Legislators Want to Add Serious-Crime Suspects to Database


August 30, 2007
NorthJersey.com
By Peter J. Sampson

Two decades after a Florida rapist became the first American convicted in a case built on DNA evidence, investigators are routinely turning to a national database that now holds more than 5 million genetic "fingerprints."

Some lawmakers in New Jersey are hoping it can hold even more. They're considering legislation to further expand DNA collection in the state to include anyone convicted of disorderly conduct and those arrested for murder, manslaughter, kidnapping and sex offenses.

"I think this would be a great tool for law enforcement to solve many unsolved crimes and make the streets of this country a lot safer," said state Sen. Nicholas J. Sacco of North Bergen, a sponsor of the measure. "And if by chance there is no conviction or no match, the DNA would be destroyed."

Englewood Assemblyman Gordon M. Johnson, also a sponsor, said the proposed law would speed up the investigative process and possibly avert additional crimes by immediately screening a suspect's DNA instead of waiting up to a year for a conviction.

Touted as powerful crime-fighting tools, federal, state and local DNA databanks are growing faster than ever, thanks to more than $300 million in federal grants and vastly expanded laws. However, the trend is raising fear among some civil libertarians about an erosion of rights.

New Jersey's DNA database has grown by about 27,000 profiles a year since lawmakers expanded the pool in 2003 to include people convicted of any crime in the state. Adding arrestees into the system could mean an additional 80,000 profiles a year, said Joe Petersack, acting DNA lab director at the state's Office of Forensic Science in Hamilton.

New Jersey, which has collected DNA from more than 160,000 convicts, was inundated after the pool was expanded three years ago. The backlog peaked at 114,000 samples in early 2006, Petersack said.

In March, a search linked DNA collected from a man convicted of shoplifting two years ago to semen recovered after a Ridgefield Park woman was raped and killed in her home in 1982. The link could have been discovered sooner, authorities said, but for the huge backlog of offender samples waiting to be processed.

With federal grants to outsource its samples and a new state-of-the-art lab with robotic stations that can process 96 samples at one time, the backlog is being reduced by about 8,000 a month, Petersack said. It is expected to be eliminated by year's end, he said.

1,000 hits a month

The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), a software program that allows the DNA profiles to be stored and compared, links 52 state, military and FBI databases and 156 local participants nationwide. Each state is responsible for all crime scene and offender profiles collected within its borders, and for deciding what offenses qualify to be in its database.

The databases all contain two types of DNA profiles: One is the forensic type, collected at a crime scene. The other is taken directly from people arrested or convicted in certain crimes.

The nationwide system is generating 1,000 matches -- or "hits" -- a month, many of them involving crimes that investigators likely wouldn't have connected. It has proven adept at bringing rapists to justice decades after their attacks, linking burglars to murders and sexual assaults, and clearing innocent defendants.

"This program began 17 years ago with no staff and no budget, and it has aided in over 50,000 investigations," said Dr. Tom Callahan, chief of the CODIS unit at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Va. "So by any measure it would be successful."

Of the nearly 51,000 investigations aided by CODIS, 34,600 of the "hits" have involved offenders whose DNA was already on file in the state where the new crime took place. Another 5,400 linked a known offender to a crime in another state.

In another 10,625 of the cases, CODIS linked two crime scenes, signaling to police that the same unknown culprit was responsible for both.

"This is where serial cases are identified," Callahan said.

Besides catching killers and rapists, DNA has the power to quickly eliminate suspects and to exonerate the wrongly convicted.

This summer, a New Jersey man who spent 22 years behind bars for the rape and murder of two children was fully exonerated, raising the number of inmates cleared by DNA evidence to 205.

Since the first post-conviction DNA exoneration in 1989, inmates have been proven innocent in 31 states, including five men in New Jersey, according to the Innocence Project, a New York legal charity that works to free the wrongly convicted.

"In more than 35 percent of the 205 DNA exonerations, we've not just proven our client's innocence, we've also identified the true perpetrator," said Innocence Project spokesman Eric Ferrero. "And more often than not, that is done through a DNA match in CODIS."

States widen the pool

Initially restricted to the most violent convicts, the pool of those required to surrender their DNA was expanded in most states to include convicted burglars, non-violent offenders and juveniles as lawmakers saw the tool's potential for solving crimes.

"In the mid-to-late Nineties, as the states were establishing their databases, the cases that were worked for DNA, for the most part, were violent crimes -- homicides, rapes, kidnappings," said Callahan. "When an association was made between an offender and an unsolved crime, a check of that person's criminal history in many instances revealed a burglary conviction, and so states started to include burglary as one of the qualifying offenses."

Eleven states recently widened the pool even further to include those arrested in certain cases. As a result, nearly 71,000 arrestee profiles have been added to the national database over the past two years.

The trend to include arrestees in DNA databases has alarmed civil libertarians. For them, it not only represents a grave threat to privacy and the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. They say it flouts the legal maxim that a person is innocent until proven guilty.

The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the 2003 state law that expanded New Jersey's DNA collection rules. The state Supreme Court upheld the law in January.

In New Jersey, CODIS has provided 1,430 investigative leads, 1,000 of them in the last 12 months, Petersack said.

"In 2005, we only had 85 hits," he said. "It's all geared to how many samples you have in the database."

The numbers should continue growing.

Although federal law enforcement agencies also were authorized in 2005 to collect DNA from federal arrestees and from non-citizens detained for illegally entering the country, they're still waiting for the Justice Department to promulgate rules before beginning.

"There are many federal law enforcement agencies that have to be coordinated," Callahan said.


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