FREEHOLD – A third software engineering expert testified before Paul Caneiro on Friday that testing of the computer software that produced DNA results implicating him in the murders of four family members appeared inadequate, but he also said the computer program was “reasonably good’ and well… written.
“Aside from the testing issue, I thought the code itself was quite professional, to be honest, and I’ve seen a lot of unprofessional code,” Paul Martin testified about a software known as STRmix, which is under a microscope. a hearing in the Caneiro murder case.
“It was pretty good,” Martin, a software engineer at Florida-based consulting firm Harbor Experts, said of the STRmix computer code.
“It met the most reasonable technical standards,” said Martin, a member of the National Computer Science Society and computer science faculty at Johns Hopkins University.
Superior Court Judge Marc C. Lemieux, who is presiding over the hearing, will decide whether the DNA evidence produced by the STRmix software can be admitted against Caneiro, 57, of Ocean Township, when he stands trial next year for his brother’s murder , sister-in-law, niece and nephew.
Defense witness Paul Martin, a software engineering expert, speaks during a hearing for Paul Caneiro before Superior Court Judge Marc C. Lemieux on Friday, Dec. 6, 2024, at the Monmouth County Courthouse in Freehold. The hearing will review the admissibility of DNA evidence in the quadruple murder case against Caniero.
Lemieux’s decision will have statewide implications for the software, which deviates from traditional methods of DNA analysis and has never before been challenged in a New Jersey court.
The Pubic Defender’s Office is attempting to block future use of STRMix, claiming that the method it uses to analyze DNA is generally not acceptable in the scientific community.
Martin was the third software engineering expert to testify for the defense this week as prosecutors filed their case against STRmix.
Like the two other software engineers who testified for the defense, Martin said he felt testing the software to ensure it works properly was inadequate. He also said there was a lack of documentation showing that the tests performed could relate to the software’s requirements.
“If software isn’t traceable to the requirements, you don’t have testing to ensure that each requirement is implemented correctly,” says Martin.
“I think the tests are missing, so the documentation for the tests is missing,” Martin said. “I can clearly see parts of the system that were completely untested,” he said.
STRmix uses a method known as probabilistic genotyping to analyze DNA and is a departure from traditional DNA analysis methods that have been in use for decades.
STRmix and other probabilistic genotyping programs use algorithms to analyze small amounts and complicated mixtures of DNA that often cannot be analyzed using traditional methods.
Paul Caneiro listens during his pretrial hearing before Superior Court Judge Marc C. Lemieux on Friday, Dec. 6, 2024, at the Monmouth County Courthouse in Freehold. The hearing will review the admissibility of DNA evidence in the quadruple murder case against Caniero.
The traditional method, known as random match probability, generates a statistic about the probability that a match to a DNA profile can be found in the general population, while probabilistic genotyping generates a ‘likelihood ratio’ that a person of interest can be included or excluded as contributor to a DNA mixture.
Caneiro is accused of killing his brother Keith, 50; sister-in-law Jennifer, 45; niece Sophia, 8; and cousin Jesse, 11, whose bodies were discovered in Keith Caniero’s Colts Neck mansion on November 21, 2018, by first responders responding to a slow-burning fire at the residence.
Keith Caneiro had been shot four times in the head and once in the back. Jennifer Caneiro and the two children were stabbed repeatedly and badly burned. Jennifer Caneiro was also shot in the head.
DNA that the STRmix program determined was a mixture of Paul and Sophia Caneiro, and another mixture to which Jesse was believed to have contributed, was later found on clothing recovered from the defendant’s basement.
Prosecutors want the STRmix evidence admitted at Caneiro’s trial and clear the way for state police to continue using the software in its DNA lab.
Although the code for STRmix was well written, Martin said the code still needs sufficient testing.
Christopher Godin, staff attorney for the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender’s Forensic Science Unit, listens to defense witness Paul Martin, a software engineering expert, during a pre-trial hearing for Paul Caneiro before Judge Marc C. Lemieux of the Supreme Court on Friday, December 6, 2024, at the Monmouth County Courthouse. The hearing will review the admissibility of DNA evidence in the quadruple murder case against Caniero.
“Testing is very important, even in code that is well written,” he said, answering questions from Christopher Godin of the Attorney General’s Office. “You have to test the code because you want to find bugs that aren’t obvious.”
When asked by Monmouth County Deputy First Assistant Prosecutor Christopher Decker if he had found any bugs in the code that had any material effect on the results produced by STRmix, Martin responded that they had not.
Also responding to Decker, Martin said he encountered none of the roadblocks that another software engineer said when trying to analyze the STRmix code.
Nathaniel Adams testified Wednesday that he was unable to conduct a proper analysis of the STRmix code for the defense because STRmix attorneys did not grant him the license to run the program.
Martin, on the other hand, said he got everything he asked for to complete his review.
The defense is expected to call its final witness when the hearing resumes Monday.
A reporter in New Jersey since 1985, Kathleen Hopkins covers crime, trials, legal issues and virtually every major murder case affecting Monmouth and Ocean counties. Contact her at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: DNA software used in Caneiro murder case is ‘pretty good,’ says expert
