Did the OJ Simpson murder trial hold back the use of DNA evidence?
No. What we were arguing in that case was that DNA testing itself can be very reliable. But the results are only as good as the integrity of the evidence before it gets to the lab. Since the police department admitted mishandling all the blood evidence, repeatedly, one could not have confidence in the integrity of the case. Perhaps the one silver lining in the whole Simpson case is that crime laboratories all over the US didn’t want to be perceived as being like the Los Angeles police crime laboratories, which looked like a bunch of bumbling idiots, so they have tried to clean their own house. What are other countries doing to improve their criminal justice systems? Canada is the first country in the world to have “innocence commissions”. What they do is truly marvellous. They will perform a post-mortem on the case of a man who was wrongly convicted and find out what went wrong and what they can do to reduce the likelihood of it happening again in the future. That is what you do in sci
