Student:
When you're dealing with DNA you find at crime scenes. How do you sort of deal with the possibility that the DNA's been planted there, by the criminal to sort of lead them off track?
Andy:
We don't deal with that. The samples will be submitted to our laboratories and we would profile the sample and we would give the information to the police. There's no way of telling whether a sample's been planted or not, not to a scientist.
Robin:
Right. But in general it tends to be that criminals really aren't that smart and so a lot of them wouldn't really think about whether or not they should plant evidence and then some kinds of things would be really difficult to plant. So I suppose somebody could get a blood sample of somebody else and throw it around the room, or a piece of hair from somebody else and throw it around the room.
But if you look at the whole picture of the crime scene, people, and this is not what our expertise would be, but there are people who really know a lot about looking at crime scenes and looking at blood spatter. Let's say somebody was stabbed with a knife and the way the blood comes away from the wound and people who have an expertise in that area can make sense of what's at a scene and so it would be probably very difficult to plant things that really looked appropriate for an event that's as violent as most crimes are. But it could happen.
