On Crime, DNA, and Kittens

DNA before being brutally hacked
to pieces by a heartless crime lab

ABC News for Australia reports that the court in Holbert (that's the capital of the Australian state of Tasmania) has heard DNA evidence in the case of the decapitation of two kittens and the strangling of a third.

Three men went to the home of a woman whom they suspected of throwing rocks to try to break up their all-night party. So I'm guessing these are neighbors and not just random people messing with each other. The ABC report doesn't clarify.

At any rate, the woman wouldn't let the three men into her house and one of them broke a window of her car, so she called the police. (I'm wondering if she could have done that when the all-night party continued beyond reasonable bounds, leading her to wish to throw rocks.)

When the police arrived at her house they found three dead kittens: one intact, one in two pieces and one missing its head. There is no mention of the head of the third kitten ever being found.

They called in CSI. Well, they called in whatever CSI is called in Tasmania, Australia. They tested for DNA. Now they did this even though it's the testimony of the DNA profiler that it was "unusual" to get a full DNA match from contact. They swabbed the kittens anyway.

Having swabbed the kittens, they performed DNA testing, and got a full match on one of the defendants. The full match, according to the expert witness, would indicate that the kittens were handled with force.

Damning evidence!

Except that the expert witness then also acknowledged that the DNA could have been transferred to the kittens by the defendant leaving DNA on the axe that someone else then used on the kittens.

In other words: Tasmania performed CSI-level investigation on the murder of these kittens in order to incontrovertibly prove absolutely nothing about who actually killed the kittens.

In Tasmania's defense, they can engage in such exercises because Australia in general has an intentional homicide rate of 1.2 per 100,000 population per year (compare to Monaco with 0.0 and Iceland with 0.31, Netherlands with 0.93, the UK with 1.17, the US with 5.0 and El Salvador with 71*). Tasmania has the lowest crime rate of all the Australian states, and with a population of 500,000 the authorities don't get to play CSI all that often.

*Compiled on the Wiki from multiple sources by people who (yayy) have way too much time on their hands. Thank you people with way too much time on your hands.