Problems in New York

There are approximately 250 crime labs in the United States, and five of them are currently using TrueAllele, while four others in Ohio, Georgia and Louisiana are expected to go live in the next several months.

But the company’s $1.2 million contract with the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center was canceled four years after it started and before TrueAllele was ever approved for casework.

The agency began working with TrueAllele in September 2011, said state police spokesman Beau Duffy. But in the fall of 2014, lab officials launched an internal investigation over allegations that 15 analysts were sharing answers in TrueAllele training sessions and on exams, raising questions about their integrity.

The implementation of TrueAllele was suspended at the request of the state commission on forensic science and while an internal investigation was conducted.

The contract ultimately was canceled in September 2015, Mr. Duffy said, because there was only one year left on it, and there would have been no way to complete the training and validation in that time.

Based on the investigation, one analyst was terminated and two resigned, while the others were permitted to remain working.

Earlier this year, three employees at the lab filed a federal lawsuit against the New York State Police and officials in the lab, alleging that they were improperly disciplined following the revelations about answer sharing regarding TrueAllele.

At issue in the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of New York, was whether the information sharing was encouraged as part of the training process or was cheating. The plaintiffs said that lab officials were retaliating against them for advocating for the use of TrueAllele because those officials feared that the superior performance of TrueAllele would endanger convictions based on the methodology in place there (and in most labs across the country), known as Combined Probability of Inclusion.

That could open the state to liability from those who were wrongfully convicted.

While Mr. Duffy said he could not comment on pending litigation, Joseph D’Amico, the former superintendent of the New York State Police, and George Beach, the current head of the agency, wrote in the Albany Times-Union that the allegations being made against lab officials are inaccurate.

“This was not a misunderstanding, nor are the punished analysts being used as scapegoats for any reason,” Mr. D’Amico wrote in February. “Our main focus from day one was preserving the lab's integrity. Anyone who breaks clearly articulated rules and is not truthful about their actions undermines the work of others and potentially jeopardizes investigations involving law enforcement agencies statewide.”

In a story published Tuesday, Mr. Beach said allegations that lab officials were trying to “scuttle” the implementation of TrueAllele, or that the failure to implement it would lead to crimes going unsolved or people being wrongfully convicted, were wrong. Instead, he said, the contract was canceled for business reasons.

The agency, Mr. Beach said, is committed to implementing probabilistic genotyping into its lab and last week put out a request for information from companies that sell that technology. Mr. Duffy said that Cybergenetics is welcome to submit TrueAllele.

Allegheny County

When Allegheny County officials entered into a contract with Cybergenetics to use TrueAllele, prosecutors in the district attorney’s office say they thought it would be great.

More and more they were seeing that serious criminal cases often included DNA samples from more than one person. TrueAllele, they believed, would help them solve more cases.

But then, Ms. Spangler said, the lab never moved forward in implementing the program. Lab personnel changed, and different philosophies developed.

Robert Huston, the director of labs for the Allegheny County Office of the Medical Examiner, said there are a variety of reasons TrueAllele was never put to use.

“These include reproducibility of results, time of analysis, the availability of the source code [this means that the scientists could not explain how it works in court], general acceptance by the scientific community and validation of the system,” he said in a statement. “Additionally, the up-front cost and annual cost of the system make it less attractive for use by the office when compared to other systems which do not raise as many concerns.”

But the DA’s office does not share those worries.

“No one has ever said to me his science is wrong or faulty, or that they’re uncomfortable with the software” Ms. Spangler said.

Still, she knows that the lab is independent from her office.

“We can’t tell them what to do.”

So instead of relying directly on the crime lab, the DA’s office began to contract privately with Cybergenetics.

Since October 2013, the Allegheny County district attorney's office has spent $285,975 to have TrueAllele analyze data in 31 cases.

There is now an official protocol in place for when county crime lab analysts discover mixed DNA samples that they are unable to interpret, Ms. Spangler said. They put a note in their official report, and when the individual prosecutor receives it, he or she consults with Ms. Spangler to decide whether to send the data to Cybergenetics.

“The lab is very responsive when we ask for the data or evidence to be sent to outside labs,” she said. “They’re very approachable.”

But Ms. Spangler said the situation is not ideal and that it would be less expensive and cumbersome for the crime lab to do the work.

“That’s a legitimate issue to raise,” Ms. Spangler said. “But that’s for someone else. We can’t tell them what to do. We’ve made the inquiry.”

But she said that she believes that TrueAllele gets her office reliable results that can be used in court.

“We want to use the best resources we can,” she said.

Ms. Spangler noted that TrueAllele clears potential suspects, too — lending credence to the product.

“That’s very important to us,” she said. “If the wrong person is in jail, that means there’s a criminal out there possibly still committing other crimes.”

Dr. Perlin said he has presented case results for criminal defendants in 31 cases, and that TrueAllele helped exonerate an Indiana man who was wrongfully convicted.

But defense attorney Noah Geary, who is representing a man linked to a double homicide through TrueAllele, said the program should not be used in Allegheny County.

“If the Allegheny County crime lab doesn’t accept it, then the DA’s office shouldn’t accept it, and a jury shouldn’t accept it,” he said.

What the creator says

Dr. Perlin, who also holds doctoral degrees in computer science and mathematics, said he has never gotten a full explanation why the Allegheny County crime lab won’t use his program, but he has offered to help implement it.

“We have spent years helping the crime lab, working with them for free, providing training at no cost,” he said. “It would be best for Allegheny County if the crime lab used the better mixture interpretation software that they have.”

He insists that his program is not too complex to understand, but also recognizes that in some instances, the analysts who wouldo use it may be uncomfortable.

“If you’ve mislearned a field, and you’re an expert at it, it can be difficult to unlearn all of that experience, learn something new and then move on,” Dr. Perlin said. “There can be cultural difficulty for some forensic scientists who are very focused on certainty. They want to be able to make statements with certainty in court, for example.”

But he also said that in some places, like Kern County, Calif., it took only a year to get TrueAllele up and running. The City of