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“I’ve never been at the crime scene!” — gloves as carriers for secondary DNA transfer

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Abstract

Over recent years, DNA profiling techniques have become highly sensitive. Even small amounts of DNA at crime scenes can be analysed leading to new defence strategies. At court, defence lawyers rarely question the existence of a DNA trace (source level) but challenge how the DNA was transferred to the scene (activity level). Nowadays, the most common defence strategy is to claim that somebody else had stolen the defendant’s gloves and used them while breaking and entering. In this study we tested this statement. Using gloves made of different material (cloth, leather, rubber) and varying secondary transfer surfaces (wood, metal, glass), we simulated a few of the most likely transfer scenarios that occur during breaking and entering. While we detected the presence of DNA on the outside of 92 of the 98 gloves tested, we observed only one case of secondary transfer in a total of 81 transfer experiments. This data demonstrates that secondary transfer under conditions resembling realistic conditions is a very rare event.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank to all the participants who took part in this study. All gloves and samples were obtained after signing a declaration of consent. We also thank Katharina Köhn, Adriana Schatton, Alice Taylor and Dawn O’Reilly for proof reading the manuscript. The practical work was done by Marie-Therese Reiß as part of her requirements for a Master of Science degree for the University of Applied Sciences Coburg, Germany.

All presented data, if not cited otherwise, were generated within the project ‘MiAS’, funded within the EU’s national ISF 2019 programme (grant no: IZ-5793–2019-45).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Department of Criminal Investigation in Thuringia, Kranichfelder Str. 1, 99097, Erfurt, Germany

    Katrin Tanzhaus, Marie-Therese Reiß & Tom Zaspel

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  1. Katrin Tanzhaus
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  2. Marie-Therese Reiß
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Correspondence to Katrin Tanzhaus.

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Tanzhaus, K., Reiß, MT. & Zaspel, T. “I’ve never been at the crime scene!” — gloves as carriers for secondary DNA transfer. Int J Legal Med 135, 1385–1393 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-021-02597-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00414-021-02597-w

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