We may not be there yet but hardly a week goes by without a cold case being solved in Europe (don't know about the US).
There are judges, for example in France, who are now forcing cases to be re-opened due to greatly advanced and also greatly lowered costs for DNA testing.
So cases where DNA was collected decades ago is now usable.
A case has been solved a few days ago (forgot which one it was) but the one that impressed me the most was a cold case where the killer was a serial killer and... a cop. Once, 20 years after the last crime or so, a letter was sent to all the cops that could have been in Paris (they suspected a cop was the killer) at that time was sent to ask them for a DNA sample, that cop, now retired cop due to his age, committed suicide.
He knew it was "gg".
Bad times for bad guys who committed crimes a long time ago: at any point now the cold case may be solved.
These cold cases being solved also make it to the news, frontpage: constantly reminding those who got away with their crime that they cannot sleep tight.
It may be sci-fi, today, to use DNA to predict a face and then to run facial recognition on it but...
It's not sci-fi to use new science discoveries to solve cold cases. And I'm very happy that motherfuckers are getting caught.
In the US, it’s going to vary wildly, with some places solving old cases, and some places with such a huge backlog that they just stick the DNA sample in a freezer and ignore it.
Comments
We may not be there yet but hardly a week goes by without a cold case being solved in Europe (don't know about the US).
There are judges, for example in France, who are now forcing cases to be re-opened due to greatly advanced and also greatly lowered costs for DNA testing.
So cases where DNA was collected decades ago is now usable.
A case has been solved a few days ago (forgot which one it was) but the one that impressed me the most was a cold case where the killer was a serial killer and... a cop. Once, 20 years after the last crime or so, a letter was sent to all the cops that could have been in Paris (they suspected a cop was the killer) at that time was sent to ask them for a DNA sample, that cop, now retired cop due to his age, committed suicide.
He knew it was "gg".
Bad times for bad guys who committed crimes a long time ago: at any point now the cold case may be solved.
These cold cases being solved also make it to the news, frontpage: constantly reminding those who got away with their crime that they cannot sleep tight.
It may be sci-fi, today, to use DNA to predict a face and then to run facial recognition on it but...
It's not sci-fi to use new science discoveries to solve cold cases. And I'm very happy that motherfuckers are getting caught.
In the US, it’s going to vary wildly, with some places solving old cases, and some places with such a huge backlog that they just stick the DNA sample in a freezer and ignore it.
It's old news here. From April 2018...
"Relative's DNA from genealogy websites cracked East Area Rapist case"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16936041