September 30, 2003

Dear Colleague:

On Wednesday, October 1, we will introduce legislation that includes a new version of the Innocence Protection Act, which was cosponsored during the 107^th Congress by 250 members of this House. Given your past support for this measure, we invite you to join us in cosponsoring this important initiative.

This year's bill has been carefully crafted over the course of many months of negotiations. It represents an effort to balance the needs of all participants in the criminal justice system--including those accused or convicted of violent crimes and victims of such crimes and their families--by reducing the risk that the innocent are convicted while the guilty remain at large.

The bill will be introduced as title III of a comprehensive package of programs known as the Advancing Justice Through DNA Technology Act of 2003, which provides over $1 billion over the next five years to assist Federal and State authorities in solving crimes and protecting the innocent.

In addition to the Innocence Protection Act, the bill enacts the President's DNA Initiative and authorizes $755 million for the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program to eliminate the current backlog of unanalyzed DNA samples in the nation's crime labs, and authorizes additional grant programs to expand and improve the capacity of the Federal, State and local criminal justice system to realize the full potential of forensic DNA technology. A Senate companion bill will be introduced by Senators Hatch, Biden, Specter, Leahy, DeWine and Feinstein.

No one knows whether innocent people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. We do know that there have been some very close calls. Since 1976, 111 people in 25 States have been released after spending years on death row for crimes they did not commit. Some of them came within days of being put to death.

The Innocence Protection Act includes four principal elements that would help remedy such miscarriages of justice and prevent them from recurring, by--

§ Ensuring eligible Federal inmates access to DNA testing to establish their innocence. Currently, many are denied access to testing and/or prevented from introducing the evidence that would exonerate them-evidence which, in many cases, would also identify the guilty party.

§ Establishing the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program, named for the first death row inmate exonerated through DNA evidence, to help States defray the costs of post-conviction DNA testing.

§ Authorizing grants to the States to improve the quality of legal representation for both indigent defendants and the public in capital cases. Lawyers assigned by the court to these unpopular and unprofitable cases are often inexperienced, overworked or incompetent. It is little wonder that over half of all death sentences are overturned on appeal or after post-conviction review because of errors at trial.

§ Increasing the maximum amount of compensation available to Federal death row prisoners and others who are found to have been unjustly imprisoned.

The deadline for original cosponsors is Wednesday, October 1 at 3:00 P.M. For further information or to cosponsor the bill, please contact Katy Crooks (Rep. Sensenbrenner) at 5-3926, Mark Agrast (Rep. Delahunt) at 5-3111 or Jill Janovetz (Rep. LaHood) at 5-6201.

Sincerely,

/s/ F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr.

/s/ William D. Delahunt

/s/ Ray LaHood

/s/ John Conyers, Jr.

/s/ Robert C. (Bobby) Scott