People v. Nelson

Opinion

CHIN, J.

In 2002, investigators compared evidence from a 1976 murder scene with defendant’s deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) profile and identified defendant as a possible donor of that evidence. He was then tried for and convicted of that murder. The prosecution presented evidence that the odds that a random person unrelated to defendant from the population group that produced odds most favorable to him could have fit the profile of some of the crime scene evidence are one in 930 sextillion (93 followed by 22 zeros). Because the world’s total population is only about seven billion (seven…