IAPE Evidence Blog

New Orleans Net LLC, nola.com
BYLINE: John Simer­man, The Times-Picayune 

Orleans Parish, LA

Link to Arti­cle
The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. Items belong­ing to Michael A. Litchkoff that were taken in a 1962 rob­bery are among the items in the inven­tory. Litchkoff, a for­mer United States Coast Guards­man, born in 1908, was never located to have the items returned. An inter­net seach shows he died on Sep­tem­ber 8, 1968 and is buried in plot U O 1960 in the Willamette National Ceme­tery In Port­land, Ore. It is sup­posed he was vis­it­ing New Orleans when the crime occurred. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE 

The plas­tic bag sat there in the base­ment of the Orleans Parish crim­i­nal cour­t­house, coated in a moldy film that hides what’s inside and where it might belong. They’ll get around to open­ing it, joked Rob­bie Keen, “when­ever we get brave enough.”

The rank con­tents have stayed packed in plas­tic since the ini­tial cleanup fol­low­ing Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, when flood­wa­ters filled the crim­i­nal cour­t­house base­ment and turned an already-primitive evi­dence stor­age oper­a­tion into a cesspool of water­logged evidence.

Float­ing vials of bod­ily fluid, latent fin­ger­prints, drugs, sex toys, pros­thetic legs and stacks of guns, knives, metal bats and crow­bars went scattered.

In some cases, pros­e­cu­tors in crim­i­nal cases have sim­ply gone with­out, assum­ing the evi­dence was lost or destroyed.

But over nearly two years, Keen and her team of five full-time work­ers have steadily waded through 18,000 pieces of evi­dence. They have sorted, repack­aged, shelved and bar-coded them in a labo­ri­ous bid to bring mod­ern, com­put­er­ized sense to the evi­dence — and pos­si­bly exon­er­ate inno­cent con­victs, or under­score their guilt, in the process.

Under a $1.4 mil­lion grant from the National Insti­tute of Jus­tice, the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project has cat­a­loged key items in rape, mur­der and armed rob­bery cases from before the storm — stuff that by state law must be retained forever.

Some of the evi­dence they’ve sorted dates back to 1958, said Keen, an archae­ol­o­gist work­ing for the New Orleans Police and Jus­tice Foundation.

“This is like the biggest dig,” said Keen. “We had teeth yes­ter­day, den­tures … The blood and stuff, it’s amaz­ing how long it lasts. We found blood into the ‘70s and it was still liquid.”

The work is not done. Hun­dreds of orphaned pieces of evi­dence wait to be opened and pegged to crim­i­nal cases, remain­ing for now in a steamy ware­house whose loca­tion is kept secret.

But the evi­dence rooms at the crim­i­nal cour­t­house at Tulane and Broad Streets — in the base­ment and the attic — now are clean, tidy and rel­a­tively free of the ver­min that would feast off con­fis­cated drugs, Keen said.

Sev­eral boxes of mar­i­juana and other nar­cotics will be sent to a steel plant in an undis­closed loca­tion — a purg­ing process that is also a key part of the project.

At least 25 per­cent of the evi­dence in var­i­ous rooms of the crim­i­nal cour­t­house has been tossed, along with 75 per­cent of the evi­dence at the ware­house, Keen said.

Some items — tires, fish­ing rods, not drugs — can go on the mar­ket. Clerk of Crim­i­nal Court Arthur Mor­rell said he plans to sell some of the old evi­dence, pos­si­bly through an online auction.

“We got so much stuff. We’re going to have to. It would be crim­i­nal to destroy some stuff and not bring money to our office,” Mor­rell said dur­ing a recent tour of the evi­dence rooms with Crim­i­nal Dis­trict Judge Lau­rie White, who over­sees the grant.

The con­di­tions now a far cry from what they were when the cleanup first started in early 2010, Keen said.

“We had an extreme rodent prob­lem. The rats would eat the pot and use the roaches for water,” Keen said, describ­ing the mess. “We had dead bod­ies of rats hang­ing out of things.”

The project has mod­est aims: To bring evi­dence stor­age in Orleans Parish into the mod­ern era, aided by a com­put­er­ized inven­tory sys­tem known as “The Beast,” which replaced a paper-and-Magic Marker sys­tem that endured for decades.

Before the scan­ning sys­tem, if cour­t­house staffers mis­placed a piece of evi­dence on a shelf, there would be no ready way to track it down. Now, The Beast knows where it sits.

“So far, since Kat­rina, we haven’t lost any cases,” insisted Donna Thomp­son, assis­tant super­vi­sor in the base­ment prop­erty room where court staff tracks the evi­dence and signs it out to prosecutors.

“In the future, if a case gets retried, there’s going to be no ques­tion in their minds when they ask for the evi­dence,” said Emily Maw, direc­tor of the Inno­cence Project New Orleans, a par­tic­i­pant in the project.

“They’re going to know the answer they get is absolutely accurate.”

One recent crim­i­nal case high­lighted the prob­lem. In an aggra­vated rape trial, pros­e­cu­tors in 2006 thought that a fetus that was cen­tral to the case was lost in the Kat­rina flood­wa­ters. The jury hung.

Then, last year, the fetus was dis­cov­ered on the day of trial with a jury picked, hav­ing appar­ently been over­looked. The judge ordered a mis­trial. Finally, this month, pros­e­cu­tors used the fetus to help con­vict 58-year-old Samuel Williams.

Now, behind a locked chain in a room where defen­dants once came in for line­ups, boxes line up neatly on shelves, with bar-coded stick­ers. Fin­ger­prints, crime scene pho­tos and rape-kit evi­dence rest inside. On another shelf, neatly stacked plas­tic tubes hold knives of var­i­ous shapes and sizes — weapons once, now evidence.

A plas­tic tub near the door con­tains ham­mers, golf clubs, shafts, tire irons, saws, claws, all tagged for tracking.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Inno­cence Project, the DA’s office and the Police and Jus­tice Foun­da­tion meet every other week to go over cases where redis­cov­ered bio­log­i­cal evi­dence might prove fruit­ful to either con­firm a con­vic­tion or open the door to an exoneration.

So far, evi­dence has gone to the lab for test­ing in nine cases. Four remain pend­ing. Three test results sup­ported the con­vic­tions. Two were inconclusive.

Regard­less, it’s a step for­ward, Maw said,

Since a 2001 state law granted state fund­ing for indi­gent con­victs to seek post-conviction DNA test­ing in some cases, just three Orleans Parish pris­on­ers had sought the test­ing until the project got under­way. Now a dozen have.

One main rea­son: No one quite knew where bio­log­i­cal evi­dence sat.

“We said we’d love to do post-conviction DNA test­ing in Orleans Parish, but we can’t because we’re never going to find the evi­dence,” said Maw. “It didn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean it wasn’t there. The sys­tem had been so chaotic for so many years.”

John Simer­man can be reached at jsimerman@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3330.

Work­ers Darn­nell Gauntt, left, and Angela Anthony unpack cloth­ing items from a mur­der. The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
 

The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. A worker repacks items from a mur­der. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
 

The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. Worker Dar­nell Gauntt unpacks a shoe from a mur­der case. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Stacks of evi­dence line shelves wait­ing to be sorted as the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
 

Project Direc­tor Rob­bie Keen explains the pro­ce­dures of how the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE 

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

USA TODAY, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 13A
BYLINE: Kevin Johnson

Dal­las, TX

High num­ber of wrongly con­victed peo­ple freed because of Dal­las archive spurs national push to retain DNA tied to crimes

DALLAS — The exon­er­a­tion of Cor­nelius DuPree Jr. after three decades in prison began in a cramped local lab­o­ra­tory, where an unusual repos­i­tory of bio­log­i­cal evi­dence from thou­sands of crimes is lib­er­at­ing more wrongly con­victed inmates than any in the country.

The lab was born in the after­math of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion here to fill a void: When Kennedy was shot in 1963, there was no foren­sic sci­ence cen­ter in Dal­las County to store and ana­lyze evi­dence needed to solve crimes. Today, as DNA analy­sis has matured, old sam­ples of blood, hair, dried saliva and other bio­log­i­cal mate­r­ial pre­served at the lab have trans­formed it into an archive of hope for pris­on­ers held in error.

Crime-solving remains the lab’s pri­mary mis­sion, and the old DNA sam­ples have helped ana­lysts iden­tify crim­i­nals who have eluded inves­ti­ga­tors for years. Exon­er­a­tions have emerged as a by-product of that mis­sion. Since 2001, the lab’s DNA archive has secured free­dom for 21 pris­on­ers serv­ing up to life in prison — the most exon­er­a­tions in any county. 

As more hor­rific mis­takes of the past are exposed, the Insti­tute of Foren­sic Sci­ences has become Exhibit A in a national push by some law­mak­ers, civil rights advo­cates, pros­e­cu­tors and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment for more uni­form stan­dards reg­u­lat­ing how bio­log­i­cal evi­dence should be retained in crim­i­nal cases.

Dupree, 51, was freed in Jan­u­ary when DNA lifted from strands of hair stored at the lab more than 30 years ago cleared him in the rape and rob­bery of a Dal­las woman and her male com­pan­ion. James Woodard, 57, was freed in 2008 after evi­dence filed at the lab more than 27 years ago wiped out his con­vic­tion in the slay­ing of his girl­friend. Charles Chat­man, 49, was freed in 2008 because evi­dence ware­housed more than 26 years ago cleared him in the rape and rob­bery of a neighbor.

For all three men, tech­nol­ogy was just devel­op­ing or did not exist to test the evi­dence col­lected at the time of their arrests. The first exon­er­a­tion using DNA evi­dence occurred in 1989; the years since have pro­duced advances in sci­ence and the law.

In Dal­las County, the wrongs are being righted because “the evi­dence — decades after it was col­lected — was there to test,” Dis­trict Attor­ney Craig Watkins says. The county has been retain­ing evi­dence for decades, some sam­ples since 1978.

But in many places, the sam­ples that ulti­mately freed DuPree, Woodard and Chat­man would not have been saved. Only about half the states — includ­ing Texas — now require the auto­matic preser­va­tion of DNA evi­dence after con­vic­tion, accord­ing to The Inno­cence Project, which uses DNA evi­dence to assist inmates’ claims of inno­cence. Six­teen states have no preser­va­tion laws.

As new cases of wrong­ful con­vic­tions con­tinue to emerge based on DNA tests, the cam­paign for con­sis­tent preser­va­tion stan­dards is gain­ing momen­tum across the coun­try. Among recent developments:

* The National Insti­tute of Jus­tice, the research arm of the Jus­tice Depart­ment, is fund­ing the devel­op­ment of con­sis­tent guide­lines for evi­dence reten­tion across the coun­try. The work, orga­nized by the Com­merce Department’s National Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­ogy, began last year and is expected to be com­plete by 2012, says Melissa Tay­lor, an ana­lyst in the institute’s law enforce­ment stan­dards office.

* Penn­syl­va­nia Repub­li­can state Sen. Stew­art Green­leaf says a four-year study com­mis­sioned by the state’s Gen­eral Assem­bly, planned for release as early as April, is expected to rec­om­mend a pack­age of bills requir­ing the reten­tion of evi­dence and the cre­ation of a foren­sic advi­sory board to over­see crime lab oper­a­tions. Penn­syl­va­nia has no cur­rent preser­va­tion laws.

Green­leaf, who has con­sulted with Dal­las offi­cials about their lab­o­ra­tory prac­tices, fears his state’s pris­ons may hold as many — or more — wrongly con­victed pris­on­ers as those in Texas. “I believe there may be more cases nation­ally and in Penn­syl­va­nia that we are not aware of in part because of the lack of (evi­dence) super­vi­sion and preser­va­tion,” he says.

* Mass­a­chu­setts state Sen. Cyn­thia Creem, a Demo­c­rat, is spon­sor­ing a pro­posal that would increase inmates’ access to test­ing after con­vic­tion and set stan­dards for retain­ing the evi­dence in a state where no guide­lines exist. Creem’s bill, filed in Jan­u­ary, calls for all bio­log­i­cal evi­dence to be retained as long as the con­victed pris­oner remains in cus­tody or on pro­ba­tion or parole.

While many law­mak­ers agree new state mea­sures are needed to guard cru­cial evi­dence for pos­si­ble future test­ing, not all believe their states need or can afford the stan­dard fol­lowed in Dal­las County, where much of the bio­log­i­cal evi­dence is never discarded.

“At some point you have to be prac­ti­cal,” Mon­tana Repub­li­can state Sen. James Shock­ley says. He sup­ports a bill in which pros­e­cu­tors can request that evi­dence be destroyed after con­victed felons’ appeals are exhausted, even if time remains on their prison sen­tences. In cases where there is no sus­pect, the evi­dence would be pre­served for 30 years.

“The prob­lem is stor­age,” Shock­ley says of costly ware­house space that would have to be expanded if evi­dence were stored indef­i­nitely. “I can’t imag­ine any sci­ence” that would war­rant longer reten­tion to pre­serve the option for future test­ing. “That’s just not real world.”

Yet when DuPree was sen­tenced to 75 years in prison in 1980, Watkins says nobody fore­saw the value of DNA analy­sis in iden­ti­fy­ing errors in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem today, either.

Barry Scheck, co-director of The Inno­cence Project, says there is a sim­ple expla­na­tion for why so many wrong­fully con­victed pris­on­ers have walked out of Dal­las County court­rooms as free men: “What makes Dal­las unique is that they have saved more evi­dence,” Scheck says. “That’s the rea­son. End of story.”

100,000 pieces of DNA

There is only one view to the out­side world from one of the exam­i­na­tion rooms at the Insti­tute of Foren­sic Sciences.

Framed by a bay win­dow on one wall is the drive-up emer­gency room entrance at Park­land Hos­pi­tal, the spot where Pres­i­dent Kennedy was brought nearly 48 years earlier.

The lab­o­ra­tory owes its very exis­tence in large part to law enforce­ment weak­nesses exposed by the president’s assas­si­na­tion, says Tim­o­thy Sliter, the institute’s evi­dence sec­tion chief. Sliter says the assas­si­na­tion and the result­ing inves­ti­ga­tions under­scored the county’s lack of sci­en­tific exper­tise and abil­ity to ana­lyze evi­dence in crim­i­nal probes.

Although con­ceived in the post-assassination 1960s, the lab did not open until the late 1970s, when the ear­li­est stan­dards for the stor­age of evi­dence empha­sized preser­va­tion, Sliter says.

Some, includ­ing Watkins, say the strict evi­dence reten­tion prac­tices were first encour­aged by leg­endary Dal­las Dis­trict Attor­ney Henry Wade, who wanted the evi­dence pre­served to guard against defen­dants’ appeals. But Sliter believes sci­ence set the tone for an archive that now holds about 100,000 pieces of bio­log­i­cal material.

Much of the evi­dence is stored in 17 freez­ers, all set to 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

The sam­ples — on stained fab­ric swatches, in small plas­tic tubes and on cot­ton swabs con­tain­ing all forms of bio­log­i­cal mate­r­ial — are pack­aged in plas­tic, assigned a num­ber and filed in blue plas­tic bins, resem­bling a library in deep freeze.

New evi­dence pour­ing in from about 100 law enforce­ment agen­cies in the area requires the addi­tion of one new freezer every year. Each is equipped with an alarm sys­tem to guard against fluc­tu­at­ing tem­per­a­tures and pos­si­ble machine malfunctions.

Stacy McDon­ald, Sliter’s chief deputy, says the steady vol­ume of work has pro­duced a back­log of about 450 tests, result­ing in aver­age wait times of two to three months for results. The requests come from police, pros­e­cu­tors and pris­on­ers. Emer­gency requests, she says, can be turned around in about three days.

McDon­ald says the $33 cost per sam­ple includes the “life­time” stor­age fee.

Sliter says expenses to test and main­tain the lab are far more sub­stan­tial — about $5 mil­lion per year. Yet he dis­putes the idea that long-term stor­age is too costly.

“It’s all a mat­ter of whether you think it’s impor­tant enough to do,” he says. “For years, peo­ple lived with the delu­sion that the jus­tice sys­tem was free from error. In the 1990s, that delu­sion began to be shat­tered largely because of DNA evidence.”

Sliter, McDon­ald and the lab’s 17 ana­lysts know their work has led to dra­matic exon­er­a­tions, but they have never met the men who have won their freedom.

“We try to treat every­thing we do here with the same sense of seri­ous­ness,” McDon­ald says. “Some­body could be exe­cuted based on what we do here.”

“The pros­e­cu­tors may love us today,” Sliter adds. “Tomor­row, maybe not so much.”

Archive miss­ing material

For all of the Dal­las laboratory’s suc­cesses, the institute’s record isn’t per­fect, says Michael Ware, chief of Dal­las County’s Con­vic­tion Integrity Unit.

Evi­dence in some cases dat­ing to the late 1970s and early 1980s can­not be located, says Ware, whose unit was cre­ated in 2007 to review hun­dreds of con­vic­tions in which ques­tions were raised about pris­on­ers’ pos­si­ble innocence.

“You are not going to find what you’re look­ing for in some of those cases,” Ware says. “And that’s under the best of cir­cum­stances. Think about what that means in other lab­o­ra­to­ries” that do not always pre­serve evidence.

McDon­ald acknowl­edges there are miss­ing pieces from the archive’s ear­li­est years, from about 1978 to 1983. From 1983 on, she says, the evi­dence is intact.

About 30% of requests for archived evi­dence go unfilled because the mate­r­ial is not avail­able, McDon­ald says. In some of those cases, includ­ing con­vic­tions based on con­fes­sions or plea agree­ments, the evi­dence was never sub­mit­ted by the inves­ti­gat­ing agency. In oth­ers, the mate­r­ial may have been returned to the agen­cies at their request.

Joe Latta, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence, says prob­lems with miss­ing and mis­han­dled evi­dence plague the industry.

“The vast major­ity (of police agen­cies and crime labs) have a hard time tak­ing care of what we call ‘the stuff,’ ” says Latta, one of 23 mem­bers of the fed­eral panel that is devel­op­ing national guide­lines for evi­dence retention.

He says many evi­dence ware­houses are run by police or other law enforce­ment offi­cials who have no back­ground over­see­ing those oper­a­tions. Civil­ian sci­en­tists, not police, main­tain the bio­log­i­cal evi­dence in the Dal­las lab.

“Police chase bad guys,” Latta says. “We have no expe­ri­ence what­so­ever tak­ing care of warehouses.”

The Dal­las lab’s work has given DuPree a chance to reclaim the life he lost 30 years ago.

He mar­ried after his release from prison. As an intern for Demo­c­ra­tic Texas state Sen. Rod­ney Ellis, a strong sup­porter of the inno­cence move­ment, DuPree is advo­cat­ing for new laws to help inno­cent pris­on­ers gain their freedom.

Among the pro­pos­als being drafted is a bill to adopt uni­form stan­dards for how evi­dence is retained across the state.

“With­out that evi­dence being in that lab, there is no way I’m here,” DuPree says. “I would still be in prison.” 

No law on DNA preservation

Six­teen states have no laws requir­ing the preser­va­tion of DNA evi­dence:
* Alabama
* Idaho
* Indi­ana
* Kansas
* Mass­a­chu­setts
* New Jer­sey
* New York
* North Dakota
* Penn­syl­va­nia
* South Dakota
* Ten­nessee
* Utah
* Ver­mont
* Wash­ing­ton¹
* West Vir­ginia
* Wyoming
1 — Note: Wash­ing­ton does not require preser­va­tion but does have a pro­vi­sion in state law that allows judges to order the preser­va­tion of evidence.

Source: The Inno­cence Project 

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

The Billings Gazette, billingsgazette.com
BYLINE: JESSIE MCQUILLAN and DAN WEINBERG The Billings Gazette
Link to Article

Billings, MT

The Mon­tana House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has before it a bill that, if enacted, will mea­sur­ably improve our jus­tice sys­tem. Sen­ate Bill 58, co-sponsored by Sen. Lynda Moss, D-Billings, and Sen. Jim Shock­ley, R-Victor, will have county law enforce­ment pre­serve DNA sam­ples on evi­dence found in cer­tain seri­ous, vio­lent crimes. The bill has already passed the Mon­tana Senate.

The Mon­tana Asso­ci­a­tion of Coun­ties doesn’t want this bill to pass. Its lob­by­ists claim the expense of stor­ing small bits of DNA evi­dence is too expen­sive for the coun­ties to take on. They also claim that facil­i­ties that store evi­dence are already inad­e­quate. There are sto­ries of mold grow­ing in one evi­dence room and poor doc­u­men­ta­tion in others.

MACO’s claims of poor evi­dence stor­age are true. Some of Montana’s coun­ties need to do a bet­ter job of main­tain­ing evi­dence. The integrity of our jus­tice sys­tem depends on it. Cases are deter­mined by the qual­ity of evi­dence. Their claims are not true that stor­ing small bits of DNA evi­dence would be unpre­dictably and unnec­es­sar­ily expensive.

If you were to talk with MACO rep­re­sen­ta­tives or lis­ten to the leg­isla­tive hear­ings, you would envi­sion entire auto­mo­biles and sofas being stored in enor­mous ware­houses. These require­ments are false. SB58 requires only that small sam­ples of DNA be pre­served, and offers clear ways for coun­ties to dis­pose of unnec­es­sary evidence.

Since DNA was first used in foren­sic sci­ence, hun­dreds of peo­ple nation­wide have been exon­er­ated for crimes they did not com­mit. DNA tells a story with 100 per­cent accu­racy. Match­ing bio­log­i­cal mate­r­ial, assum­ing the evi­dence is main­tained, is accu­rate and true. The other value of DNA is that it has shown us how fal­li­ble the other meth­ods of foren­sic sci­ence have been. The true value of eye­wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, hair analy­sis, bal­lis­tics analy­sis and coerced con­fes­sions all dimin­ish com­pared to DNA.

Texan Craig Watkins is the Dal­las County Dis­trict Attor­ney. When he took office sev­eral years ago, he was asked to sign a piece of paper that would have cleaned up the county’s evi­dence room and destroyed sam­ples of DNA. Mr. Watkins chose not to sign that paper. Since that day, over 40 men and women, con­victed in Dal­las and housed in Texas jails and pris­ons, have been exon­er­ated using those sam­ples of DNA. These were all inno­cent peo­ple, wrong­fully con­victed and imprisoned.

If jus­tice is not your chief con­cern but safety is, then con­sider this: In nearly 40 per­cent of the cases where some­one has been exon­er­ated of a crime using DNA, law enforce­ment went on to find the real per­pe­tra­tor using that same sam­ple of DNA. When we prop­erly store and use DNA evi­dence, we get real crim­i­nals off the street.

If jus­tice is not your chief con­cern but eco­nom­ics is, how do you rec­on­cile the cost of stor­ing small sam­ples of DNA with the cost of impris­on­ing inno­cent peo­ple (more than $34,000 per inmate per year)? MACO com­plains that the state of Mon­tana should store DNA, not the coun­ties. Presently, the state crime lab does main­tain some stor­age. The coun­ties need to do their part.

What is the value of free­dom for Mon­tanans who have com­mit­ted no crime? What is the value of jus­tice? This is our Dal­las moment.

Jessie McQuil­lan of Mis­soula is exec­u­tive direc­tor for Mon­tana Inno­cence Project. Dan Wein­berg is the organization’s founder and president.

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org