How DNA Technology helps solve cold cases
By Mahima Sultan
Roughly eight million children go missing around the world every year. An unidentified teen that was hit by a tractor-trailer on Interstate 75 four miles south of Macon in 1979 was one of them.
The 15-year-old was buried in an unmarked grave in Evergreen Cemetery while detectives searched for answers.
“The Bibb County detective was looking for this young man’s relatives or trying to figure out where he was from, meanwhile at the same time the Michigan police were looking for him as well,” Macon Judicial Circuit District Attorney David Cooke said.
In 2018, the body was exhume DNA technology identified him as Drew Greer, a Michigan teen missing for nearly 40 years.
Cooke said DNA evidence brings a “degree of certainty to a number of convictions” and missing persons cases.
“I like anything that provides certainty, anything that we can do to promote confidence in the system and in the result,” he said. “Just knowing that we have justice is important.”
Dr. Sara Appleby, who has studied experimental psychology and completes research on wrongful convictions and legal decision making, said that DNA is far more reliable than any other form of evidence.
“People trust DNA evidence,” she said. “Research has shown that it is the most trusted piece of forensic information.”
Appleby said that previous types of forensic evidence like bullet marks, bite marks and fingerprinting are forms of pattern matching, and can sometimes be wrong.
“Faulty forensic sciences is a leading cause of wrongful convictions because we were are putting a lot of faith behind something that turns out wasn’t based in science,” she said. “DNA evidence didn’t originate in the criminal justice system, it originated in the lab, and we brought it to the criminal justice system. It’s a far more reliable piece of evidence to use in your decision making.”
The Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS) is a database that is funded by the federal government that contains DNA profiles of convicted individuals and suspects of unsolved crimes.
“The beauty of CODIS, of course, is that when an offender goes into the prison system, they may be going in for one crime, but if their DNA pops up from a rape kit from an unsolved sexual homicide, well we’ve now found who did that,” said Cooke, who has been prosecuting for nearly 22 years.
The system gathers DNA to help solve crimes where victims are unwilling to come forward.
“This has been my life’s work as a profession,” said Cooke, who specializes in crimes against women and children, sex crimes, and murder.
The evolution of DNA technology helps provide assurance in the criminal justice system and aides in convictions and exonerations.
“It’s not a matter of it looking good, it’s a matter of it being good,” he said. “We want the highest degree of certainty that we can have when we go into court and try to do the right thing.”
