Word: dna
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. WALDO COHN, 89, Manhattan Project biochemist who helped develop plutonium for the atom bomb; in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Cohn's methods were later used in RNA and DNA research...
...victim and no credible evidence linking him to the crime scene--was painfully weak. So was the case in Tulsa, Okla., against Tim Durham, who spent six years in prison (of a 3,220-year sentence) for the rape of an 11-year-old girl, until DNA cleared him. The jury ignored 11 alibi witnesses who swore Durham was at a skeet-shooting contest when the crime occurred...
...DNA is also confirming a point legal scholars have long made: that eyewitnesses are often wrong. "There's a myth that the image is burned in a witness's mind and never forgotten," says Yale Law School lecturer Stephen Bright. "In fact, science says just the opposite." And eyewitness testimony is only as reliable as the eyewitness. Two men sentenced to death for a Chicago murder and then freed by DNA evidence in 1996 were convicted largely on the testimony of a woman with a sub-75 IQ, who later said prosecutors promised to release her from jail...
...good look at him during the assault, and the investigators didn't have any solid leads. For years Smith lived in fear that he would return and attack her or her daughters. But one day, her husband, a police officer, came home with good news: the state DNA lab had caught her rapist. Norman Jimmerson, in fact, was already in jail, convicted of kidnapping and robbing two other women around the same time that Smith was attacked. When his DNA was entered into the state's data bank--something Virginia law now requires of all felons--it matched a semen...
...While DNA makes headlines by exonerating people of crimes they were convicted of years ago, the same technique is enabling police across the country to track down and put away criminals who might otherwise have gone free. DNA is the biggest thing to happen in crime solving since fingerprints--and it's likely to be a lot more useful. Fingerprints can be used only when a perpetrator happens to leave a clean imprint. But DNA can be taken from hair, sweat or saliva. It even has a convenient tendency to fall off skin, leaving genetic markers behind...