Zixi Chen
Mr. Ippolito
Forensics
18 January 2018
Augenstein, Seth. “Bloody Clothing Near Dead Baby's Body in NJ Leads to Composite of Mother's Face.” Forensic Magazine, 20 Dec. 2017, www.forensicmag.com/news/2017/12/bloody-clothing-near-dead-babys-body-nj-leads-composite-mothers-face.
In the article “Bloody Clothing Near Dead Baby's Body in NJ Leads to Composite of
Mother's Face.”, the author Seth Augenstein described a case in which a popular phenotyping service was used. This case happened in November 2014. A decapitated little girl’s remains was discovered in Farmingdale, N.J. The investigators had very few evidences that they can use to find the mother of this baby. Their only evidence included: the body of this girl and the handbag and two bloodstained blouses found near the little girl’s remains. Based solely on the DNA she left behind at the scene, the investigators had to reconstruct her looks using a popular phenotyping service employed by a growing number of local law enforcement agencies-- the Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based DNA phenotyping company which uses DNA profiles to generate composite facial likenesses. They predicted that the mother would look like a Latina woman who had Central or South American ancestry. Even though this method was very useful for this case, the officials still said that this method “has faced scrutiny for its limitations and skepticism about its accuracy and usefulness… eye colors beyond blue and brown, and hair color, which it can predict with about 75 percent accuracy”. These small imperfections in this system may lead to bigger problems in other cases.
This case described is relevant to today’s society because the use of DNA testing is appearing in more and more cases that involved forensics. Even though this is a great way, there is a great possibility that the results can be completely mistaken and someone innocent may be thrown into jail for years because of a wrong test result. Also, the use of facial reconstruction based on DNA can be useful in a lot of cases. For crimes such as a murder, the DNA left in the crime scene can be of a great help to the investigators if the facial reconstruction method can have great accuracy.
Seth Augenstein did a good job organizing the important facts of this case into the article. In addition to his own explanations, he also added many quotes from people of this profession about the case and the investigation methods used. His description of the phenotyping service used were detailed, and the pictures about the evidence in the case were also organized and easy to understand for the readers. However, the author has a few weaknesses. It would have been very nice if he included more details on the actual case other than just talking about the DNA methods used. It would also be nice if he can give the readers more ideas in which fields this facial reconstruction method could be used.
2 comments:
Andrew Rotchford
Augenstein, Seth. “Bloody Clothing Near Dead Baby's Body in NJ Leads to Composite of Mother's Face.” Forensic Magazine, 20 Dec. 2017, www.forensicmag.com/news/2017/12/bloody-clothing-near-dead-babys-body-nj-leads-composite-mothers-face.
Zixi does a great job in her review of the article. She gives his key information about the article and the main points that the reader should be aware of. She picks a very interesting topic that relates the forensic science and I found the article to be really intriguing. Once again this article points out how forensic science while helps out investigators in making decisions based on evidence it is not conclusive. This article specifically talks about the use of DNA testing. this article points out that DNA testing can be a miss positive. She does a great job explaining what happened in the situation to the dead body and the steps of forensic scientist took.
Even though her article was very well written there some things I would suggest that she work on. The first being to add more quotes from the article I felt like she didn't have enough and could add more. The second thing that I would suggest her to do is to reread the article one more time or have someone else.
Something that I learned in this article is that DNA testing isn't as foolproof as I thought.
www.forensicmag.com/news/2017/12/bloody-clothing-near-dead-babys-body-nj-leads-composimothers-face.
Zixi’s review of the article “Bloody Clothing Near Dead Baby's Body in NJ Leads to Composite of Mother's Face,” by Seth Augenstein was well done. She did a good job in providing a detailed summary of what the case involved as well as findings from the crime. She also did a good job providing some quotes from the article which help in understanding the context better. Zixi also did a good job by tying the article’s content to forensics and how they could be used in an investigation.
Although Zixi’s article was overall well done, there were a few aspects which could have been added to help improve the review. Although she included some quotes, I thought that it would have been more helpful if she had included more in her review to help develop a stronger context. Also, she discussed how a phenotyping company uses DNA profiles, however it would have been good if she had talked in more detail about how they “generated composite facial likeness.”
Overall, I thought that Zixi’s review of the article was equally informative and interesting to read. From her review I was able to learn more about how DNA profiles could be used in generating a facial reconstruction as well as how this could aid forensic scientists.
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