Before They Were Stars
Eight fictional icons with looks and backstories so fantastic they have to be based on actual people. But whom?
the very people investigating the crime, is the best-understood form of transfer. And after Lunsford heard Kulick’s presentation and retraced Anderson’s day himself, he concluded he had jailed an innocent man. He counted contamination among his leading theories.
In Santa Clara County, the district attorney’s office reviewed the Kumra case and found no obvious evidence of errors or improper use of tools in the crime lab. They checked whether Anderson’s DNA had shown up in any other cases the lab had recently handled and inadvertently wandered into the Kumra case. It had not.
It was Lunsford who figured out the answer to the riddle of how Anderson’s DNA ended up on Raveesh Kumra. He was reading Anderson’s medical records and paused on the names of the ambulance paramedics who’d picked up Anderson outside S&S Market. He had seen them before. He pulled up the Kumra case files. Sure enough, there were the names again: Three hours after picking up the drunk Anderson at the market, the two paramedics had responded to the Kumra mansion. Somehow, the paramedics must have moved Anderson’s DNA from San Jose to Monte Sereno. District attorney Jeff Rosen has postulated that a device slipped over both patients’ fingers to measure oxygen levels may have been the culprit. Deputy district attorney Kevin Smith framed the incident as a freak accident. “It’s a small world,” he told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.
But it was hardly a small mistake to the defendant. Had the case gone to trial, jurors may well have convicted Anderson, as they did the other three defendants (a third man, Marcellous Drummer, was eventually arrested). A 2008 study found that jurors rated DNA evidence as 95 percent accurate and 94 percent persuasive of a suspect’s guilt. “We’re desperately hoping that DNA will come in to save the day, but it’s still fitting into a flawed system,” says Erin E. Murphy, a professor of law at New York University and author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA. “If you don’t bring in the appropriate amount of skepticism and restraint in using the method, there are going to be miscarriages of justice.”
Having narrowly escaped a terrible fate, Anderson himself has advice for law-enforcement officers: “There’s more that’s gotta be looked at than just the DNA,” he says. “You’ve got to dig deeper. Reanalyze. Do everything all over again before you say, ‘This is what it is.’ Because it may not necessarily be so.”
“If you don’t bring in the appropriate amount of skepticism, there will be miscarriages of justice.”