MS. ABRAMSON: We're back in session and we're going to have Mr. David Lazer.

MR. ASPLEN: Actually this relationship began about a year ago when David Lazer came to our meeting in Boston that we held, and David and I met then. We had thought about the idea of some kind of collaborative effort prior to that, and that stuck in my mind, so David and I began to collaborate a little bit more, and I flew up to Cambridge to talk to him one day, and he came down to D.C. one time, and I think we have this ball now officially rolling.

David is an assistant professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Prior to that he taught for a couple of years at Princeton University. He has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan. He is here to talk to us a little bit about Kennedy School and then what we're thinking in terms of the Joint Commission meeting/conference on some of the development DNA related issues.

So, David, thank you for coming down to Washington again.

MR. LAZER: Thank you for having me. Let me keep this relatively short and sweet and open it up for discussion as to how to maximize the value added from the conference in November. Let me first just outline briefly the format that I have been talking to Chris about for the conference and then talk about some -- I've spoken with various members of the Commission as well as various faculty at the Kennedy School as to what topics that might be various panel topics to center the conference around. I would like to then open up to discussion as to what would be the best way to format things and what would be the best panel topics for discussion.

So briefly the conference as we've outlined it right now, the format of the conference, a lot of this has to do with the particular capacity at the Kennedy School and the hotel next to the Kennedy School to accommodate conferences.

Right now the dates we settled on are November 19, 20, and 21 of this year with I gather a Commission meeting. There will be a Commission meeting early on the 19th, and then the conference would begin after that with a keynote address and a reception that evening. Then on Tuesday would be the real meat of the conference where there would be a total of six or seven panels, two on the morning of the 20th, two on the afternoon of the 20th, and two on the morning of the 21st, and possibly one in the evening post dinner on the 20th.

There are two issues here. One is basically the substance to be covered, and then the second is how to cover the substance. The way we have been talking about this is that generally the format for each of these panels would be preliminary sessions and that there would be time for the invited speakers to -- let's say three or four speakers per panel to present a certain set of ideas, some time then for discussion and Q and A to the panelists where there would be roughly an hour and 45 minutes per panel. I think it's important especially in terms of the population that we would be aiming at to allow a generous amount of time for people to interact and discuss with each other as well as with the various panelists afterwards, so there would be generous amounts of time for lunch together, dinner together, coffee breaks, and what have you for people to discuss what they've heard.

I've spoken to various members of the Commission as well as various faculty at the Kennedy School as to what questions we should center the conference around. There have been a few things that have come up a number of times, and I'll throw them out here and let me throw it out to discussion as to what you think would be the best way to maximize the value added from this conference.

First of all, I think it is clear that we should have at least some discussion of exactly what DNA technology enables just so that everyone that is coming to the conference is on board with exactly what does the technology make possible. Then I would say that we need to talk about what the public institutions -- how they we might say enable the technology or not. Basically in certain ways you have a sort of standard situation here where there is a new technology that comes along, an innovation which has potentially very powerful uses in the system, and the question is how does the system adapt and adopt or not that technology.

I think that this could be broken down both in talking about the DNA database -- I would say there are separate sets of issues going around database issues and post-conviction relief issues, and I would say that would be useful to have discussions centered around -- to have separate discussions centered around those two sets of issues.

Then clearly the distinguishing characteristic I think of DNA technology is just how powerful it is, just how much it can potentially reveal beyond just identification. So I think there needs to be a decent amount of discussion about the privacy and ethics issues around the utilization of DNA technology in the criminal justice system. Then I think that it would be useful to have some discussion -- and again this is based on my talking with both the Commission and faculty at the Kennedy School -- on just the value of public discourse. I mean the objective in part of both the Commission, but also particularly with the conference is to serve as a sounding board, as a way to spur public discourse on this topic.

In some ways it's striking how little discourse there has been on this topic other than clearly there has been a lot of post-conviction relief issues in recent months, but, for example, on the database issues you don't see a lot of discussion I think in newspapers and debate about these issues, and I think it would be useful to use this as a forum to spur some of that discussion. In many ways I think that's the value added of this conference in general.

I should say, by the way, I'm open to also people contacting me about what would be good -- what you think would be topics that should be covered, voices that should be heard, and so we can sort of continue that conversation right here.

Let me throw it open to questions and discussion.

MR. ASPLEN: If I could just add to what you've already said, one of the things that we talked about was facilitating a discussion by actually having panelists actually write papers ahead of time so this is something more than a conference where folks show up and discuss things. There will be a tremendous amount of thought and effort that goes into it beforehand, and that those papers will be able to stimulate that discussion.

Also subsequent to the conference the Kennedy School, as I understand it, will essentially publish some kind of proceedings. I don't know exactly what format they will take, but there will be kind of a joint publication of the proceedings from the Commission and the Kennedy School that while not included in the final report of the Commission, will be considered part of the Commission's work ultimately whenever it's published.

MR. LAZER: I think the papers are an essential ingredient to get people to come rather than think about what they're going to say on the flight to the conference to actually have to put in a few hours.

MR. ASPLEN: Not that any of us do that.

MR. LAZER: So I think that will help get to a deeper level of discussion on the subject matters.

MR. GAINER: Who is the intended audience?
MR. LAZER: Ideally it would be a combination of practitioners and academics, and what we would like to get in the room -- the guest list would include some mix of the key people from the criminal justice system and as well as academics who have done research on both DNA and as well as more generally on the criminal justice system to come into the room together. In part I think what I really want to happen is to have some dialogue amongst the people who wouldn't normally talk with each other, and there are certain ways of manipulating the conference. You make people sit next to each other in certain ways so that you will get certain conversations arising that I think could be productive for everyone.

MR. ASPLEN: I think at some point in time we also discussed the possibility of bringing in some legislators to the extent that these decisions are ultimately made by legislators, so we could bring those folks in also.

MR. LAZER: I think both on the federal and state level identifying sort of key people who are interested, legislators' staff and so on.

MS. ABRAMSON: By "practitioners" I assume you mean you law enforcement.

MR. LAZER: I have a certain terminology coming out of the Kennedy School, which is basically a practitioner is anyone who has sort of been out there in the real world in any way, shape, or form. The way I was using it is pretty general, which would include both law enforcement as well as legislators and so on. So really everyone who actually does stuff rather than write about it.

MS. ABRAMSON: Have we worked on the list of panelists? It's now July, so if we want something in writing by November --

MR. LAZER: We need to move quite expeditiously. I have been working on coming up with a list of people because we want to start contacting people in the next few weeks or at least identifying the must haves and then sort of move on. Probably for the conference part given that timing, it's difficult to get academics to do anything real quickly, coming from that direction myself. So probably for the conference we'll probably have people come out with various speaking points, but it won't actually be complete papers for the conference, but rather sort of outlines of papers and let's say abbreviated papers just because given July to November, I think that's the best we could expect and let's say completed papers a few months thereafter.

MS. ABRAMSON: The steering committee, as I understand it, Phil Reilly, Barry Scheck, Jeff Thoma, and Chris --

MR. ASPLEN: Correct; and David Kaye.

MR. LAZER: I've spoken to all of the above.

MS. BALLOU: I'm just wondering when you mentioned the added value of public discourse, coming from law enforcement, that means civilians. The statement you said before about how powerful is privacy ethics, I think that would be your discourse right there, those issues, so do you have a little more what you mean by "public discourse"? I would just hate to see you repeat two issues that basically sound like you're going to get the same kind of response.

MR. LAZER: There are various public values at stake here. Partly it's a discourse of how we allocate resources to societal objectives, and so there is a question, as has been discussed today, about allocating money toward application of this technology, and that is one element of a discussion, public discussion, as to how much resources should we devote to this technology as well as how do we want to design institutions to make this happen because obviously there is sort of a lot of awkward governing arrangements involved in making, for example, the database happen because we have so many governing entities involved to have to coordinate with each other.

So a lot of interesting discussions could happen around that. Clearly another set of values is, you know, crime fighting values on the one hand, trying to catch criminals. Another set of issues is privacy issues, and there needs to be some public discussion as to how we best balance and achieve those various types of values. So that's really where I see the value of discussion occurring.

MR. ASPLEN: That's also somewhat generated by a speech that was given by Justice Briar at the recent Whitehead Institute Symposium on Genetics and Society that I sent a copy of to all the Commissioners and I would be happy to get you folks a copy also, but the point that Justice Briar made essentially was that there was a tremendous value to public discourse on these issues to Supreme Court decisions, and that's something that we don't often think about.

We often think about Supreme Court decisions made in the vacuum of purely the legal system and legal construct, but he used two examples, one of which was the right to die debate prior to it being heard at the Supreme Court level, and also some of the issues surrounding the patenting of genes.

As I was listening to this presentation my thought was that is exactly what the Commission is doing. I mean the function of the Commission is to have that discourse, and particular to us, we look at like the arrestee issue where when that first started two years ago, when that discussion started, it started on television really with Commissioner Saffer on TV one night and the ACLU on the TV the next night, and I think the Commission provided a great value to having kind of a level playing field.

So that's where that concept got generated, especially considering the fact that the Commission is going away after this conference. Kind of what next? How do we discuss these issues? What mechanism has that public discussion?

MR. PLOURD: You brought up some subjects about post-conviction and data banking. Another subject area that might be dovetailing post-conviction would be looking at the unsolved old cases very similar to post-conviction cases.

MR. LAZER: There is a whole set of interesting issues. You're talking about how to prioritize resources. With the database if you have a certain set of resources, how do you prioritize them? It's not just simply an issue of how you maximize the number of hits, but sometimes also digging into old wounds, which there was an interesting article last month I think in the Boston Globe about looking to old cases and how many of the victims weren't so happy about having this dug up again.

I mean sort of going back to the issue of public discourse, there are a lot of interesting trade-offs as to what you pursue and how you pursue it, and I think that's where sort of having society mull these things over is a healthy thing.

MR. PLOURD: We're working on some protocols for old case review, and that's a big issue, what are the victims thinking? How do you deal with the victims of a 20-year-old case?

MR. LAZER: Are there other views on how exactly we might format this in terms of getting enough sort of interaction and discussion so as to maximize the value added in terms of this discourse? I'll throw that out to everyone because I've played around with various ideas of how to get people mulling this over and talking about it, and how do you get people coming away from the conference really saying well, you know, these are really tough issues and I think I really gained something here? Do people have views sort of on the nuts and bolts level of how to make that happen?

MR. CLARKE: What other models have been used at the school for similar type symposia?

MR. LAZER: This is a somewhat larger magnitude. There are certain suggestions I've got at the very nuts and bolts level, of, for example, formatting it so, for example, you have a very active chair of each panel who will act as sort of followup questioner, for example, and take it upon themselves to try to make the panel more coherent, if you will, and having a summarizer, someone picking out someone who will sort of take five minutes at the end of the panel and say listening to this conversation here are what I think are sort of the key issues.

So there are various ideas along those lines which I'll plan on implementing as well as just, for example, at lunch trying to -- when I was talking about getting people to talk to each other, trying to mix tables up at lunchtime so that people -- so you get some mix. People naturally just talk to the people they already know, so you could easily have a conference where people only talk to the people they already know. For example, you might try to get people assigned to tables so they're scrambled up in various ways. These are getting down to the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts, but it matters quite a lot in the end in terms of the success of the conference.

So there are various ideas like those floating around at the Kennedy School. I'm just wondering in particular given that you folks know the populations and the particulars of the issues best,what you might suggest. Is there any particular things you might suggest?

MR. CLARKE: I've seen that active moderator, for lack of a better term, used quite effectively in the past a couple of times.

MR. ASPLEN: David, do you think that on one of these subjects on these panels that it could be formulated in a way that we could pursue the friendly Arthur Miller type discussion, which I think is a little bit different than what you're talking about, where you get more of a kind of a case scenario or whatever, and you've got the participants there, maybe five or six representing different components, maybe prosecutor, defense attorney, civil libertarian type, laboratory over here and have that kind of more immediate interaction amongst them?

MR. LAZER: So, for example, presenting some type of scenario or case scenario and saying let's talk about how you might wrestle with that? That could be quite valuable. In fact, we even have a case that was developed at the Kennedy School around the implementation of the database in Massachusetts, and it might serve as a useful discussion point along those lines because there are again a lot of these trade-offs in there.

MR. ASPLEN: One thing that comes to mind is what we talked about earlier this morning on the behavioral genetics issue. Let's say what are the ethical considerations of you've got -- let's suppose that there has been the identification of a gene for pedophilia and the percentages are 75% or something and play that out. Prosecutor, what is your ethical obligation to use it or not use it? Defense attorney? Maybe that's a good place because I think if you're going to facilitate that, it has to be something where there is going to be a wide divergence of use. Otherwise it gets pretty boring.

MR. THOMA: Chris, one of the things in our discussions we're really looking for almost a debate format where there are different ends of the spectrum in the same panel, so we were looking along those lines, but I think it's a good formula to have an exact discussion, not necessarily a case or something like that, but a given set of facts what would you do or what is your view on this, and I think that's definitely something we should take into account.

MR. LAZER: I think that's a very good idea. More generally where there is a range of opinions, we need to have that on the panel because I think one hopes to get a little heat and enlightenment going on these panels, and particularly that might be something else to work with the panel chairs on. Let's work out certain types of questions to present. It might not be a whole discussion around a particular fact pattern, but let's say let me throw out a scenario to you. There is someone who has this gene, et cetera, et cetera, what do you do? What do you think is the right thing to do? So I think that's a very good idea as a tool to pursue it.

MS. BASHINSKI: I have a thought about how you memorialize the meeting. I think back to a conference that I was at a few years ago, and what they did was to insure that comments, questions, and other things were captured almost verbatim so that you don't lose the dynamic of the conversation. I don't know if that's part of what you would expect to do, but I think it really does memorialize it.

MR. LAZER: I think that's very important. Ideally we will be able to use the web. This is the wonderful thing today in terms of spurring public discourse, but we will get it all recorded, and the objective is to record it and then archive it in essence on the web and ideally simulcast some of it on the web and potentially if there is interest on say CSPAN or what have you where the objective would be that if someone hears that this is a great conference and there is this really great panel on privacy issues, and to have it so someone could click, go to the conference and click go to that panel and then have it in depth so then you could go to particular parts of the panel. I think that would really magnify the impact of the conference.

MS. BASHINSKI: You might even consider with some editing and iteration back and forth putting some of that in the actual proceedings, not the entire transcript, but some of the comments and exchanges.

MR. LAZER: That's a good idea.

MR. GAHN: Just a few thoughts I jotted down here. I think one of the things that you may wish to look at is at what other scenarios of this technology can you present to the public and to law enforcement? What does the public think of a police officer following someone for the purposes of obtaining a genetic sample or even doing something more aggressive or active? What do they think of stringency searches where you're going to look for your databases and perhaps look for relatives? The elimination samples, do police swab everyone on the scene or when a person is identified? What do you do with those? I think victim impact is so important.

The other area that you might want to look at would be the statute of limitations. Is the technology going to cause us to change our statute of limitations? Should we even go back 10, 20 years and identify these individuals and can they be used in our new sex predators even though you can't charge, there is never going to be a conviction? Could other states use it in what they call other acts of crimes evidence even if the statute is past? These are a lot of questions and issues I think come up with technology.

MR. LAZER: I think that's a terrific list, and then the question would be so plugging that in I think into sort of a broader theme and saying now -- and again maybe either you would want to use those as particular questions in particular panels or they may naturally come up in certain ways as well. If you want to talk about privacy, let's run by this scenario where let's say you search for relatives of close hits, what have you. So I think that we may even want to work on a list of these scenarios in essence sort of as discussion starters.

MR. ASPLEN: I think the way that Norm phrased it is really important, and we don't often phrase it that way is what does the public think about it? We always think about it in the legal context, can we legally do it and is it a good investigative technique, but that phrasing I think is really, really important.

MR. REINSTEIN: When the steering committee decides who is going to be the moderator of this Arthur Miller type presentation, it's really important to put a lot of thought into who that person is because sometimes that person dominates the conversation, which isn't good. Sometimes the person just isn't very effective, and the whole thing falls on its face. I just did one in Arizona on capital punishment, and the moderator was fantastic, and I've done other ones in the past where it was just a bunch of people talking for five minutes and the person didn't generate any discussion.

MR. LAZER: It's a real skill to walk that line spurring discussion without dominating it.

MR. PLOURD: I did a panel with Woody and a couple of judges for a judges' conference. Actually there was a professional person that does it. He really doesn't know the subject matter. He is the facilitator, and that's the type of person you want to get because that would be a big problem to more or less have a keynote speaker.

MR. ASPLEN: There are a couple of people at Harvard who are pretty practiced at that.

MR. LAZER: This is sort of the particular way of teaching at the Kennedy School is around the case method. So the objective is very much along these lines, which is okay, rather than projecting their own views, they just develop a skill at sort of sensing the sort of key points that you have to push and the argument and getting people in essence saying it themselves or pushing the envelope themselves.

MR. REINSTEIN: Also to make sure that one of the people doesn't dominate the conversation other than the moderator.

MR. STRANGE: I think one of the things going forward is going to shift a little bit at least in the national scene to the states. In Texas at least we're going to be trying to increase funding for a variety of DNA things, and it's impossible to recreate at a state level this kind of function that you're talking about. I think it's very important that the product of this be somehow transferrable to the state legislators in the form of a presentation of evidence to them at the committee level to make decisions about the extent to which arrestees are entered into the database and that kind of thing. I think it's a great idea, and it's something that's going to be necessary in order to convince legislators one way or the other.

MR. LAZER: Ideally I think we would get some state legislators. There are a lot of state legislators out there, but ideally you would be influencing those particular policy debates at that level, and I think that has got to be seen as part of the impact of what we're doing here because that is where perhaps you might say most of the action is.

MR. GAINER: Can I simply reaffirm what Chris was mentioning about the unsolved cases. We heard Paul talk about the failed consequences of moving quickly just because of the backlog, but many of us -- and, of course, you heard Barry talk about it -- just think it's criminal that we have not done something with our unsolved cases. I haven't heard much of the police collection end of this law enforcement or criminal justice, so we need to have a portion of several of the panels at that end of the business.

MR. LAZER: Particularly focused around the backlog issue or just sort of the allocation?

MR. GAINER: For David I just hit a couple of them. I think it's the resource allocation from the police perspective and from the criminal justice perspective, whether it's a police lab or the police department, and it's the serendipity aspect that law enforcement can use in deciding how to collect evidence as well as how that ties into the nonsuspect cases. There are just tens of thousands of those nonsuspect cases that we're all shrugging our shoulders at, which means someone else is being victimized.

MS. ABRAMSON: It would seem to me it would start at the scene of the crime and what the officers do and where are you going to put your resources, et cetera.

MR. LAZER: I think that's essential again to talk about societal values of where we target our resources both in terms of just generally do we decide to pour more resources into this particular technology and then looking within say the criminal justice saying you have a particular size pie; how do you allocate it? Part of this is also a question of adaptation. If you have a new technology come along and say we will reallocate some of the money we have doing other stuff to doing this new thing and get more done with the same amount of resources, some organizations don't typically adapt very quickly because they're real institutional states and keep on doing things they way they have been done. I think here is an introspection of what are the organizational barriers to adapting to these new opportunities.

MR. GAINER: I guess in some respects it could be very simple. If there was $50 million to be suddenly allocated to the future of DNA, should we put the $50 million in straightening out post-convictions or should we put $50 million into the prevention of further crimes and working unsolved cases? I mean I just think that's interesting. Which one do I choose?

MS. BALLOU: If you could start a discussion by just giving the whole group you've just been given $50 million; how would you tackle this problem?

MR. PLOURD: Nobody gets a prescreening of it.

MS. BALLOU: Because I hate to see the hopeless situation you have all of these backlogged cases at your lab. Everybody is shrugging their shoulders. I don't know. It would be nice to have a discussion that people are thinking of some ideas as to where we can go and what we might do as a group.

MR. LAZER: I would agree with that, but I think there are two ways of framing these questions. Well, you get $50 million, but there is also a question you already have resources allocated to the criminal justice system, and do you reallocate some of what you have and you go to your state legislator and say rather than more of this, we want more DNA? It may not have necessarily been the case that particular law enforcement organizations are asking for that reallocation. So there are a lot of interesting ways of framing that discussion, and I think it really does get down to again sort of as a society do we want to allocate it toward looking at old cases or just new cases? Do we want to do it all, but then at the cost of something else because we don't have unlimited resources? That's why we need to have a discussion like that.

MS. ABRAMSON: I'm going to have to call this to a halt because we're half an hour late. So thank you, Professor Lazer, and I hope the people who do have ideas will communicate with you on them, and I think this has been fruitful.

I did announce the steering committee for a purpose other than to let you know who they are, and that is to encourage anyone else who wants to join them for this to do that. Chief Gainer. Anyone else?

MS. TURMAN: I will be happy to work with you on victim impact. I mean this process isn't driven by victims, but I've got some ideas.

MS. ABRAMSON: It's not closed. We have others that join and join for particular purposes, too. So thank you. We'll see you in November at a great seminar. You have a number of people at the law school that we've heard and worked with. So thank you.

MR. LAZER: I'm just going to put a few business cards so you can easily figure out my contact information, but you can track down anyone on the Internet anyhow. So thank you.

MS. ABRAMSON: Chris has reminded me what we failed to do yesterday was approve the printing of the CD training ROM that we saw. We all gave it great accolades, but we didn't have an official motion approving it and asking that it be appropriately distributed.

MR. THOMA: So moved.

MR. ASPLEN: I second.

MS. ABRAMSON: Is there any discussion?

MS. BASHINSKI: Just one comment. If it's possible to do something -- I'm sorry to say this -- to do something about that word, please do consider that.

MR. THOMA: In fact, Jan was offering to do the entire voice over.

MS. BASHINSKI: I'm just suggesting.

MS. ABRAMSON: If they can, they will make appropriate changes. If they can't, we'll go with whatever it is. Those in favor?

(Chorus of ayes.)

MS. ABRAMSON: Opposed? It's unanimously carried. Any other cleanup? Professor Butler.

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