Opinion ID: 1160857
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: Axell and Barney

Text: Axell, supra, 235 Cal.App.3d 836, 1 Cal.Rptr.2d 411, decided in October 1991, was the first California appellate decision to confirm the general scientific acceptance of RFLP DNA analysis within the meaning of Kelly, supra, 17 Cal.3d 24, 130 Cal.Rptr. 144, 549 P.2d 1240. After a detailed Kelly hearing during which numerous experts (including Drs. Kenneth Kidd and Laurence Mueller) testified over a sixmonth period in 1989, the Axell court determined that all three phases of RFLP DNA analysis performed by the private laboratory Cellmarkprocessing, matching, and statistical calculation through utilization of the product rule had achieved scientific acceptance under the Kelly standard. ( Axell, supra, 235 Cal. App.3d at p. 868, 1 Cal.Rptr.2d 411.) On the issue of population substructuring, the court concluded the testimony of the prosecution experts had overcome defense fears about the lack of statistical independence essential to the proper application of the unmodified product rule. ( Id at pp. 856-868, 1 Cal.Rptr.2d 411.) Any question or criticism of the size of the database or the ratio pertains to weight of the evidence and not to its admissibility. ( Id at p. 868, 1 Cal.Rptr.2d 411.) Barney, supra, 8 Cal.App.4th 798, 10 Cal.Rptr.2d 731, was decided in August 1992. In the months between the filing of the Axell and Barney decisions, two significant events occurred. The first was the publication of a pair of articles contained in the December 20, 1991, issue of the journal Science. The article by Harvard University Professor Richard C. Lewontin and Washington University Professor Daniel L. Hartl (Lewontin & Hartl article, supra, 254 Science 1745; see ante, 88 Cal.Rptr.2d at pp. 45, 49, 981 P.2d at pp. 968, 972) attacked the failure of DNA statistical calculation analysis to account for population substructuring. In a rebuttal article appearing in the same issue, Drs. Chakraborty and Kidd, both of whom testified in this case, defended the practice of performing statistical calculations of probability estimates without regard to substructuring. (Chakraborty and Kidd article, supra, 254 Science 1735; see ante, 88 Cal.Rptr.2d at p. 50, fn. 29, 981 P.2d at p. 973, fn. 29.) The second was the NRC's [30] publication of its first report on DNA profiling, which appeared in April 1992. (1992 NRC Rep., supra; see ante, 88 Cal.Rptr.2d at p. 36, fn. 1, 981 P.2d at p. 960, fn. 1.) Although the report did not constitute an outright rejection of the unmodified product rule, it acknowledged that the effect of population substructuring was controversial. Rather than attempt to resolve the controversy, the 1992 NRC Report assumed for the sake of discussion that substructuring might have a significant impact, and suggested the ceiling principles as a means of modifying the product rule to ensure that DNA probability estimates would be sufficiently conservative to account for substructuring. (1992 NRC Rep., supra, at pp. 12-15, 79-85.) These intervening publications, reasoned the Barney court, undermined Axell's conclusion that sufficient scientific consensus had been reached regarding the insignificance of the effects of population substructuring on calculations made with the unmodified product rule. The Barney court noted that although the briefing before it predated publication of the Science articles and the 1992 NRC Report, the briefing raised the same concerns regarding substructuring as had been discussed in the recent literature. ( Barney, supra, 8 Cal.App.4th at p. 816, 10 Cal.Rptr.2d 731.) Discussing Lewontin and Hartl's claim that contrary to the assumption of random mating, ethnic subgroups within each database tend to mate endogamously (i.e., within a specific subgroup) with persons of like religion or ethnicity or who live within close geographical distance, the court noted its concern that the resulting substructuring, if not taken into account, could skew statistical calculations based on the available databases utilizing the product rule. ( Barney, supra, 8 Cal.App.4th at p. 815, 10 Cal.Rptr.2d 731.) The court then noted that Chakraborty and Kidd strongly disagreed with Lewontin and Hartl, contending the latter exaggerated both the extent of endogamy and the effect of substructuring. ( Ibid. ) The Barney court also referred to an article in the same issue of Science introducing the Lewontin-Hartl and Chakraborty-Kidd articles, characterizing the debate between them as bitter and raging, and citing another population geneticist as agreeing that the then current statistical methods `should not be used without more empirical data.' ( Barney, supra, 8 Cal.App.4th at pp. 815-816, 10 Cal.Rptr.2d 731.) The court further noted that the 1992 NRC Report acknowledged the existence of a `[s]ubstantial controversy' concerning those methods of statistical analysis. (8 Cal. App.4th at p. 819, 10 Cal.Rptr.2d 731; see 1992 NRC Rep., supra, at pp. 74-75.) Based on these observations, the Barney court concluded, Whatever the merits of the prior decisions on the statistical calculation processincluding Axell the debate that erupted in Science in December 1991 changes the scientific landscape considerably, and demonstrates indisputably that there is no general acceptance of the current process.... Simply put, Axell has been eclipsed on this point by subsequent scientific developments. In reaching a conclusion different from that in we do not express disagreement with Axell 's reasoning at the time, but rather have progressed to a point on the continuum of scientific debate which neither the Axell court nor the two trial courts in the present cases could have anticipated. ( Barney, supra, 8 Cal. App.4th at pp. 820-821, 10 Cal.Rptr.2d 731.)