Finegan's Wake: A Partial DNA Match in Rhode Island

A Rhode Island newspaper reports that "[t]he Cranston Police Department has arrested 49-year-old David Finegan, of no permanent address, for the burglary and sexual assault of an 81-year-old woman." [1] Police "collected [DNA] at the crime scene on May 2." On June 10, the Rhode Island Department of Health reported that it had a DNA profile from the crime with which to query an offender database. The Rhode Island laboratory did not use software designed for kinship searching, but on July 8, the department advised detectives that it had found a partial DNA match to a female inmate.

The article does not speculate on why it took a month to complete a routine computer search and report the results.Was it because of legal concerns? Was the partial match trawl intentional, or was the discovery inadvertent? Whichever it was, the detectives turned their attention to five male siblings. They discovered that one of them, David Finegan, was "in close proximity . . . on the night of the incident."

Why this roundabout method of identifying Finegan? He was on parole in July. Was the underlying offense not one that triggered entry into the DNA database? Was there a backlog in entering offender profiles into the database? Whatever the explanation, Finegan had the misfortune of being picked up on July 14 on a parole violation and held for the weekend. Detectives quickly obtained a search warrant and took a sample of DNA from him before he made bail and dropped out of sight. A week later, they learned that it matched the crime-scene DNA.

Pursuing an anonymous tip, police found and arrested Finegan in Providence. He "is being charged with burglary and first-degree sexual assault." Interestingly, he has an arrest record (including domestic assault, felony DWI, resisting arrest and other assaults) dating back to 1991. A bill that would expand the state database to include arrestees is before House and Senate committees in Rhode Island.

Reference

1. Joe Kernan, Arrest Made in Rape of Elderly Woman, Cranston Herald, Dec. 19, 2011

Acknowledgment

Thanks to Frederick Bieber for informing me of the Cranston Herald article.

Cross-posted from The Double Helix Law Blog

Abusing AFIS -- Conviction by Computer?

On television shows such as NCIS, seconds after a forensic scientist inserts an image of a latent fingerprint into a machine connected to an automated fingerprint identification system (an AFIS), a computer screen blinks MATCH FOUND ... MATCH FOUND ... MATCH FOUND ... , and the chase is on. Apparently, some police and prosecutors think this is real.

Robert Garrett, a past president of the International Association for Identification, writing in the Evidence Technology Magazine, describes three cases in which governments have taken very serious actions against individuals based solely on the output of an AFIS search — with no review by any latent print examiner [1]. AFIS searches generate a list of potential matches — often the 20 closest matches as determined by an algorithm that looks at prints very differently from the way humans do. There is no proof that the AFIS ranks the candidates in the way that a skilled human examiner, relying on more information in the images, would. A number 1 candidate can be an obvious mismatch (to the human eye and brain). The Scientific Working Group on Friction Ridge Analysis, Study, and Technology (SWGFAST) insists that “AFIS ranks and scores have no role in formulating and stating conclusions based on ACE-V,” the steps that latent print examiners follow [2] and that “[t]he practice of relying on current AFIS technology to individualize latent prints correctly is not sound” [3].

According to Mr. Garrett, U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement relies on raw AFIS results to initiate deportation proceedings, and grand juries issue indictments relying on this information without testimony from a qualified examiner that the AFIS match means anything [1, p.10]. He concludes that “AFIS hits must be examined by a qualified fingerprint examiner and the results of that examination verified before any proceedings are commenced against a potential suspect. It is unethical, unprofessional, and—most likely—unconstitutional to do otherwise” [1, p. 11].

I would not presume to question Mr. Garrett’s professional judgment of what is unprofessional conduct in the fingerprint expert community, but it seems fair to ask on what basis he concludes that the practice of using unreviewed AFIS output is “most likely ... unconstitutional.” The article offers two possible bases for this judgment. First, Mr. Gerrett writes that

U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts and, more recently, Bullcoming v. New Mexico, reiterated a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” Reports of a laboratory or investigative finding do not satisfy the requirement.

This won’t wash. The Sixth Amendment right to confrontation is a trial right. It does not apply to administrative and grand jury proceedings. Even the usual rules for expert evidence are not binding in these proceedings. At trial, an AFIS hit, not used as part of the basis for an examiner’s opinion, would be impermissible under the rules of evidence, since this kind of scientific evidence is neither scientifically valid (under Daubert) nor generally accepted in the scientific community (per Frye). But this does not make it unconstitutional. An argument could be made that it deprives the defendant of due process to be convicted on the strength of such evidence. Cf. McDaniel v. Brown, 130 S.Ct. 665 (2010). However, the Confrontation Clause line of cases on which Mr. Garrett relies suggests that “machine-generated” test results can be introduced without the separate judgment of a human examiner. The state of Illinois currently is seeking to exploit this idea — unpersuasively in the judgment of many commentators — in the pending Supreme Court case of Williams v. Illinois (involving DNA tests and discussed on other postings on this blog).

The second suggestion regarding the constitutionality of AFIS evidence is that

Our society and its government have embraced technology in various forms for its efficiency and economy. In the areas of law enforcement and public safety, these technological advances have included AFIS, the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), airport security screening devices, and red light/traffic cameras. But these advances bring with them compromises of privacy and our right “…to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects…”

It would be extravagant to assert that AFIS, CODIS, airport magnetometers and ordinary scanners, and red light cameras are “most likely unconstitutional,” and this may not be what Mr. Garrett intended to state or imply.

In any event, the article is an eye-opener. Police and prosecutors who rely on unexamined AFIS matches are not acting professionally or responsibly. Mr. Garrett deserves thanks for shedding some light on this remarkable practice.

References

1. Robert J. Garrett, Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) and the Identification Process, Forensic Sci. Mag., July-Aug. 2011, at 10–11.

2. SWGFAST, Position Statement on the Role of AFIS Ranks and Scores and the ACE-V Process, Oct. 15, 2011.

3. SWGFAST, Press Kit, May 19, 2004, at 14.1.3.

Williams v. Illinois (Part II: More Facts, from Outside the Record, and a Question of Ethics)

This morning, Professor Richard Friedman posted a revealing report that Cellmark sent to the Illinois State Police (ISP). As he explains, and as my previous posting on the facts of Williams v. Illinois indicated, the report consists of much more than "machine-generated" statements. But the "lodging" (not part of the record in the case) and Professor Friedman’s remarks warrant a few additions or revisions to my presentation of the facts of the case.

On cross-examination, ISP analyst Karen Kooi Abbinanti, who examined the blood sample that Williams gave under court order in another case, testified to William’s STR profile. Because ISP analyst Sandra Lambatos, who provided the state’s only evidence of a DNA match, testified that “there [was] a computer match generated of the male DNA profile found in semen from the vaginal swabs of [LJ] to a male DNA profile that had been identified as having originated from Sandy Williams,” I presumed that the Cellmark report listed this profile as coming from the male fraction of DNA in the vaginal swab. Indeed, Lambatos testified that the “allele chart” in the Cellmark report “included data that [she] used to run [her] data bank search.” Joint Appendix at 61. Thus, I wrote that

The unnamed analyst believed that the semen had the following profile: D3 (16, 19), DWA (17, 17), FGA (18.2, 22), D8 (14, 14), D21 (29, 30), D18 (13, 17), D5 (12, 13), D13 (11, 11), D7 (10, 12), D16 (9, 11), TH01 (7, 7), TPOX (11, 11), and CSF (8, 10). The analyst’s report included this profile . . . .

Now that the report is lodged, it is clear that this singular profile is not what the anonymous Cellmark analyst and Cellmark’s two laboratory directors, Robin Cotton and Jennifer Reynolds, signed off on. Their table, which was Lambatos’s “data,” has the entry of (10, 12, 13) instead of (12, 13) for the D5S818 locus. Had Ms. Lambatos used this tri-allelic genotype, Williams would have been excluded! (Tri-allelic, single locus profiles are rare, but they are not unheard of. For example, one paper reports three cases of tri-allelic patterns observed during routine forensic casework on 5964 Belgian residents [1], and the D5S818 (10, 12, 13) profile has been observed [2].)

Ms. Lambatos, however, testified on cross-examination that the Cellmark report’s “deduced male donor profile” (to quote the report itself) was not actually a deduced profile, but only a list of deduced alleles. Joint Appendix at 71. Interpreting it in this fashion (which may well be the correct understanding what the unknown analyst meant to write), she searched the unspecified database for certain two-allele subsets of the three alleles— namely, (13, 13), (10, 13), and (12, 13). Id. This made sense because, if Cellmark had correctly identified the victim’s profile — something that Lambatos did not check — then the rapist rather than the victim had to be the source of the 13-repeat allele.

The circumscribed nature of Ms. Lambatos’s testimony on direct examination about the “DNA match” is worthy of comment. Full disclosure would have required a scientist to reveal that other male profiles than just Williams’ profile were “consistent with” the vaginal-swab mixture and could have been picked out of a database in her trawl. Instead, Ms. Lambatos acquiesced in or suggested confining her testimony to Williams’s matching profile and the random-match probability associated with that one profile. In other words, she chose not to acknowledge possibilities that were inconsistent with the state’s theory. Does such selectivity contravene the professional responsibility of forensic scientists to “[a]ttempt to qualify their responses while testifying when asked a question with the requirement that a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer be given, if answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would be misleading to the judge or the jury”? [1]

The answer, I think, depends on how misleading Ms. Labatos’s answers on direct examination were. This was not a case of a single profile that probably could exclude everybody except for a twin brother. The analysts were unable to distinguish between Sandy Williams and other males with similar, but not identical profiles, as possible sources of the male DNA. By not disclosing this fact, Ms. Lambatos and the prosecutor made the DNA “match” sound especially compelling. The prosecutor asked about “the male DNA profile found in the semen.” Ms. Labatos made no effort to correct or clarify even though she firmly believed that Cellmark was reporting at least three different male profiles for the semen (and that Williams was, of course, a match to only one of them). Hammered with Ms. Lambatos’s figures for the Williams’ profile frequency, a judge surely would think that only Williams or a mythical twin could have been the rapist. In contrast, a judge who understood that Cellmark's tests also pointed to men with other DNA profiles might have been more willing to entertain some doubt.

The counterargument is that the probative value of the evidence for the ambiguous profile is essentially the same as the probative value of the evidence for the unambiguous profile that Ms. Lambatos was asked about. Assuming that the vaginal swab DNA is a mixture of the victim’s DNA and one man’s DNA, and assuming that the laboratory called all the alleles correctly, the likelihood ratio for the hypotheses of Williams versus that of a random, unrelated man is 1/[p(10,12,13) + p(13,13) + p(10,13) + p(12,13)], where p is the random-match probability for the full genotype, including the alleles shown in parentheses. Ms. Lambatos computed the probability p(12,13) as falling in the quadrillionths. Although I have not consulted allele frequency tables, it is a safe bet that similarly small probabilities would pertain to the profiles with the (13,13) and (10,13) genotypes. The random-match probability for the profile with the tri-allelic pattern would be even smaller. (When asked by the defense, Ms. Lambatos testified that a tri-allelic male was not a real possibility.) Therefore, I would predict that the correct computation would not differ from the number given to the judge by more than an order of magnitude. Hence, the witness’ failure to clarify or correct the prosecutor in her questioning affected the probative value of the evidence minimally.

Nevertheless, for the expert to present such oversimplified testimony without any qualification seems problematic to me. When confronted with the omissions on cross-examination, the expert owned up to them, but did she not ask the prosecutor to present the expert's reasoning accurately in the first place? And if she did, why did the prosecutor not do it?

References

1. G. Mertensemail, S. Rand, E. Jehaes et al., Observation of Tri-allelic Patterns in Autosomal STRs During Routine Casework, 2 Forensic Sci. Int’l: Genetics Supplement Series 38-40 (2009).

2. NIST STR-base, Tri-Allelic Patterns, June 2, 2011, http://www.cstl.nist.gov/strbase/var_D5S818.htm#Tri

3. American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors Laboratory Accreditation Board, ASCLD/LAB Guiding Principles of Professional Responsibility for Crime Laboratories and Forensic Scientists, Principle 19, Version 1.1, 2009.

Cross posted from The Double Helix Law Blog, 15 Dec. 2011

Was the White Powder Cocaine? Apparently so, but Melendez-Diaz Acquitted

In February, the Boston Globe reported the acquittal of Luis Melendez-Diaz [1]. Melendez-Diaz gained legal fame when the Supreme Court reversed his initial conviction for drug trafficking because the Commonwealth of Massachusetts used sworn "certificates of analysis" from a state laboratory to show that a white powder was cocaine. [2] A state statute allowed this official hearsay, and the certificates were not accompanied oral testimony (or even a written report) of how the laboratory reached this conclusion.

On retrial, the Commonwealth "called to the stand a chemist from the state Department of Public Health who testified that the substance allegedly found in the back seat of a police cruiser with Melendez-Diaz and two other men in 2001 had tested positive for cocaine." Apparently the accuracy of the laboratory's finding was not in dispute. The defense lawyer said that the case "really seemed to be about guilt by association." Police had arrested Melendez-Diaz and two other men and placed them in the back of a police cruiser. Because the officers saw the men fidgeting on the way to the police station, they searched the car and found 19 bags of a white substance.

Evidently, Melendez-Diaz's proximity to the bags did not convince the jurors of his guilt. A spokesman for the district attorney's office said that “We’re 10 years out from the original incident, and the passage of so much time only makes a case tougher to try. The acquittal did not free Melendez-Diaz, who is serving a separate 10-year sentence for drug trafficking.

References

1. Martin Finucane, Drug Defendant Retried on High Court’s Order Is Acquitted, Boston Globe, Feb. 11, 2011.

2. Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. __, 129 S. Ct. 2527 (2009).

Williams v. Illinois (Part I: Just the Facts)

The Supreme Court heard oral argument last week in Williams v. Illinois. The case could have been just another of the thousands of rape cases that work their way through state courts across the country. But the prosecution decided to take a shortcut to convict Sandy Williams. Rather than present the laboratory analyst who produced the DNA profiles of the victim and the rapist, it had an analyst from a completely different laboratory testify in a bench trial. This gap in the state's case eventually attracted the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, Williams is the third case in as many years in which the Supreme Court has agreed to review criminal convictions relying on the findings of laboratory workers who do not appear at trial.

Unsurprisingly, the parties frame the issue before the Court differently. On one hand, according to Williams the question is

Whether the prosecution violates the Confrontation Clause when it presents . . . the substance of a testimonial forensic laboratory report through the trial testimony of an expert witness who took no part in the reported forensic analysis, where the defendant had no opportunity to confront the analysts who authored the report.

Brief for Petitioner at i. On the other hand, according to the state, the issue is

Whether a criminal defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to confront witnesses against him is satisfied where a prosecution expert testifies live at trial to her independent, expert opinions and is subject to unrestricted cross-examination.

Brief for Respondent at i.

How can the expert’s opinions be “independent” if she simply took what someone else told her as true in forming them? What is the value of “unrestricted cross-examination” when the witness’s knowledge of what transpired is so severely restricted? Understanding what information the testifying witness relied on seems crucial to an informed resolution of the case. Yet, the prosecution elicited no detailed information on this at trial. In this posting, I shall describe the facts of the case more fully and what I was able to extract by reading the trial transcript about the “data” (as the state’s witness called it), used in forming her “independent, expert opinions” (as Illinois calls them). Later postings will comment on the oral argument and the legal issues.

The Rape Kit

The Supreme Court of Illinois outlined the events leading to the submission of biological evidence to the state laboratory:

On February 10, 2000, 22–year–old L.J. worked until 8 p.m. as a cashier at a clothing store in Chicago. On her way home . . . [a]s she passed an alley, the defendant came up behind her and forced her to sit in the backseat of a beige station wagon, where he [sexually assaulted her]. He then pushed L.J. out of the car while keeping L.J.'s coat, money, and other items. After L.J. ran home, her mother opened the door and saw her in tears, partially clothed with only one pant leg on. [H]er mother called the police.

Shortly after 9 p.m., Chicago police officers arrived at the home . . . . After L.J. told the officers what had transpired, the officers issued a “flash” message for a black male, 5 foot, 8 inches tall, wearing a black skull cap, a black jacket and driving a beige station wagon. An ambulance transported L.J. and her mother to the emergency room. [V]aginal swabs . . . were . . . placed into a criminal sexual assault evidence collection kit along with L.J.'s blood sample. The kit was sent to the Illinois State Police (ISP) Crime Lab for testing and analysis.
On February 15, 2000, [a] forensic biologist . . . performed tests that confirmed the presence of semen. . . .

People v. Williams, 939 N.E.2d 268, 270–71 (Ill. 2010).

To Maryland and Back

Like too many police laboratories, the ISP lab was behind in processing rape kits and other DNA samples. So after letting the rape kit sit for nine months, it sent the vaginal swab that it knew contained semen along with the reference sample of LJ’s blood to a private company, Cellmark Diagnostics, in Germantown, Maryland, via Federal Express. Cellmark received the samples the next day (November 29, 2000). Another fours months went by before Cellmark returned the samples and supplied a report (on April 3, 2001).

The analysis of the reference sample of the victim’s blood at Cellmark should have been straightforward. That sample had plenty of DNA purely from LJ. Nevertheless, no one testified about the electropherogram. Was it clean, with clear peaks, or did it have blobs, pull-up, or off-ladder peaks? The transcript of the testimony, reproduced in relevant parts at the end of this posting, does not contain such questions. The testifying expert never looked at this electropherogram or the data underlying it.

The transcript does suggest, however, that the vaginal swab was not so easily analyzed. Vaginal swabs from rape victims often contain epithelial cells from the victim and some number of sperm cells. Extracting the DNA yields a female fraction from the victim’s epithelial cells and a male fraction from the sperm cells. The two DNA profiles will be mixed together, and someone must deduce which male profiles are consistent with the mixture (and the probability that each such profile is present in the mixture).

Sometimes this “mixture deconvolution” can be avoided by a procedure that extracts the female DNA first and then extracts the male DNA (because sperm cells are harder to break open than are epithelial cells). Under ideal conditions, the latter extract contains DNA from the semen cells only. Unfortunately, the differential extraction failed. The second extract still was a mixture of DNA from LJ and the unknown rapist.

So the Cellmark analyst did his or her best to decipher it by “subtracting” the victim’s peaks (as ascertained from the victim’s reference blood sample) and attributing the remaining peaks to the rapist. This was not as simple as it sounds, because the individual STR alleles are not that uncommon, and the victim and the rapist probably had some alleles in common. In any event, the Cellmark analyst arrived at a single profile — a set of 13 pairs of numbers characterizing the DNA that the rapist inherited from his mother and father. The unnamed analyst believed that the semen had the following profile: D3 (16, 19), DWA (17, 17), FGA (18.2, 22), D8 (14, 14), D21 (29, 30), D18 (13, 17), D5 (12, 13), D13 (11, 11), D7 (10, 12), D16 (9, 11), TH01 (7, 7), TPOX (11, 11), and CSF (8, 10). The analyst’s report included this profile and LJ’s profile (derived from her reference blood sample) as well as at one electropherogram from the mixture.

Meanwhile Williams’ Profile Goes Into the Police Database

During this year of desultory activity, Sandy Williams ran into trouble with the Chicago police:

On August 3, 2000, police arrested the defendant for an unrelated offense and, pursuant to a court order, drew a blood sample from [him]. On August 24, 2000, forensic scientist Karen Kooi [at the ISP lab] performed an analysis on the sample . . . . Kooi extracted a [DNA] profile and entered it into the database at the ISP Crime Lab.

Williams, 939 N.E.2d at 270–71. Which database this was is not clear. It seems unlikely that it was the state’s database for linking known criminals to crime-scene samples, for that database was limited to convicted offenders. Only this year did Illinois pass a law to extend the state database to include certain arrestees.

ISP Uses the Cellmark Profile to Pick Out Williams

The analyst at the police lab who received the materials from Cellmark was Sandra Lambatos. Her testimony is rather fuzzy with regard to how she proceeded. I cannot tell for certain whether she immediately entered the male profile as Cellmark reported it into the unspecified computer database system or whether she waited to do that until she looked more deeply into Cellmark’s report. In any event, the queried the database for the profile that Cellmark reported must have come from the sperm. Bingo! This profile matched the profile of Williams taken after his arrest in August. Every 13-locus profile is exceedingly rare in the general population — perhaps unique to an individual and any identical twins.

Police put Williams in a line-up on April 17, 2001, and LJ identified him as the man who sexually assaulted her over a year earlier.

The ISP Analyst Testifies — and the Cellmark Analyst Does Not

At trial, the state did not call anyone from Cellmark — the laboratory that did the DNA profiling of the vaginal swab. It relied instead on Ms. Lambatos to talk about the results. Lambatos verified that the 13 pairs of numbers that constituted the ISP’s profile of Williams’ reference blood sample were the same as the 13 pairs that constituted the male fraction reported by Cellmark. This established that the database profile with Williams’ name associated with it was, indeed, Sandy Williams’ profile.

At some point before the trial, Lambatos looked at one of the electropherograms from Cellmark — the one following the differential extraction for the mixture in the vaginal sample. She did not take the Cellmark electropherograms from the victim and from the vaginal swab mixture and compare them herself to deduce the rapist profile. Instead, she accepted Cellmark’s report of the victim’s profile as a given and looked only at the mixture electropherogram to infer the rapist profile.

In short, from what I can glean from the testimony, Cellmark's deduction of the male profile is a nontrivial, human inference (although it also could be done with software). But it also looks as if Lambatos made the same deduction using (1) Cellmark's electropherogram of the mixture, and (2) the alleles reported by Cellmark for the reference sample of the victim's blood. With regard to the alleles in (2), getting from the electropherogram for the victim's reference sample of blood to her STR profile could have been quite simple, but there could have been a bit of interpretation there too. In any event, this is not a case of an interpretive analyst starting with two electropherograms of single-source profiles — Lambatos' testimony about forming an "independent opinion" from the Cellmark "data" notwithstanding.

Appendix
Excerpts from the trial testimony of Sandra Lambatos
identifying Sandy Williams as the rapist

Direct examination [JA 42]

Q  What is your current occupation?
A  I am a stay-at-home mom. [JA 43]
Q  Where did you work before that?
A  At the Illinois state police crime laboratory.
. . . [JA 51]
Q  [O]n the date of November 28th of 2000, was evidence from this case sent to (Cellmark) diagnostic laboratory . . . ?
. . . [JA 52]
Q  What was the evidence that was sent?
A  Vaginal swab and a blood standard from [LJ].
. . . [JA 54]
Q  And does this [shipping manifest] indicate the date that the evidence . . . was sent back . . . from (Cellmark) . . . ?
A  It does.
Q  And what is the date . . . ?
A  April 3d of 2001.
. . . [JA 56]
Q  Was there a computer match generated of the male DNA profile found in semen from the vaginal swabs of [LJ] to a male DNA profile that had been identified as having originated from Sandy Williams?
A  Yes, there was.
Q  Did you compare the semen . . . from the vaginal swabs . . . to the male DNA profile that had been identified by Karen Kooi from the blood of Sandy Williams? [JA 57 ]
A  Yes, I did.
. . .
Q  What was your conclusion?
A  I concluded that Sandy Williams cannot be excluded as a possible source of the semen identified in the vaginal swabs.
Q  In other words, is the semen identified in the vaginal swabs of [LJ] consistent with having originated from Sandy Williams?
A  Yes.
Q  What is probability of this profile occurring in the general population?
. . .
A  This profile would be expected to occur in approximately 1 in 8.7 quadrillion black, 1 in 390 quadrillion white, or 1 in 109 quadrillion Hispanic unrelated individuals.
. . . [JA 58]
Q  In your expert opinion, can you call this a match to Sandy Williams?
A  Yes.

Cross examination [JA 61]

Q  And that report [from Cellmark dated Feb. 15, 2001] included an allele chart, correct?
A  Yes.
. . .
Q  And that included data that you used to run your data bank search.
A  Correct. [JA 62]
Q  You did not interpret the results by [Cellmark], did you?
A  Partially. I did review their data, and I did make my own interpretations. So I looked at what the programs, what they sent to me, and did make my own interpretation, my own opinion.
Q  That would be the vaginal swab with respect to the electropherogram E2, right?
. . .
A  Yes.
Q  You did not receive electropherograms for the E1?
A  I believe all I have in my case file is E2, correct.
Q  And you did not receive electropherograms from the standard of [LJ], did you?
A  No, I did not.
. . . [JA 68]
Q  And you reviewed the electropherograms just for that second fraction from the differential extraction [procedure], correct?
A  Correct.
Q  You did not receive the electropherograms for the first part of the procedure, that first part of the extraction, did you?
A  Correct.
. . . [JA 69]
"[T]hey sent the chart that was in the F1 fraction E1. Also the profile that was in the E2 fraction and the profile that was in [LJ]'s standard, and I had only the electropherograms from the E2 fraction . . . .
Q  But you did not receive their data or their electropherograms?
A.  No, I did not receive electropherograms for those fractions.
Q  You never received any computer data, the electronic data.
A   I myself did not receive that, but that was sent to the laboratory.
Q  You never viewed that?
A  Oh no, I did not.

First posted to The Double Helix Blog, 13 Dec. 2011