Science and the Legal System

It takes time for the law to understand a scientific principle. We may take finger prints and DNA as cast in iron evidence today, but that takes time. Carl Zimmer talks about one such instance involving the famous actor, Charlie Chaplin, in his book on heredity, She has her Mother’s Laugh. A serial womanizer, Chaplin had an affair with Joan Berry, got bored with her, and dumped her for the next girl.

 

Berry, however, would not go away quietly. In 1943, she filed a paternity suit claiming that her in-the-womb baby was Chaplin’s and demanded he pay for the child’s upbringing. Back then, DNA comparison wasn’t an option, so lawyers tried an inherited trait as a test instead: the blood type.

 

At that time, scientists knew that the blood variant proteins (A, B and O) had certain characteristics: A and B both dominated over O. This implied certain patterns: if you got A from one parent and O from the other, you’d be an A. To be an O, you needed an O from both parents. Conversely, a child with blood type B must have one of its parents with B: there was no way parents with A and O could have a child with B.

 

While not covering all scenarios, this meant the blood type could still rule out certain combinations. Hoping theirs would be such a case, Chaplin’s lawyers demanded such a test with Berry, her child and Chaplin. As luck would have it, theirs was one of those impossible combinations.

 

Case closed? Not quite. Blood type based reasoning was still a new concept, most jurors didn’t understand it, and judges didn’t know it well enough to declare it as cast in iron. Ergo, the jury got deadlocked. A retrial followed, and this time the jury ruled in favour of Berry: they declared Chaplin to be the father! The Boston Herald was aghast:

“California has in effect decided that black is white, two and two are five and up is down.”

Nonetheless, the verdict stood. It was the end of Chaplin’s Hollywood career.

 

At the other end of the science-law spectrum is the time when a supposedly true scientific principle turns out to have exceptions.

 

In 2003, Lydia Fairchild had to get a DNA test to get welfare benefits: the DNA test would prove if her kids were really her’s, which would then determine the welfare benefits she was entitled to. The test came back showing the 3 kids were her husband’s, but not her’s!

 

The law came down heavily: had she kidnapped the children? Wasn’t she guilty of welfare fraud? Fairchild desperately got the children’s birth certificates, indicating she had delivered them in hospitals. But how could DNA be wrong? And so most lawyers refused to take her case. Except for one.

 

And then Fairchild had a fourth child. This time, a court appointed officer was there to witness the birth. He oversaw a blood sample drawn from the baby for a DNA test. Stunningly, the baby’s DNA didn’t match Fairchild! Even though the court officer had witnessed the birth and the blood draw, the court decided that DNA could not be wrong.

 

And then Fairchild’s lawyer heard of another woman, Karen Keegan, who had faced the same situation: the DNA said her children weren’t hers, though they were her husband’s. In Keegan’s case, the discovery happened when she was being checked as a possible organ donor for one of her children. So Keegan and the doctors were determined to find out what was going on (after all, it was an organ transplant/life-and-death matter). And they found that Keegan was a “chimera”: at conception, her mother had twin embryos. But very early, those twin embryos fused into a single child (Karen). And thus, Keegan ended up with two sets of DNA/cells at conception: one from each now-fused twin (parent?!). The doctors now compared cells from multiple parts of Keegan: most didn’t match her children, though one set did. The kids were her’s, after all.

 

Fairchild’s lawyer wondered if she was a chimera too. He demanded his client get the same tests as Keegan. Her skin, hair and saliva samples didn’t match her kids. But a cervical smear sample did. And so, Fairchild got to keep her kids too.

 

Heredity works in strange ways. In the chimeras, it’s impossible to say if the parent-child were also aunt/uncle-child! Or as Zimmer wrote:

“We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology. But despite our genetic essentialism, these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be readily broken.”

 

If it’s so counter-intuitive even to scientists, can we really blame the law/legal system if it can’t keep pace?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more