Powerful DNA software used in hundreds of criminal cases faces new scrutiny

DNA has been considered the gold standard of forensic evidence for more than 30 years, even as various types of junk science have fallen out of use. But in recent years, police and crime labs have stretched and expanded how they use genetic material to pin suspects—from tapping into private ancestry websites to creating police sketches of suspects’ faces. The latest practice to come under scrutiny is an obscure technique, “probabilistic genotyping,” that takes incomplete or otherwise inscrutable DNA left behind at a crime scene, often in minuscule amounts, and runs it through a software program that calculates how likely…

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