The problem with mitochondrial DNA is that it is inherited only from the maternal side of the family. The hair could have belonged to Anthony, to the victim, to Anthony's brother, or to any of the female ancestors in the maternal side of the family. Because the state could not establish that the victim was the source of this hair, the fact that it could establish that the hair was from a cadaver was not enough to prove that Anthony committed a murder. This is no surprise. The forensics community commonly recognizes that, "in general, the significance of an mtDNA sequence match is dependent on the case in question, and the type of mtDNA involved. In only a restricted set of circumstances can mtDNA matching be considered definitive evidence of identification" (Holland & Parsons, 1999).

The other evidence that the defense questioned was whether scientific tests could determine that decomposition...
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