A New Jersey judge ruled that prosecutors can use evidence of a powerful DNA tool and increasingly common in the next trial of a man accused in the murder of four relatives in 2018.
Monmouth County judge Marc Lemieux, agreed with the prosecutors that Strmix, which allows forensic analysts to try small and complex DNA samples that would probably have been considered unusable a decade ago, repeated evidence had been resisted and they have been confused.
“Strmix works, and seems to work very well,” he wrote in a decision of 212 pages last week.
The defense lawyers of Paul Caneiro, who is waiting for the trial in the murder of his brother and the family of his brother, had urged the judge during a one -week hearing last year to block the evidence gathered with Strmix because they said he had not been properly examined for use in criminal cases.
Caneiro, who was 51 years old at the time of murders, declared himself innocent of first degree murder positions for Keith Caneiro murder, 50; Jennifer Caneiro, 45; and his two children, Jesse, 11, and Sophia, 8.
They were found at home on November 20, 2018 in Colts Neck, 47 miles south of New York City.
The prosecutors alleged that Caneiro fatally shot his brother, stabbed his niece and nephew, and shot and stabbed his sister -in -law before his home fire. Then he set fire to his own home in an effort to cover up the crime, authorities alleged.
The jury selection is expected to begin in May.
Prosecutors introduced more than a dozen DNA samples in the case using Strmix, which was developed by scientists in New Zealand and Australia and introduced in the United States about a decade ago.
Experts have said that the software, which uses statistical models to analyze complex samples obtained from something as small as some cells that remain in a door knob, has revolutionized how the DNA is analyzed and is probably used by most forensic laboratories in the United States.
In a case in the case of Caneiro, DNA analysts could not obtain results using traditional methods when analyzing a pair of blood stained jeans discovered in Paul Caneiro’s basement.
But after the laboratory began using Strmix, the software showed that the DNA of La Mancha was 2.7 seventh times more likely to come from Paul Caneiro’s nephew than another person, a forensic analyst said during the audience.
Paul Caneiro’s defense lawyers had challenged the software, saying that it had not proven reliable in the same way as “security critical” systems used in cars and airplanes are. Strmix, they said in a brief, can produce false results that could help unjustly condemn someone.
