If defense lawyers want to present that, "more power to them," Harmon said. Jurors don't believe their experts, he said, and "that's why people get convicted in these cases."
The Times reported in May that a San Francisco judge presiding over a murder trial allowed jurors to hear the rarity statistic of 1 in 1.1 million. But the judge refused to permit the defense to reveal that there would be a 1 in 3 chance of finding a DNA match in the database, even if the actual perpetrator was not among the profiles.
Chin acknowledged the database effect, but said adjusting for the database would not have mattered in Nelson's trial.
The odds of finding a random match would still have been astronomical, Chin wrote. But that "does not mean that [rarity statistics] are the only statistics that are relevant and admissible."
"In a different case, if the database were large enough and the odds shorter than those here, the database match probability statistic might also be probative," he wrote.
--
maura.dolan@latimes.com
--
jason.felch@latimes.com
