Maybe this should be in the technology section but as it deals with how technology isn't being applied it probably shouldn't after all! In the last year I was a jurist in a local murder trial where we were subjected to hours of testimony about evidence that proved exactly nothing. I still enjoy CSI type shows but I don't suffer any delusions about their reality; this story should prove that point:
DNA traces of an unknown eastern-European woman had been found at almost 17 crime scenes, including two murders (including a 22 year old police officer) but also car jackings, unprofessional break-ins and on a bullet fired in a marital dispute. The crimes where spread around a large area including south-west Germany, France and Switzerland. It now turns out that the several-hundred-men task force might have really been chasing a phantom. Alarmed by the apparent randomness of the crimes, involving both highly professional work and seemingly amateur break-ins, they started checking for contaminations in the labwork. The likeliest suspect now are the cotton swabs used to collect evidence at the crime scene. All the swabs used in the forensics works were sourced from the same supplier, a company in northern Germany that employs several eastern-European women that would fit the profile. Even more inciminating, the state of Bavaria lies right in the center of the crimes' locations, without ever finding matching DNA in crimes on its territory. Guess what: they get their cotton swabs from a different supplier.
http://mwinkelmann.com/2009/03/the-heilbronn-dna-mixup/I suspect that there is a woman who is working in the swab factory that occasionally uses the product to clean out her ears and then puts it back!
