Human Heredity 11th Edition by Michael Cummings

Exercise 5

You are serving on a jury in a murder case in a large city. The prosecutor has just stated that DNA fingerprinting shows that the suspect must have committed the crime. He says that for cost reasons, two STR probes were used instead of four, but that the results are just as accurate. The first probe detected a locus that has a population frequency of 1 in 100 (1%), and the second probe has a population frequency of 1 in 500 (0.2%).
A) What is the combined frequency of these alleles in the population?
B) Does this point to the suspect as the perpetrator of the crime?
C) Is there any other evidence you would like from the DNA lab?
D) Do you think that most people on juries understand basic probabilities, or do you think that DNA evidence can be used to mislead jurors into reaching false conclusions?