History of DNA Evidence

By terrellhensley

  • Alphonse Bertillion

    Alphonse Bertillion
    In the 1870's the police began to circulate photographs as a method of apprehending criminals. Another major innovation was the Bertillion Method. This was named after Alphonse Bertillion, a Paris police officer who pioneered the identification of criminals through the precise physical dimensions and the charting of scars and unusual physical attributes.

  • Fingerprinting

    Fingerprinting
    Fingerprinting was a revolutionary development that was exhibited by a detective from Scotland Yard at the St. Louis Worlds Fair in 1904. St. Louis subsequently established the first fingerprint department in the United States.

  • Alec Jefferys

    Alec Jefferys
    Jeffreys's DNA method was first put to use in 1985 when he was asked to help in a disputed immigration case to confirm the identity of a British boy whose family was originally from Ghana.

  • Tommie Lee Andrews

    Tommie Lee Andrews
    In 1987, Tommie Lee Andrews became the first American ever convicted in a case that utilized DNA evidence. On February 21, 1987, a stranger broke into a Florida woman's home in the middle of the night and burglarized and raped the woman at knife-point.

  • Virginia Division of Forensic Science

    Virginia Division of Forensic Science
    In 1989, the Virginia Division of Forensic Sciences implemented DNA testing in its criminal investigations, becoming the first state crime lab to introduce such a policy. Later that same year, the Virginia General Assembly became the first American legislature to pass laws that required certain classes of offenders to submit DNA samples for inclusion in a DNA databank. This law required certain sex offenders and certain violent felons to provide samples for the databank.

  • Forty-nine Other States Established Databanks Within Nine Years

    Forty-nine Other States Established Databanks Within Nine Years
    Within nine years of Virginia's establishment of the first state DNA databank, the other forty-nine states passed laws requiring the collection of DNA samples from certain criminals for the purposes of establishing state DNA databanks. All fifty states require DNA samples from convicted sex offenders, with some states collecting from all classes of felons, as well as certain classes of misdemeanants.

  • DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act.

    DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act.
    In 2000, Congress facilitated the collection of DNA when it passed the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act, which provides funds to the state forensic laboratories confronting a backlog of DNA.

  • House v. Bell

    House v. Bell
    In 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court fully embraced DNA evidence in House v. Bell when it ruled that Paul House was entitled to a new trial in federal court based in large part on DNA evidence that was not available at his 1985 trial, which supported his actual innocence.

  • The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS)

    The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS)
    The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is an electronic database that integrates the DNA profiles contained in the criminal offender databases of the fifty states and the federal government. In October 2008, CODIS contained 241,685 forensic profiles and 6,384,379 offender profiles.