In a truly awful decision reminiscent of Gore vs. Bush, the Supreme Court has decided that there should be no federal mandate for genetic testing after someone has been convicted. Even though DNA evidence can free innocent people who were wrongfully accused. How absurd is this?

It is especially hard to understand when there is ample evidence that there are plenty of innocents in prison. And when a DNA test can prove so conclusive in showing their innocence.

A case I use in a high school activity (and which will be highlighted in the new Technology Benefiting Humanity exhibition at The Tech) involves Marvin Anderson. He is an African American who was convicted of rape by an all white jury in the South.

Court TV produced a great documentary that details all of the mistakes that sent Marvin to prison. And how the Virginia state government, much like our current Supreme Court, fought the simple DNA test that eventually proved his innocence.

Marvin was a suspect because he had a white girlfriend and the rapist had said that he had a white girlfriend during the attack. In a photo line up, Marvin’s was the only picture in color. Then, in the real line up, Marvin was the only man who had been shown in the photo line up.

Marvin’s lawyer represented the man who had really committed the crime. The trial lasted one day and as I said, Marvin was sent to jail by an all white jury. And while Marvin languished in prison, the real rapist confessed but the judge threw out the confession.

This is when the Innocence Project took up the case. The Innocence Project uses genetic testing to free innocent men and women. After hearing the details of Marvin’s case, they decided to help him clear his name. And it was not easy!

First off, they had to find the evidence from the case. This is often hard to do because evidence gets thrown away after a certain amount of time.

But, by a miraculous fluke, the Virginia government found the evidence from the rape kit… it had been saved in a lab notebook. So all that needed to be done was to see if the DNA from the crime scene matched Marvin's. If it didn’t, then Marvin most likely was innocent.

But the Virginia government would not allow the evidence to be tested. Apparently, just like the Supreme Court, procedure mattered more than innocence to the bureaucrats involved.

How many people like Marvin Anderson are waiting for the justice system to do the right thing?
Finally, in 2001, after Marvin had been in jail for 15 years and spent four years on parole, Virginia passed an Innocence Project backed statute that allowed DNA evidence to be tested in some cases. Marvin’s was the first evidence tested under the new statute. He was found to be innocent and the police were able to use the evidence to catch the real rapist.

If the Virginia government had not done the right thing, the real rapist would be free to continue committing crimes. And everyone would still see Marvin as a rapist.

There are undoubtedly Marvins rotting in jail in the three states that don’t allow for genetic testing after a conviction (Alaska, Oklahoma, and Massachusetts). And other Marvins are probably in those other states that only allow genetic testing in certain situations.

The Supreme Court could have given all of these innocent people the chance that Marvin finally got after 19 years. But five justices decided against doing that.

Now I suppose there is probably some legalese reason why the Supreme Court ruled that innocent people should stay locked up. But I am not lawyer enough to understand it. And neither are the Marvins still out there, waiting for justice.

Shows like CSI can increase the public's awareness of geneticsOne of the most fun parts about my job is answering people's genetics questions at our Understanding Genetics website.  We get around 200 questions each month from all over the world and they definitely keep me on my toes.

They also give me a feel for what is going on with science in popular culture.  I can tell this by looking at Google Analytics data and seeing which of our previous answers has had an upsurge in visits.  (We post around one new answer online per week.)

For example, whenever PBS airs a show on how a mutation called CCR5-delta 32 may have made people resistant to the plague, I get an uptick in the hits on the answer that deals with that topic.  When House (a show on Fox) had a character say that of course someone was adopted because he had a cleft chin and his parents didn't, I got an uptick on the Chimeras start out as fraternal twins that fuse together at a very early stage.  What this means is that chimeras have two sets of DNA.  Some of their cells have the DNA from one twin and the rest of their cells have DNA from the other twin.

As you can imagine, these folks can wreak havoc with a police investigation!  What happened in the CSI episode was that the DNA from the crime scene did not match the DNA from the most likely suspect.  In the end we find out that the suspect is a chimera and that the evidence left behind at the crime scene had one set of DNA and that the blood they tested had a different set of DNA.  From the same person!

It is great that there is so much science starting to seep into popular culture.  If the science is accurate, it is a great way to get people involved in science.  I just wish it was accurate more often.

I knew I was in trouble when I saw the jars. Big jars, filled with tinted liquid, with weird things suspended in them. Things that definitely used to be alive, and that I would not have wanted to see when they WERE alive.

"One of my favorites is this one here," says my host, Senior Wildlife Forensic Specialist Jeff Rodzen, "we have a bird who choked to death on the head of a lizard." Hmm. A favorite? Maybe compared to the others lining the wall: jars filled with parasitic worms, a tule elk fetus, a see-through rabbit where you can see every bone.

Add in the bighorn sheep skull among the modern equipment, and the paws sticking up in the back of the evidence and it made for a surreal day of reporting.

Welcome to the autopsy and necropsy room at the California Fish and Game office in Rancho Cordova, about 12 miles east of Sacramento. This is the place where blood and hair and small fibers from wildlife crime scenes are DNA-matched for all the poaching cases in California.

This is a fascinating place, if a little macabre. And it was the starting point for a QUEST radio story that had many more story lines than I could possibly pursue in one feature.

• I learned about a canine program designed to track down poachers, and an offshoot of that program that actually sniffs out invasive species like Quagga mussels.
• I found out how dangerous the job of Game Warden actually is, and the reasons it’s so hard to recruit new officers.
• And I found out how complicated poaching can become, and how endemic it is in California.
• I discovered there’s a subculture of poaching.

Some poachers hit the country backroads late at night, right after the bars close, and Game Warden Todd Tognazzini said those are the easier ones to catch. But the ones who are good at it use sophisticated communications equipment, night-vision sights on their guns, and small, strong flashlights to stun wild pigs or deer into standing still. This is called "spotlighting." Some poachers will black out their brake lights, run on roads without headlights, and use other ingenious ways to keep a low profile while they illegally hunt wild animals.

Game warden is one of the most dangerous law enforcement jobs around– after all, you're going into a remote area, with no backup, to confront people who are carrying guns and knives. Would any urban police officer do that? There is a dearth of game wardens in California, partly due to decades of budget cuts. Last thing I found: The newest high-tech method of tracking down poachers is actually pretty low-tech. Dogs. A new canine program helps game wardens find illegal animal kills. Not surprisingly, poachers hide their contraband, and it's not easy for game wardens to find it. Lieutenant Kristie Wurster is stationed in Alpine County, near Placerville. She’s one of 18 wardens in the canine-training program, and she uses her dog Wrigley to sniff out illegal fishing and hunting. .

Wurster estimates the dog saves about 800 man-hours of work a year. "We are so small in numbers and we just tip the iceberg of how much poaching is going on," she says. "That’s why I’m so excited about the program, to have another set of eyes and ears – and nose – to be able to detect the issues."

Listen to the "Wildlife CSI" Radio report online, and check out our photo set on Flickr which includes: photos of a game warden at work tracking poachers in the foothills of southern Monterey County, as well as deer, boar, abalone and other illegally killed animals.

I was excited to be working on this story. After all, it's not that often that a primarily environmental reporter gets to spend a couple weeks focusing on forensics technology and the debate over gun control (let alone receive firearms training on a 38-special from a senior criminalist at the DOJ's California Criminalistics Institute). In the end, there was much, much more to report than I could squeeze into five minutes.

Supporters of microstamping will want to have heard from the technology's inventor, Todd Lizotte of NanoMark Technologies. Lizotte reports a much higher success rate than the UC Davis study and, according to a microstamping supporter I spoke with, has declined any potential profits he might have made on it.

Microstamping itself has far more subtleties than I was able to report on. Fred Tulleners experimented with (and had various degrees of success with) several different types of stamping, as documented in the report he and others prepared for the California Policy Research Center. Even for a non-ballistics expert, that report makes for compelling reading. Tullener's personal opinions on microstamping are also more complex than the story allows: He told me that he would like to see more investment in law enforcement and detection — on the street investments, in other words, rather than new technologies.

I also want to point out that the story overestimates the overall success rate of Tulleners' microstamping tests. I say that microstamping worked "roughly three quarters;" of the time; in actuality, Tulleners says it was closer to 50 percent.

And finally, there's more afoot in the world of gun control technology than I was able to delve into. For example, "Smart Guns," which would recognize and respond exclusively to their registered owner's grip. Supporters point in particular to the number of minors killed while playing with their parents' guns. Of course, controversy follows every new gun proposal. Here’s a Wired article about the Smart Guns debate.

Listen to the "How to ID a Bullet" Radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

ABC, Yahoo! and others ran a story about a woman who had a liver transplant whose blood type ended up changing. I love stories like this.

Not because of the change itself. Most likely, stem cells traveled from the new liver to the patient’s bone marrow. There, the stem cells set up shop and gave her a new blood type.

What intrigues me is what these types of stories mean for solving crimes. Because changed blood type usually means changed blood DNA. In other words, her blood cells now have different DNA from the other cells in her body. This can really confound an investigation if the police aren’t careful.

Of course this was a very rare event. But bone marrow transplants aren’t. And every bone marrow transplant results in blood cells with different DNA compared to the rest of the recipient’s cells.

Imagine that someone who has had a bone marrow transplant does something wrong and leaves blood behind at the crime scene. The police do a cheek swab to gather DNA evidence and check it against the police DNA database as well as likely suspects (including our bone marrow recipient).

The police don’t catch our bone marrow recipient because his cheek DNA is different than his new blood DNA. So he is off the hook (as long as the police don’t check the blood too). But they do get a match and arrest someone—the donor.

Sounds weird but something almost like this complicated a case in Alaska a few years ago. There was a serious crime and a semen sample from the crime scene matched a known criminal’s DNA. But the person whose DNA matched the DNA from the crime scene had a strong alibi…he was in jail at the time! So what happened?

A little further investigation showed that the guy in jail had received a bone marrow transplant from his brother. And his brother was the one who committed the crime.

This one worked out all right in the end. But what would have happened to the brother if he weren’t in jail at the time? Would an overworked public defender have figured something like this out? The guy was lucky he was already in jail!

So people with bone marrow transplants need to be careful. And the police need to be careful about what sample they take from suspects.

Dr. Barry Starr is a Geneticist-in-Residence at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA.

latitude: -33.8027, longitude: 150.988