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Forensic DNA Education for Law Enforcement Decisionmakers

CODIS Searches and Partial Matches, cont.

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CODIS Searches and Partial Matches, cont.

illustration of Codis matches
National Institute of Justice (NIJ) (see reuse policy).

Partial matches may link a close relative (generally, father-to-son and/or brother-to-brother relationships) and provide investigative leads. However, moderate stringency searches have demonstrated very low efficiency in locating true relatives in offender databases.2

Partial matches are identified by an analyst who reviews candidate matches after the CODIS search is complete. A partial match occurs when the offender profile is excluded as the person who committed the crime because it does not match the crime scene profile, but the analyst identifies a sufficient number of alleles in common between the suspect and crime scene profile to believe that a family member of the suspect may be the true perpetrator.

View a loci chart representing a partial match.

2 Bruce Budowle et al.: Clarification of Statistical Issues Related to the Operation of CODIS PDF download: 120kB

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