COMMISSIONER ASPLEN: As always, thank you folks for being here. If you have been anywhere near a newspaper or a television set over the past two months, you can well imagine that the commission has been pretty busy.

DNA or the issue of DNA, particularly forensic DNA, has been in a lot of different places and, as such, the commission's resources have been tapped to a great extent.

Before I go any further, I am supposed to announce we do have a sign language interpreter here for anyone who may need it. However, in the absence of that at this point, that individual will, I believe, have a seat and rest until we get notified somebody does need her services.

As I said, it has been an extremely busy couple of months, which is a great thing. As I say, the commission's resources, be they previous reports that have come out, previous recommendations that we have issued, or simply individuals that we can put in touch with the press or with representatives in either Congress in Washington or any of the state legislatures, the commission continues to be of great benefit to the national discussion that is going on, be it post-conviction issues, be it investigative issues, et cetera, et cetera.

Today's agenda or this meeting's and today's and tomorrow's agenda is designed to do a couple of things. First of all, the next, I guess, session when I am done speaking will be to introduce to you the final version of the CD ROM that the crime scene working group has put together.

I will talk a little bit more about that later, but our hope is that you will like that; that you think it is well done; and we hope we can distribute that particular CD by mid-August to end of August to police departments across the country.

It has been a long, arduous task, and I will get into that more a little bit later. However, it is only one of two CDs that we will be doing. This is the introductory CD, the beginning level that we will be discussing today.

Between this meeting and the meeting in November, we will put together the second CD ROM which will be more for evidence technicians and collectors of DNA evidence.

We will also talk about the law enforcement summit that is the result of a commission recommendation that the Attorney General approved and is now scheduled for the 27th and 28th. A number of commissioners are actively involved in that particular program.

I would encourage any other commissioners who are not necessarily on the program to attend if you can, although we realize that we already ask a tremendous amount of you. It is not a commission meeting. It is a meeting for law enforcement policymakers, decision-makers, mostly chiefs and assistant chiefs and sheriffs to talk about just law enforcement specific DNA issues.

We will talk about that agenda a little bit more, and we will talk about some proposed recommendations or proposed issues that this commission still needs to consider and what form those considerations should take ultimately, be they the form of a formal recommendation to the AG or final report.

We will also talk about post-conviction issues in the context of Woody Clarke's program in San Diego, and then we will talk -- there has been a slight change in the agenda. At the end of today, we will talk about the victim advocacy pamphlet or I guess bulletin is a more appropriate work; and Paul is going to speak tomorrow during that slot. We will switch those around.

Tomorrow, we are going to have a session on behavioral genetics, and to be very clear as I tried to be with everyone who has called this week, especially from the press, the reason to have the discussion or the presentation on behavioral genetics is really to try to begin to identify what the issues are or, more appropriately, what they may be in the future, especially given the extent to which the time line on this commission is running out.

There won't be an attempt, I think, to delve into the substantive matters of any of the behavioral genetics issues, but to simply identify what the questions are going to be that we need to look out for in the future as they pertain to the criminal justice system and the application of behavioral genetics to that. We will have the final report and review of the research and development working group report.

During the working lunch tomorrow, we will have a representative from the Kennedy School of Government, David Lazer, who is the Kennedy School's, I guess, point of contact and, really, the person organizing what will be the commission's final meeting in November, and that final meeting will be both a final meeting of the commission and a national conference on DNA related issues, legal and privacy considerations in conjunction with the Kennedy School of Government.

That will be a forum event, if you are familiar with the way the Kennedy School does things, and David will be here tomorrow to talk about that.

After lunch tomorrow, we will have a session on, a presentation on racial profiling with the thought being that subsequent to that presentation on general racial profiling, we will have a discussion on the issues that arise in the a context of DNA databases and racial profiling and what those issues may be; again, not necessarily to answer any particular questions or to make any particular recommendations in that regard, but to identify what the issues may be for future consideration.

Then finally and very importantly, at the end of the day tomorrow, what we will be doing is talking about the commission's final report and what that will look like and what issues will be considered and what will be included in that.

It will, for many intents and purposes, be a compilation of what we have already done. The commission's process was designed very specifically that way.

Again, part of that was a request of the Attorney General at our first meeting, you may remember, where she asked us not to wait until the end of the commission process to give her our recommendations, but to do that periodically; but also so that we could essentially put together a final report in a relatively expeditious fashion, given the extent to which we have a, one way or the other, a change of administration at the end of this year.

We will also have to consider, and I will give you an outline -- Robin, have we already given them the proposed outline?

You have, among your materials, which I realize are quite voluminous at this point, a proposed outline for the commission's final report, and the last chapter that is written there addresses issues that need to be listed and identified that need to be continually discussed in some sort of public setting, what issues this commission did not address, perhaps why it didn't address it, and an eye towards the future to what needs to be addressed in the future.

One example would be what we already said about sample retention, recognizing that, that particular issue, while it should remain status quo right now, should be formally looked at in another five years, I think we said.

So, that is why we will have discussions like the behavioral genetics and stuff like that before that final session tomorrow, where we look towards what will be included in that final report. I guess that is all I have at this point in time.

COMMISSIONER ABRAHAMSON: Any questions or comments for Chris before we proceed?

MR. SCHECK: Yes, I have one.

While I think that the work of the commission has been, in many ways, terrific, I think we should wonder really why these issues dealing with behavioral genetics, racial profiling and some of the ethical issues, we are now first getting, you know, almost a preliminary kind of presentation the very last day.

You cannot do everything, but it does seem to me that this was a whole set of issues that we never really grappled with quite the way that maybe we should have and maybe we could not have just because of the composition of the committee; and maybe it is something the Justice Department should think harder about.

The problem is that all these issues, which I really think are vital, they always tend to get put on the back burner while we deal with more immediate bureaucratic concerns, and that is unfortunate because it is a commission on the future.

MR. THOMA: I can speak just to that. I agree with you, Barry, but particularly on the racial profiling issue, and I did get Professor Butler to speak tomorrow, we tried to get a speaker for our January meeting, but unfortunately it happened to be over Dr. King's birthday, so it was pretty difficult to do; but I agree with you with regard to a lot of the other issues that we have not touched on.

COMMISSIONER ASPLEN: Barry, do you include behavioral genetics in that? Are you talking primarily about the racial profiling issue?

MR. SCHECK: No.

I am actually even talking more about the behavioral genetics and the potential ethical issues and the privacy issues in general, which I think both of these questions implicate.

COMMISSIONER ASPLEN: One thing that I would encourage you to do is to pursue that particular issue, actually, either one of those issues or both of them for inclusion in the Kennedy School conference also so it is not excluded from that.

I have mentioned those issues to the Kennedy School very specifically, and I know that --

MR. SCHECK: I look from the very first day we had our planning meetings on this commission, some of the issues that, you know, I wanted to raise and thought we should have addressed more forcefully and was hoping the legal issues workshop would do, has to do with taking elimination samples from people in the course of investigations, issues of informed consent, what we are going to do with the elimination samples, possibilities of racial profiling problems in the collection of samples in those situations; and frankly, I will present something at the Kennedy School on that, but the situation actually has become a more serious one, in my judgment, while we have waited on that.

I mean I am looking at the estimates that our labs in New York have for the number of elimination samples they are going to be getting in burglary cases; as we expand the technology, just elimination samples in sexual assault cases, all of which are collected, all of which are now being stored in the data banks; and I will tell you now, we have a raging debate within our state about whether or not those ought to be searched, how they ought to be preserved, and they are very serious issues.

I had always hoped that we would hit those and come to terms with them sooner rather than later, but I don't mean this in a mean spirited way because I think the work of the commission has been terrific.

I just want to point out it always seems to happen that way, doesn't it, that people that are working every day in the labs, in the trenches, on the streets, they have concerns, and I appreciate them, and they are serious concerns: How I am going to get money? Can we deal with the backlog? What we are going to do about changing techniques?

These are all important questions. I am not saying they were not, but our charge was to look to the future, and I think these issues are not just in the future, they are now. It is just an observation.

COMMISSIONER ABRAHAMSON: And a good one, and Chapter 8 is going to be identification of issues requiring further and continued review, and by the time we do those, there will be a new set of issues for the future, et cetera. So, I think those are good ones, and I hope you jot them down so we can deal with them.

Any other comments or statements?

(No response.)

COMMISSIONER ABRAHAMSON: We will go to our next item, which is the crime scene investigation working group report.

Chief Gainer?

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