Donated hair and crimes.

[mjr]

I was just thinking. What would happen if someone with donated hair committed a crime?

[Greenday]

I was just thinking. What would happen if someone with donated hair committed a crime?

Well, you'd assume there would be more proof. And unless someone donated their hair and the recipient lived really close, it's doubtful the police would come up with an argument to arrest the donor.

[mjr]

Well, you'd assume there would be more proof. And unless someone donated their hair and the recipient lived really close, it's doubtful the police would come up with an argument to arrest the donor.

I was thinking that also, but the donor hair would still have the donor DNA on it.

[Greenday]

I was thinking that also, but the donor hair would still have the donor DNA on it.

Right, but you are assuming the donor would also be in a DNA registry.

[TheHuckster]

I'd think there's a paper trail involved in hair donations. Provide that paperwork and prosecution has to do more work to prove the suspect's guilt (or simply deny the hair sample as evidence).

[s_stabeler]

a) Hair isn't actually normally used for DNA matching. It's far more common for blood or such to be used.
b) if ALL they have is the hair, the the defence would have moved for- and received- a Judgement As A Matter Of Law after the prosecution presented their case, since it's nowhere near enough evidence to convict on. In cases where a small bit of blood blew a case open, they later found far more evidence.
c) Do you think that cops always have only one suspect throughout a case? It's even fairly common for them to start building a case against someone, then realise the suspect is innocent. (there are two phases to a criminal investigation: identifying possible suspects and proving a particular suspect committed the crime. It's fairly common for investigations to need to go back to identifying suspects)

[AmbrosiaWriter]

I think you are all missing a very important point. TYPICALLY, hair will only contain DNA that can be sampled if it is pulled directly from the head and thus has a skin tag attached to it. Rarely can there be DNA suitable for actual testing be pulled from the hair shaft itself. (Your hair is not living material, basically.)

Donated hair is cut, thus there very, very likely wouldn't be a follicle attached to it. The most they could get out of it is "perpetrator had this color, this type of hair."

So the likely hood of someone with donated wig committing a crime, losing some hair from the wig, and them being able to actually pull suitable DNA out of the hair shaft is infinitesimally small.

https://www.forensicmag.com/article/...s-hair-samples