October 15, 2020
Criminal Courts

Amicus Brief on Probabilistic DNA Analysis

Emily Paul, Logan Koepke, Urmila Janardan, Aaron Rieke, and Natasha Duarte

Amicus brief

Working with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, we filed a brief with the Superior Court of New Jersey in New Jersey v. Pickett supporting the defense’s request to fully examine TrueAllele, the probabilistic DNA analysis software used in the case, in order to assess its reliability.

TrueAllele has not been validated through independent studies and its source code has never been independently reviewed. Our brief argued that each aspect of TrueAllele must be subject to independent and adversarial review and that the Court must fulfill its gatekeeping function and not allow the makers of TrueAllele to shield it from such a review.