a news release Thursday.
The bipartisan bill will provide funds to prosecute cold cases using DNA evidence, such as rape kit backlog cases and cases involving other violent crimes.

MENDOZA, Argentina, Oct. 11, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Mendoza Governor Alfredo Cornejo and Attorney General Alejandro Gullé received the “Katie’s Hero Crime Fighting Award” for demonstrating their commitment to victims and protecting public safety by establishing a criminal offender DNA database for Mendoza. DNA Saves, an organization that advocates for the creation of criminal offender DNA databases, provides this award to government officials who recognize the power of DNA databases to solve and prevent crime, and who demonstrate leadership in bringing these databases to their communities.