Opinion ID: 1672000
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Admissibility of Expert Testimony on DNA Test Results

Text: As his last claim of error regarding the guilt phase of his trial, Walker contends that the trial court abused its discretion in denying Walker's motion to suppress expert testimony concerning DNA tests on a cigarette butt found in Ms. Jones' car because the evidence was not relevant to any fact at issue in the case. Dr. Kahn, of the Metro-Dade crime lab's DNA section, testified at trial that he performed PCR testing on a cigarette filter found in Ms. Jones car. He found the DNA from the filter to be type 1.1, 1.2a type shared by Walker, his brother Willie Rogers, and 12.2 percent of the African-American population, 6 percent of the Caucasian population, and 4.8 percent of the Hispanic population. Specifically, Walker argues that this evidence was erroneously admitted at trial because the test results are not probative, by themselves, of the presence in Ms. Jones' car of either Walker or his brother. Moreover, Walker does not smoke, and the state failed to present any evidence that Rogers smoked either. As the State correctly points out, similar challenges to blood test evidence establishing that a general blood type is shared by both the litigant and the tested item have been rejected. See Mann v. State, 420 So.2d 578, 580 (Fla.1982); Williams v. State, 143 Fla. 826, 833-834, 197 So. 562 (1940) (holding that blood-grouping evidence was admissible where the respective blood types of the defendant and victim could be identified only as types 2 and 4). See generally Timothy E. Travers, Annotation, Admissibility, weight, and sufficiency of blood-grouping tests in criminal cases, 2 A.L.R.4th 500 (1980). We find that the concerns Walker raises in this claim go to the weight of the DNA evidencewhich Walker had an opportunity to argue was lowand not to its admissibility. [6] Consequently, we do not find that the trial court abused is discretion in denying Walker's motion to suppress Dr. Kahn's expert testimony.