The students, who are supervised by Innocence Project Director and Professor (left), filed an application last April asking that the Crown be compelled to retain all murder exhibits unless an inmate has approved their destruction or a court order has been obtained to authorize the destruction.

According to Young, the application was driven by frustration that the Innocence Project had “to abandon a lot of cases due to the inability of the state to locate or find the evidence needed for us to reinvestigate.”

Ontario Superior Court Judge Edward Belobaba ruled earlier this month that the Innocence Project’s application – launched in the name of Amina Chaudhary, 46, who is serving a life sentence for the Feb. 3, 1982 murder of eight-year-old Rajesh Gupta – was too broad and unmanageable. However, the judge did not throw out the constitutional challenge as the federal government had requested. Instead, he said the challenge can proceed if it is scaled down and pertains only to evidence in murder cases. Next step for the Innocence Project will be to amend the statement of claim in the case, which will likely be heard next year.

Young credits then second-year Osgoode students Ashley Audet, Kathleen Beahen and Leila Mehkeri with doing the research last year for the original application. “They chronicled all the problems and the various preservation of evidence policies in Canada,” Young said. “In April, before the school term ended, we completed the work and we filed.”

This year, second-year JD students Noah Schachter and Genevieve Trickey were responsible for responding to the government’s motion to strike the claim. “They prepared the factum pretty much on their own with very little guidance from me,” Young said.

“If we win this case, it will not only be a victory for the Innocence Project, but governments will have to come up with a more unified and comprehensive regime of evidence preservation for all types of offences," says Young. "Right now every police force, every court house and every lab maintains their own policies about preservation of evidence. Nobody works together; the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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DNA evidence is popularized in cop and legal dramas as proof of irrefutable guilt, but it's only as solid as the conditions under which it is collected. , professor of criminal law in 91��ɫ's Osgoode Hall Law School,  was featured in a on the dark side of DNA evidence on March 13:

Last year, University of Virginia law Professor Brandon Garrett and Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, found that three of 156 US individuals ultimately exonerated in serious crimes had been wrongly convicted because of DNA errors. In one case, a technician grossly overstated evidence. Another featured lab contamination. The third wrongful conviction came after senior analyst Fred Zain gave evidence in court he knew to be false.

Alan Young, a criminal law professor in 91��ɫ’s Osgoode Hall Law School, describes the Zain case as “a classic example of why you can’t simply roll over and play dead in the face of science.” After his shortcomings at the West  Virginia State Police Crime Laboratory were discovered, Zain left and became head of a medical examiner’s lab in Texas. His errors became one of several problems the state ultimately faced.

“They have had to reopen hundreds of cases in Texas because of the discovery of horrible preservation and contamination issues,” said Young. “They had to literally shut down a lab in Houston because it was generating so many false results.”

The full article is available on The Globe & Mail's .

Republished with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post The dark side of DNA evidence appeared first on Research & Innovation.