Legal History Of Dna Evidence
In general, state and federal courts have increasingly accepted DNA evidence as admissible. The first state appellate court decision to uphold the admission of DNA evidence was in 1988 (Andrews v. Florida, 533 So. 2d 841 [Fla. App.]), and the first major federal court decision to uphold its admission occurred in Jakobetz. By the mid-1990s, most states' courts admitted DNA test results into evidence.
No court has rejected DNA evidence on the grounds that the underlying scientific theory is invalid. However, some courts have excluded it from evidence because of problems with the possible contamination of samples, questions surrounding the significance of its statistical probabilities, and laboratory errors. Several states have passed laws that recognize DNA evidence as admissible in criminal cases, and others have enacted laws that specifically admit DNA evidence to help resolve civil paternity cases.
The admissibility of novel SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE such as DNA profiling is governed by two different judicial tests or standards: the Frye, or general acceptance, standard, and the Daubert, or relevancy-reliability, standard. The Frye test, which comes from the 1923 case Frye v. United States 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir.), holds that the admissibility of evidence gathered by a specific technique (such as DNA analysis) is determined by whether that technique has been "sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs." In Frye, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that a lie-detector test using a blood-pressure reading was not admissible as evidence. By the 1970s, 45 states had adopted this common-law standard for the admission of novel scientific evidence.
The U.S. Supreme Court overruled use of the Frye test in federal courts in its 1993 decision Daubert v. Merrell Dow, 509 U.S. 579, 113 S. Ct. 2786, 125 L. Ed. 2d 469. In Daubert, the Court held that the FEDERAL RULES OF EVIDENCE, enacted in 1975, govern the admission of novel scientific evidence in federal courts. It found that Frye provides too stringent a test and that it is incompatible with the federal rules, which allow the admission of all evidence that has "any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence" (Fed. R. Evid. 401). The Court found that judges have a responsibility to "ensure that any and all scientific testimony or evidence admitted is not only relevant, but reliable."
In general, courts that have used the Daubert standard have been more likely to admit DNA evidence, although many jurisdictions that have relied on Frye have permitted it as well. Nearly all cases in which DNA evidence has been ruled inadmissible have been in jurisdictions that have used Frye.
States are free to adopt their own standards for the admission of evidence, and have increasingly adopted the Daubert standard. By 1995, the number of states using the Frye standard had dropped to 23, while 21 had adopted the Daubert standard.
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