the very people investigating the crime,
is the best-understood form of transfer.
And after Lunsford heard Kulick’s pre-
sentation and retraced Anderson’s day
himself, he concluded he had jailed an
innocent man. He counted contamina-
tion among his leading theories.
In Santa Clara County, the district
attorney’s office reviewed the Kumra
case and found no obvious evidence
of errors or improper use of tools in
the crime lab. They checked whether
Anderson’s DNA had shown up in anyother cases the lab had recently han-
dled and inadvertently wandered into
the Kumra case. It had not.
It was Lunsford who figured out the
answer to the riddle of how Anderson’s
DNA ended up on Raveesh Kumra. He
was reading Anderson’s medical re-
cords and paused on the names of the
ambulance paramedics who’d picked
up Anderson outside S&S Market. He
had seen them before. He pulled up the
Kumra case files. Sure enough, there
were the names again: Three hours
after picking up the drunk Anderson
at the market, the two paramedics had
responded to the Kumra mansion.
Somehow, the paramedics must have
moved Anderson’s DNA from San Joseto Monte Sereno. District attorney Jeff
Rosen has postulated that a device
slipped over both patients’ fingers to
measure oxygen levels may have been
the culprit. Deputy district attorney
Kevin Smith framed the incident as a
freak accident. “It’s a small world,” he
told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.
But it was hardly a small mistake to
the defendant. Had the case gone to
trial, jurors may well have convicted
Anderson, as they did the other three
defendants (a third man, Marcellous
Drummer, was eventually arrested). A
2008 study found that jurors rated DNA
evidence as 95 percent accurate and
94 percent persuasive of a suspect’s
guilt. “We’re desperately hoping that
DNA will come in to save the day, but
it’s still fitting into a flawed system,”
says Erin E. Murphy, a professor of law
at New York University and author of
Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Fo-
rensic DNA. “If you don’t bring in the
appropriate amount of skepticism and
restraint in using the method, there are
going to be miscarriages of justice.”
Having narrowly escaped a terrible
fate, Anderson himself has advice for
law-enforcement officers: “There’s
more that’s gotta be looked at than
just the DNA,” he says. “You’ve got to
dig deeper. Reanalyze. Do everything
all over again before you say, ‘This is
what it is.’ Because it may not neces-
sarily be so.”“If you don’t bring in the
appropriate amount of
skepticism, there will be
miscarriages of justice.”this investigation was published in partnership
with the marshall project, frontline, and wired,
copyright © 2018 by the marshall project and
frontline.Reader’s Digest National Interest
114 march 2019