Postconviction DNA Testing Is at Core of Major NIJ Initiatives
Nancy Ritter
National Institute of Justice
DNA technology has become one of the most powerful tools to ensure that justice is done through our offenders and eliminate innocent suspects. Increasingly, DNA is also used to exonerate the wrongly convicted.
When this issue of the NIJ Journal went to press, postconviction DNA testing had been used to exonerate 225 people in the United States, according to the Innocence Project. (See “Wrongfully Convicted: One Man’s Story,” page 19.) But using DNA in a postconviction environment presents many challenges.
One challenge is finding old biological evidence that may — or may not — have been retained. Although many jurisdictions have a policy of retaining old swabs and other biological evidence, many do not. And, even in old cases in which biological evidence may still exist, actually locating it can be difficult. (See “Wrongfully Convicted: One Lawyer’s Perspective,” page 21.)
Biological evidence remains stable when it is properly collected and stored, and scientific advances in DNA technology make it possible to reanalyze evidence in closed and cold cases. But proper main tenance and storage of evidence can be a challenge for police agencies and forensic laboratories with limited space and even more limited budgets. The good news is that there is a national trend to reevaluate the way biological evidence is preserved.
Another challenge is the many samples that still await DNA testing in crime labs and police evidence rooms across the country. (See www.dna.gov for more on NIJ’s ongoing efforts to reduce the backlog of evidence samples.)
And, finally, even if evidence was tested for DNA at the time of an investigation and trial, new, more sensitive techniques may have been developed since then that could yield different results. For example, hair — which previously only could be examined microscopically — can now be tested for DNA