84 practice makes perfect Advanced English Reading and Comprehension
more in competing for dominance in a very proitable ield than in ensuring the quality of their
services. In the case of People v. Castro, defense lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld chal-
lenged Lifecodes’ analysis of the dried blood found on their client’s watchband and sought to have
the results excluded from testimony. A Frye hearing^1 determined that Lifecodes had done a sloppy
job of obtaining the evidence and had misinterpreted the results. Consequently, the evidence
was excluded and the case against Jose Castro was dismissed. Later, Castro admitted to the two
murders for which he had stood trial, which proved that the testing laboratory and its methods,
and not DNA evidence, were unreliable.
8 In the late 1980s, DNA testing achieved legitimacy with the involvement of governmental
agencies. he Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in collaboration with the National Institutes
of Health, had been doing its own research, and in 1988, the FBI Crime Lab, established in the
1920s, included DNA evidence techniques in its services and provided analysis to law enforce-
ment agencies free of charge. he Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had also set up its
own DNA testing facilities, and joint American-Canadian eforts brought about much-needed
standards.
9 In the meantime, the controversy over DNA testing was still raging in the media, and law-
yers Scheck and Neufeld were ighting for a moratorium on DNA evidence. In 1992, a two-year
federally funded National Research Council study recommended that DNA evidence continue to
be used in courts, and in 1994, the scientiic and law enforcement communities agreed that DNA
evidence should be considered legitimate and admissible in court. With further support for DNA
ingerprinting in Great Britain, the controversy was defused, standards were implemented,
research was stimulated, and a program was introduced in the United States to educate court
judges about genetics and DNA testing.
10 he widespread acceptance of DNA ingerprinting led to the establishment of DNA data-
bases, beginning in Great Britain, where DNA evidence had been more widely embraced from
the start. Since the mid-1980s, the British government had been investing funds in a nationwide
computerized database of DNA evidence from crime scenes and convicted criminals. Most vio-
lent ofenders are repeat ofenders, and by comparing DNA samples to available data, police
investigators were able to solve both cold cases and recent crimes.
11 In the United States, a law passed in 1994 laid the groundwork for the formation of a nation-
wide database. Another three years passed, however, before eight states combined their databases
into the National DNA Index System (NDIS). Within a few months, 300 previously unsolved
violent crimes were cleared up. Further advances in DNA ingerprinting technology and its suc-
cess rate culminated in the formation of the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), and DNA
proiles were assembled from federal, state, and local systems. By 1998, CODIS housed DNA
ingerprints from 250,000 convicted criminals and evidence from the scenes of 4,600 violent
crimes. In addition to computerized databases, DNA ingerprinting technology reduced the prob-
ability that someone other than the suspect had the same ingerprint from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 26
billion.
12 DNA ingerprinting was not only bringing criminals to justice, but was also freeing wrongly
convicted persons from long prison sentences. Predominantly poor African-American males in
their mid-twenties (at the time of conviction) are frequently accused and found guilty, particu-
larly in cases involving sexual assault, as a result of mistaken identity, police misconduct, careless
forensics, an incompetent defense, or a false confession made under pressure. DNA evidence has
been used by the Innocence Project, founded in 1992 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
at Yeshiva University by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, to exonerate hundreds of wrongfully(^1) he Frye standard, established in 1923 to set standards for scientiic evidence, states that scientiic evidence
must be based on a valid theory and must be obtained through a valid technique, which must be properly car-
ried out.