FORENSICS

SCOTLAND’S top forensics scientist has predicted it will be virtually impossible to get away with a crime within a generation due to advances in DNA technology.

The director of forensic services at the Scottish Police Authority (SPA), Tom Nelson, said rapid improvements made it more likely that criminals would always be found out.

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He said the SPA was looking at ’12 cold cases’ in which modern techniques were being used to analyse old evidence in an effort to bring offenders to justice.

New methods mean DNA traces can be found on clothing and other materials even when there is no blood – something that would have been impossible in the past.

Mr Nelson said one of the guiding principles of forensic science is ‘every contact leaves a trace’.

He said: ‘We may be recovering material at the moment which doesn’t necessarily allow us to detect an individual but, as science develops in the next 15 years, that will become possible – science is always moving on.’

Mr Nelson said the challenge for police forensics experts was to ‘throw everything that we have in our toolbox’ at securing genetic samples from crime scenes.

He said that thanks to improvements in DNA analysis ‘an individual may commit a crime and think they have got away with it for a number of years, but I believe that individual will be detected’.

The SPA’s current caseload features 12 cold cases, stretching back up to 20 years, in which forensic investigators are analysing evidence to gauge whether new breakthroughs are possible.

Mr Nelson pointed to forensics work which contributed to the conviction of nine members of a gang who were jailed for a total of 87 years in January for drug and gun offences.

Their crimes included the ‘merciless’ torture of a man over a cocaine debt and an arsenal of weapons hidden in a car. A report by Mr Nelson revealed that more than 200 DNA samples were recovered from seized firearms. More than 1,000 DNA samples and 1,000 fingerprints were recovered from various scenes.

The results of these tests identified all of the initial suspects in the case and uncovered an additional six people that were not initially linked to the group until the forensic results were provided.

Mr Nelson’s report states: ‘Criminals should be aware that they cannot escape without leaving traces of material at the scene of their crime.’

Modern forensic techniques include DNA 24, a profile kit which targets 24 parts of a person’s DNA, whereas in the past it was only possible to look at 11 areas.

However, the daughter of a former police officer, who was wrongly accused of perjury when a fingerprint found at a murder scene in 1997 was mistakenly identified as hers, questioned the SPA’s confidence in forensic science.

He said: ‘While forensics has come a long way, they still perpetuate this fiction of perfection which is not true – rubbish in, rubbish out. Human error in the collection of forensic evidence and in its analysis is still a contributor to miscarriages of justice.’