Expert doubts reliability of any new DNA evidence

A FORENSIC expert said he had “serious doubts” if any DNA evidence from a second postmortem on Sophie Toscan du Plantier would stand up in court.

Professor Allan Jamieson, chairman of the Forensic Institute in Glasgow, said the type of DNA testing being conducted — low copy number (LCN) DNA — varied in its reliability. He said this was all the more so given that Ms Toscan du Plantier had been buried twice and had already undergone a postmortem examination.

His comments come after the body of the Ms du Plantier, who was 39 when she was killed, was exhumed in France yesterday morning for a range of medical tests, including LCN testing, a complicated process that can take several weeks.

The exhumation comes almost 12 years since Ms du Plantier was brutally murdered near her isolated holiday home in Schull, west Cork, in December 1996.

“I would have serious doubts about whether anything useful evidentially would come of this,” said Prof Jamieson.

“It has been examined in a mortuary, apparently twice, has gone through a burial process twice, not subject to any forensic protection and therefore there are quite clear potential challenges to any type of evidence that might emerge from this. This is why the people need to think to the next stage, and say ‘if we did find anything, would it be of evidential any use?’.”

Speaking on the Pat Kenny radio show, Prof Jamieson said LCN DNA pushes the technology to discover “very, very small amounts” of DNA, from a very small number of cells. The process was used — and discounted — in two high-profile trials: the Robert Holohan case and the Omagh bombing case in the North.

Prof Jamieson, who gave expert evidence in the Omagh case, said the court found that proper protection measures — to ensure evidence was not contaminated — had not been applied in the case. He said that even if you get a DNA profile from LCN, there were a “whole number of ways” it can innocently get to a crime scene. “We know from published work that DNA can move from person to person and then from that person to an object that the first person might never in fact have touched.”

He said LCN was good from an intelligence point of view, rather than as court evidence. The Irish Examiner revealed yesterday that LCN DNA testing would be carried out on the body of Ms du Plantier, but Garda sources said that it was being done in conjunction with conventional DNA testing.

The exhumation, at a cemetery at Combret, Saint-Germain-du-Teil, in south-central France, was carried out on the orders of a Paris court and has sparked renewed hope in the family.