Parkinsonia Florida
Definition
The Blue Palo Verde, a thorny desert tree of the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. The species at the centre of State v. Bogan.
- Common name
- Blue Palo Verde
- Habitat
- Sonoran Desert, SW US and NW Mexico
- Legal significance
- State v. Bogan
- Family
- Fabaceae
Common questions
Why is Parkinsonia florida significant in forensic science?+
Seed pods from a Blue Palo Verde tree at a crime scene were matched by DNA profiling to a specific tree near the scene in State v. Bogan, one of the first US cases to admit plant DNA evidence.
What made the plant DNA evidence from this tree admissible?+
The court applied a reliability analysis to the genetic fingerprinting method used to individualize seed pods to a single tree, treating it much as it would newer forensic techniques generally.
Related terms
- Daubert Standard
- The US federal evidentiary standard (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 1993) requiring that expert testimony be based on scientifically valid methods with...
- Frye Standard
- The US legal test for admissibility of scientific evidence, originating from Frye v. United States (1923), which required that a technique be...
- Individualisation
- The ability to distinguish one individual organism from all others of the same species. In plant forensics, individualisation requires profiling a locus...
- Population Sampling
- Collecting DNA profiles from multiple individuals of the same species at the scene and in the surrounding area to estimate how common...
- RAPD (Randomly Amplified Polymorphic DNA)
- A PCR technique using short arbitrary primers (8-10 bases) that bind at multiple sites across a genome, generating a fingerprint pattern of...