Category Archives: Case Law

WASHINGTON, April 11, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Noting that STRmix™ – the sophisticated forensic software used to resolve mixed DNA profiles – “is not a secret product, as defendant characterizes it,” a Washington, DC Superior Court has denied a defense request to compel the prosecution in District of Columbia v. James Brandon (Case No. 2017 CF2 006160) to provide source code for STRmix™.

A health care center in Phoenix recently addressed the question of whether it could legally obtain DNA from its male employees.
The facility needed to determine whether any of its workers was responsible for impregnating a woman who had been living at the facility in a vegetative state for 10 years following a drowning.

The justices held that the DNA-tolling exception applies only when the state obtains DNA evidence that directly matches the defendant to physical evidence of a crime.
Further, the court noted that in Twiggs’ case, a grand jury indicted him based primarily on Tracy’s confession and his subsequent implication of Twiggs as a co-conspirator in the armed robbery.
“There exists no direct link between the DNA extracted from the physical evidence and Twiggs.

And here, sorrowfully, she is again. Another dead child, her name unknown for almost three decades.
Now that New York’s cold case of another long-dead, long-unknown child has been solved, Los Angeles is hoping that its anonymous little girl, Baby Jane Doe #61, found dead in 1985, might also be matched with a name, and even a family — and one day, maybe linked to whoever neglected her to death.