Law professor David Kaye and statistical science blogger sums things up nicely:
Analyzing mixtures of DNA is “not like a Ouija board — it’s not junk science in that sense,” said David Kaye, a law professor at Penn State University and author several books on forensic science. Scientists can extract useful information from those mixtures, he said. But he agrees with the report that right now there’s no reliable, consistent protocol for interpreting that information. “Forensic science is not regulated the way clinical medical labs are,” Kaye said. “And people are being put to death.”
I would say that forensics is largely regulated by police, commercial interests and those associated by employment with police crime labs. This belief system then extends itself to the prosecutors due to their successful acceptance in the courts. This is significantly NOT a culture of main stream science.
