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EmailEvery investigation is a process of elimination. When a crime has been committed it is an investigator’s job to narrow the field of possible suspects until he or she can build a case against an individual or a group of individuals.
For some cases it’s easy to eliminate everybody else and focus on one suspect. For example, when you find a woman murdered and her friends and relatives say her ex-boyfriend was a violent man, it’s pretty easy to determine the focus of your investigation. You still have to build a case, but the violent ex-boyfriend quickly becomes a person of interest.
Other cases are not so easy. A body is found in an alley, the victim of a random crime. You don’t have a suspect; so, theoretically, your murderer could be quite literally anyone. Now the process of elimination becomes long and tedious.
But that may not be true much longer. A new and controversial technology developed by Sarasota, Fla.-based DNAPrint Genomics is providing investigators with a way to quickly eliminate entire populations of potential suspects.
Read the full story: http://www.policemag.com/Channel/Technology/Articles/2005/03/The-Eliminator.aspx
