Greg Hampikian, a professor in the departments of biological sciences and criminal justice, as well as the director of the Idaho Innocence Project, recently published a peer-reviewed article titled “Correcting Forensic DNA Errors” in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. Hampikian’s research describes how Boise State helped free six innocent people with new computer technology.
An excerpt of the abstract reads:
“DNA mixture interpretation can produce opposing conclusions by qualified forensic analysts, even within the same laboratory. The long-delayed publication of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) study of 109 North American crime laboratories in this journal demonstrates this most clearly. This latest study supports earlier work that shows common methods such as the Combined Probability of Inclusion (CPI) have wrongly included innocent people as contributors to DNA mixtures.”