Dna Evidence

DNA EVIDENCE

UNIT 6 PROJECT

Matthew Jones

COMP107

DNA EVIDENCE

DNA technology is becoming the method of choice when it comes to linking individuals with crimes scenes and criminal actions. When DNA evidence is increasingly is used in criminal courts and becomes a very powerful tool in proving innocence of wrongly-convicted prisoners or anyone in trouble. DNA fingerprinting and criminal evidence is to be found in each of the courts to satisfy well established standards for the admissibility of scientific evidence.

Technology has changed in many different aspects in the criminal justice. The use of DNA evidence represents one of the best examples of how technology has altered in the criminal justice landscape. DNA is the basic building block of life. Information that is encoded in organism's DNA are as blueprints for biological development and functioning. As you know DNA exists in all living organism's and testing DNA found in a person's cell they can come up with a DNA profile for the individual.

DNA profiling of individuals didn't even exist. However, in the mid-1980's English scientists discovered certain areas that DNA strands contain many different patterns that can repeat several different times. RFLP is an accurate and reliable test, but it requires large amount of DNA to work. DNA laboratories now use tests based on the polymerase chain reaction method. Which they allow testing small amounts of DNA from biological samples. Criminal investigators can collect DNA evidence from a large number of sources. Because any amount of biological evidence can contain DNA but not every sample contains sufficient amounts of DNA to the DNA profiling.

Investigators will analyze samples to get DNA profile of each individual that the samples come from. If they already have suspect(s) in mind, they will collect samples to compare to the evidence collected from the crime-scene. The investigator database of DNA profiles can use to identify suspect(s) by...