2016/09/30

The New York Times August 26, 2016: Judge Rejects DNA Test in Trial Over Garrett Phillips’s Murder

A judge presiding over a trial in the 2011 murder of a 12-year-old boy in northern New York State said on Friday that the prosecution could not use a cutting-edge and controversial method of analyzing DNA data, dealing a blow to its efforts to convict a former soccer coach accused of the crime.

In late July, Judge Felix J. Catena of St. Lawrence County Court held a hearing on the admissibility of a computer program known as STRmix in the trial of Oral Nicholas Hillary, who is accused of strangling Garrett Phillips in the village of Potsdam.

The police have testified that there is little, if any, physical evidence against Mr. Hillary, 42, who has maintained his innocence since suspicion first fell on him shortly after the murder. Mr. Hillary, a black Jamaican immigrant who dated Garrett’s mother until shortly before the crime, has contended that he is being targeted in part because of his race. Garrett was white, as is much of Potsdam and the surrounding county.

Earlier this year, the prosecution team indicated that it would use STRmix to analyze a minuscule scraping from one of Garrett’s fingernails, and it later suggested that Mr. Hillary was one of eight people in the nation who might match the sample. The defense rebutted those assertions and challenged the reliability of the program, which uses an algorithm to determine probabilities for usually unusable data. more