Biology professor Greg Hampikian, director of the Idaho Innocence Project, was quoted in an article titled “Texas man close to exoneration after computer algorithm leads to new suspect,” which follows the story of a man freed from prison after crime-scene DNA in his case was reexamined by a new software program.
The article states:
“Greg Hampikian, a biology professor at Boise State University who was an expert consultant in the high-profile case of Amanda Knox, credits TrueAllele with helping to free the wrongly convicted in other cases he’s worked on. But he also supports the release of the software’s source code and believes that if prosecutors have the same access to such a program for a trial, then the defense must, too. He acknowledged that there are difficulties to ensuring that a defense team can be fully trained to ‘counter these highly sophisticated mathematical programs without having actually used them.’ They can also be cost-prohibitive, running in the tens of thousands of dollars.”