What if you found yourself accused of a crime you didn’t commit? What if the only thing standing between you and freedom was your word against the word of the victim? What if the court ruled against you? Craig Watkins feels that scenario happens far too often in our country, and since he was elected district attorney of Dallas, Texas, he’s done everything he can to correct those mistakes.

Last week, a California serial killer was caught after his son was convicted of a felony weapons charge. A DNA lab was able to discover a genetic link between the son's DNA and evidence from old crime scenes, which led them to investigate Lonnie D. Franklin, Jr.  Franklin has allegedly killed at least 10 people in California over the last 25 years. The police made the connection through the state’s familial search program, which allows police to take DNA from a crime scene and compare it to millions of DNA samples in a database. If there is even a partial match, police can get leads to the criminal by way of a family member.

The search has also raised ethical questions. Critics say it could lead to a form of racial profiling, because a higher proporation of inmates are African American, and linking their DNA to their family members could wrongly lead to suspicions of others in the black community.

The University of Arizona has agreed to pay $700,000 to 41 Havasupai tribal citizens to settle claims that the university misused DNA samples given by tribe members over a decade ago.

In a newly-released paper in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, scientists in Tel Aviv, Israel, describe how they have found a process to fabricate DNA. The process involved removing DNA from a woman’s blood sample and adding DNA from a different person. The process was so easy, they say, that any biology undergraduate has the tools to engineer his or her own crime scene.  (DNA evidence left at crime scenes has been considered nearly incontrovertible in the past; this process raises questions about its reliability going forward.) 

We talk to Timothy Bestor, a professor of genetics and development at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, and Tania Simoncelli, a science advisor at the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that post-conviction DNA testing is not a Constitutional right for convicted criminals. So far, post-conviction DNA testing has exonerated at least 232 people nationwide. The ruling came on an appeals case by William Osborne, who was convicted for the 1993 rape, kidnapping and assault of a prostitute in Alaska. The Innocence Project, a group of attorneys who help prisoners obtain DNA testing, has been defending him for seven years. Nina Morrison is a staff attorney at the Innocence Project has been working on his case and joins us today.

Criminal justice systems in a number of countries are expanding advanced DNA databases to keep track not only of convicted criminals, but also of people only accused of crimes. But Britain announced today that it plans to scale back its national DNA database. This move follows a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights last year criticizing Britain’s practice of keeping on file the DNA anyone who’d been arrested, even if they weren’t charged with a crime. For more we turn to Naomi Grimley, the BBC's political affairs correspondent.