Guilty Sequence describes how a Louisiana doctor was convicted of attempting to murder his ex-girlfriend, a nurse:
Schmidt arrived at his former girlfriend’s house the night of August 4, 1994, and gave her what he said was a vitamin injection. Six months later, when the victim tested positive for HIV, she accused the doctor of infecting her. Circumstantial evidence indicated that Schmidt had injected the victim with blood drawn at his office from a male patient infected with HIV.DNA fingerprinting has been widely used to link human suspects to crimes. This trial was different, however, because the virus mutates so rapidly that in a matter of hours its DNA fingerprint can change significantly.
Both the defense and the prosecution enlisted scientists to determine the relatedness of the two HIV strains — the victim’s and the patient’s. A close match between the viral DNA sequences could help prove that the doctor had committed the crime.
The case marks the first time this type of evolutionary analysis, called phylogenetics, has been admitted as evidence in a US criminal court.
If only I knew a phylogeneticist who could explain all this to me…