Use of DNA Tests OKd by Federal Court

DNA evidence can be used in federal courts under a flexible new Supreme Court standard as long as the trial judge guards against abuses, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

Criticisms by some scientists of claims of numerical probability based on analysis of genetic material do not bar its use as evidence because the high court no longer requires approval by a consensus of the scientific community, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said.

The court said there is enough scientific support for DNA analysis that a judge can properly conclude that it would help a jury determine whether the defendant was at a crime scene or committed a crime. The court said the trial judge must guard against exaggerated prosecutorial claims that might lead the jury to give “undue weight” to DNA evidence.

The ruling upheld the sexual assault and murder convictions and life prison sentence of Daniel Chischilly in the death of a woman on the Navajo reservation near Sanders in Arizona on New Year’s Day, 1990.

The DNA decision, the latest of several similar rulings by federal appeals courts nationwide, is binding on federal courts in nine Western states. It is not binding on state courts in California, where DNA evidence is being studied in the double-murder case against O.J. Simpson.

California courts have required a scientific consensus before allowing evidence based on new scientific techniques and have been divided over admissibility of DNA evidence under that standard. In the last major ruling, a state appeals court said in 1992 that a study criticizing claims of high probabilities for DNA identification showed that DNA statistical analysis lacked a scientific consensus.

However, the California Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Aug. 30 over whether to require state courts to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s new test for scientific evidence.

That test, established in a 1993 ruling, says general scientific acceptance is not an absolute requirement but is one factor a judge can consider in deciding whether the evidence would help a jury.