Expert witnesses will often quote numbers like that in court, stating that the probability of a random person getting a DNA match is less than 1 in (some large

Expert witnesses will often quote numbers like that in court, stating that the probability of a random person getting a DNA match is less than 1 in (some large number) million. However, the FBI has been strongly resistant to opening up their DNA databases so these numbers could actually be verified empirically. (I think currently they just multiply some numbers together to get an estimate.) Some preliminary research suggests that partial DNA matches are much more common than claimed. Here's a law review article about the problem: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1551467 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1551467 Naturally it suffers from the common law review problem that most of its text is in footnotes instead of the main body, but it's pretty good...