DR. SELAVKA: Chris told me that you all expected somebody outstanding in their field on this one, so thank you. I also, because I knew I'd have an audience of attorneys, I better put a disclaimer up here. By the time I was done disclaiming I didn't know whose opinions, including my own, whether these are them. But you have heard others disclaimers before so they are of little use probably.

What I'm here to do is to give what I'll call a hit-and-run. You have had a long discussion that I wasn't privy to and didn't really know about until I got here today so I'm bringing you what I guess would be considered a completely unbiased opinion, unweighed by any previous decisions made by this august body.

I'm coming to you from the State perspective and a little bit on the national basis just because us Staties (sic) tend to talk to each other. I'm going to take you through three discussion points and then leave, and then tomorrow you have at least an hour on the agenda to talk about this and I'm sure it will give you some things to think about. Hopefully you won't hate me for doing it. I will talk you through the four kinds of DNA backlogs that there are, prioritization concepts for them, and then some issues, strategies, and needs related to them.

By way of background, I did come from New York prior to this. I oversaw the accreditation effort there. There is a mandatory accreditation requirement in New York State. I oversaw it with Barry and a number of other people. The Commission that instituted the accreditation also implemented the DNA databank and had to manage the offender collection there in New York.

Since then I have gone to Massachusetts to the State Police crime laboratory and when I walked through those $30,000 stainless steel doors I was very surprised to find out that we not only had the problems that New York had in their collections, but more in addition.

Our law has a checkered past. We are the 47th State to have a DNA databank law and the first one to have it enjoined. It was enjoined almost at the point of inception in that we didn't promulgate rules and regs for governing the collection process so we were immediately enjoined from doing collections after the first set.

We put up, we promulgated some emergency rules right after I got there. We got unenjoined. We did a collection of about 2,000 samples and then we got enjoined again on a Fourth Amendment petition from four inmates sponsored by the ACLU.

Essentially a single judge, Judge Borenstein (phonetic), has decided that recidivism as a concept does not function well in Massachusetts. He has said essentially that there is no reason to pull these convicted offenders in and take their blood. That there is no reason to believe that they are any more likely to commit future offenses of the same type for which they have already been convicted and sentenced than you or I.

We have filed an interlocutory appeal with a single judge. Seven weeks ago we had oral arguments. No decision has been rendered. The AG assures me that that is a bad sign. So we have appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court, a petition to them to take the case directly rather than taking it through Appellate. And if that looks promising, all things considered we should have something, oral arguments in front of the Supreme Judicial Court sometime in January or February. Which effectively enjoins my database for the rest of the fiscal year in Massachusetts.

That is, of course, the first shot across the front of the ship. We will see what happens when the dynamite goes off at the end.

Now with respect to what I'm here to do for you today, I want to take you through four types of backlogs. You may not have considered all of them, so I just want to set the ground rules.

There are convicted offender samples which have been collected. There are those which are owed. There is new casework received by laboratories. And then there are old cases that laboratories either have on hand or in their heads somewhere with detectives or DAs. That we will call cold cases.

I won't address postconviction testing, you've done that already.

Essentially, I'll use anecdotal information, because that's really all we have, from a few states that have some data about which I'm familiar. New York State's backlog of collected samples is around 7,000 with 3500 owed, and once things are up and running New York State will garner about 4,000 samples more per year.

Massachusetts has collected 2500 samples, is owed 11,500 in retrospective collections. Once we're done we should have about 1500 new samples per year coming into the system.

On the National basis, talking with Steve Misgoda (phonetic) of the FBI, about 250,000 samples have been tested from convicted offenders collected throughout the United States for RFLP. If you add those to the 350,000 backlog for RFLP, all of them need to be tested for STRs.

So essentially you have 600,000 samples that have been collected in the U.S. Backlog that need STR testing. You also have about a million samples, anecdotally speaking, that are owed to the system of convicted offender collections.

In our best estimate at this time, if the laws didn't change anywhere, would be about 100,000 new cases submitted for convicted offenders per year that would require testing.

I should also point out that somewhere, did you receive a handout of my presentation slides? Good, so you don't have to take too many notes. It's been a long time since I was a student.

COMMISSIONER DAVIS: What do you mean by owed?

MR. SELAVKA: Owed means they are convicted offenders who are index offenders and who owe the system a blood or a buccal swab.

MADAM CHAIRMAN ABRAHAMSON: So it hasn't been collected yet.

MR. SELAVKA: They have not been collected, that's correct.

As far as casework goes now the numbers become a bit more anecdotal even in the convicted offenders samples. Essentially about 23,000 samples of casework forensic DNA typing were done in the United States in 1998. About 6,000 backlogged case samples remain according to Steve Misgoda.

We really don't have a feel for how many in the future we should expect. I'm estimating, again based on anecdotal information, that the number of cases received by laboratories today and those that we may receive by 2001 might triple, based on investigators greater use of technology and our greater sensitivity.

Go ahead, Jan.

COMMISSIONER BASHINSKI: Is that 22,000 cases or 22,000 samples?

MR. SELAVKA: I believe they are samples tested.

COMMISSIONER BASHINSKI: So maybe 1/5th as many cases.

MR. SELAVKA: Let me take that back. These are samples that could go in CODIS so they are cases. I apologize.

COMMISSIONER FERRARA: You're talking about casework DNA samples.

MR. SELAVKA: No, these are cases, because these are CODIS ready cases if you will. This is from the summer survey for CODIS.

COMMISSIONER BASHINSKI: Unsolved case profiles is what you're talking about.

MR. SELAVKA: Casing that could be submitted to CODIS.

COMMISSIONER FERRARA: So it would have to be cases because we ran that many samples in Virginia alone last year.

MR. SELAVKA: Yes, sir. I apologize. So those are cases.

What we don't know even more so than this and unexplored is how many cold cases are testable. We don't really have a good sense at the National level, but we know there are probably a lot of cases.

We don't really know what the impact of the DNA Advisory Board's recommendations are going to be on the recruitment of scientists, retention of those scientists, and productivity in the laboratories. We're probably going to bog down our laboratories in meeting the new higher quality standards. And the testing technologies we anticipated as you have heard about already will have an impact on our ability to do testing and casework and databanks.

When it comes to laboratorians, if we take the world view and sort of talk with the FBI about this issue, what would be the future of the number of samples that could present themselves to CODIS for testing and entry.

If we look at all felonies in the United States, it could be as much as around a million a year that could be presented to the system for testing and incorporation. If we look at all the rest, it would be around one and a half million.

The FBI is planning on CODIS being able to take an about a million convicted offenders a year. That way, if we are anywhere less than that we should have sufficient server-client capacity if you will.

Casework samples we don't have good numbers of suspect and no suspect cases. Some are survey anecdotes. But we do suspect if we tested all possible cases the number of cases that could be submitted to or run against CODIS could equal one and a half million a year.

Again, big load. They're planning on that at the FBI in terms of their client-servers architecture.

When it comes to prioritization, I want to set aside some apparent benefits and then sort of address the reality and take you through some examples. These again are my opinions and raised for discussion points and not as what you should do. You decide.

But the apparent benefits of prioritization include an increased potential efficacy of the tests that are run giving reasonable results and probative value to cases sooner than later. And it is good policy and looks good. It makes you feel good when you prioritize. It makes you feel like your doing something positive.

The reality is I think there are some cost benefit questions that have to be addressed. When you try to prioritize case work I think the reality is local politics and policies will always outweigh the National -- if they're anything less than standards, they will be outweighed by the local reality.

And because of that, there is really no national policy that's likely to overlay on top of the regional, local, municipal realities that already exist, of which prosecutor gets served first, which kind of high-profile case gets run over others. There will always be jurisdictional and political reasons why things get tested.

There are also some efforts underway to provide some funding and resources otherwise to the effort for casework prioritization and testing and that includes the DNA laboratory improvement program grant. They are now in phase four of a planned five year, five phase program. And also the state identification systems grants giving somewhere around $200,000 a year to most states in order to provide some infrastructure for testing for DNA as well as to other components of databasing.

Let's look at where the offenders are physically. The ones who we care about the most are those who are basically sentenced to time served, those who are on probation and parole, those in jails, and those in prisons.

The people that owe samples, as I have talked to people in other states and looked at my own situation, are those who are sentenced to time served. Almost all of them owe me samples. I don't have a lot of them. Probationer and parolees owe a lot of samples and people sentenced to jail terms owe me a lots of samples.

The places where I have been able to get my samples are in prisons, sort of descending order from there. Jail inmates, parolees and probationers. So the larger number of collections have come from prisons.

Our liability I would argue though, comes with the following considerations. The people sentenced to time served are a huge liability because they are under no supervision at all. Those on probation or parole are under moderate supervision, and those in jails are under moderate supervision as well.

You could look at liability at another way, too, from a social aspect. That is sexual predators might be seen as providing us with the highest liability in terms of collection. Those involved with crossover crimes in the younger part of their career could be our greatest liability.

When you add all these things together I think we have to ask the question how can prioritization alleviate this liability. That's really what prioritization is about.

You can imagine some schemes for doing prioritization. One could be a simple time basis. The first person out to hit the streets should be the first collected and then go backwards to the last one out. Maybe we should look at their crimes in the likelihood of recidivism for those crimes and use that to govern how we collect. Perhaps we should look at the likelihood of a person committing a certain kind of offense and leaving biological samples behind.

All of these are strategies that could be used. The reality is we will still end up with National inconsistencies unless you can come up with a standard. We also are missing some very important data at the local and state level to allow us to do some of the prioritization schemes that we can imagine.

And the time that you would spend and the errors inherent in doing any selection of samples for people out of this process are going to have significant costs and perhaps a cost not just in monetary terms but programmatic.

These are thorny issues that we have to deal with. I have a proposed strategy in order to enhance CODIS' effectiveness significantly. If we remember the goal, and that is, I think, to rapidly populate CODIS with as many profiles as possible, especially for convicted offenders, but also in the case of trying to minimize the cost and errors involved in that rapid population and create a firm infrastructure for offender collections and casework efforts.

One way we could do this is with collected samples, rapidly test all of them using STR and commercial laboratories with essentially no prioritization. If we can do them quickly prioritization becomes immaterial.

On the other hand, for samples we are owed from convicted offenders, perhaps we should prioritize them on the amount of supervision on the audience being collected from. Those who already hit the street, get theirs first. Those under limited or short term supervision, get theirs next. And finally get those in prison.

We do need a robust mechanism to make this happen, and that's the last point I'll argue. What exactly is a robust method. If you haven't lived in the process of collecting these things, I'll take you through what it means to me.

First of all, there are three key points. We need to identify a person as early as possible that they owe a blood or a DNA sample. We have to somehow get people to take ownership of the collection process. And finally, we have to do a double identification and verification that that is the right person we collected from and they were supposed to have a collection because they were an index offender.

Who identifies these people? Well, it could be identified by district attorneys, judges, and clerks of the court. Jail administrators and wardens can identify these people. Probation directors and parole administrators also could be the identifiers. You notice the laboratory is not really involved in the early identification of these offenders. We are not there yet.

We need some tools for this identification to occur. There is a missing infrastructure for information management. MIS stands for Management Information Systems.

Clerks of the court generally have an automated process by which they put in the results of the case. Criminal history databases are built on that data. Many times, New York State and Massachusetts are two examples, I've talked to other states, too, the clerks don't always put it in there. It's not always accurate.

Sex offender registries in some states are linked to the DNA databank. That could be a missing link in some states.

Correctional management systems. When a person is received by a correctional institution they're supposed to have some data of identity, the crime for which they're convicted and sentenced, and that could trigger the blood draw request.

The DAs have information systems available to them to track cases and look at sentences. And then finally, DNA databank administrators.

None of these databanks in most states are linked. All of them contain somewhat different information.

In order to do the best job we need to link them. And that is a piece where perhaps you could specify or recommended some piloting, pilot projects or funding to try to assist in that.

Also, because of the turnover of personnel involved in the collection process and the identification process there is a constant retraining need. In New York, for example, we have a person set aside at the policy analyst level, the supervisor level, who does nothing but goes out and trains people how to do the collection properly and tries to get them exciting about doing it.

So it usually takes slides. I've got three of her slides here. She goes out to the correctional facilities and tries to get them excited about the fact that for once they can try to keep future crimes from happening as opposed to taking care of people who are already convicted of crimes. Tries to get them excited about giving these criminals, these sex offenders a place to live, a spacious home with many doors and a large scenic fenced in yard and something nice to wear such as this forest green all cotton two-piece ensemble with a matching jacket.

It seems trivial, but someone has to do it. The people turn over routinely enough we have to make it happen. That takes money. New York State happens to use Burn funds for that. Not every state has that kind of availability of funding.

When we talk about ownership of the collection process, the laws in most states do not specify who gets to go get that blood. Most of these look like unfunded mandates to the locals. And in many cases, frankly, they are.

Most of the efforts are poorly coordinated. Florida has one of the best systems, Virginia is doing a good job now, California is coming along, Illinois is doing a good job, but many of the others states, especially us late arrivers, don't have any procedures in place and are very poorly coordinated.

In many states it revolves around a person who acts like a point of light to get it done. In New York City state Jim O'Connell, if this guy got hit by a truck New York State's program would be in deep trouble. He essentially makes the whole division of correctional services program of collection happen.

The prisons have some infrastructure available to them already, such as correctional health care facilities and contracts, department of health and medical examiner health, hospitals that can do collections. They even have contractors. Contractors provide you with responsiveness, with competitiveness, so a good price and good response, good service, if you will. They often lower the cost overall of collecting these samples.

In Florida they've now got a contract to do collections at the courthouse for those who would be sentenced to time served, they can collect them before they hit the street. It's good thinking by Florida. They have a program set up for it. They have set aside money in their State budget. They are getting it done. Many other states, my past and current included, are not in that situation.

It's a bit thornier, it ties people in knots at the local level for probation and parole. The reason for this is there is really no health care structure for probation and parole. They're law enforcement orphans. They don't have the things that jail administrators have or prisons have.

We've really got them poorly designed for the task of doing collections. They have a lot of administrative burdens, they are responsible for a wide distribution of services, and they have very limited access to funding. They're usually very overworked and very underfunded. That is a place where we could use some money.

On the third essential element of doing early identification is taking a double identification and verification step. We have to do this. We have to make sure that if there is a hit against CODIS we have a person in the databank for which the candidate match is forwarded that was supposed to be there. We have to make sure the finger or thumbprint that was collected was verified against AFIS. We have to make sure the sentenced offense is an index offense in that State, and that they were sentenced after the time that the databank law went into effect. All of that is very important.

In New York State we continue to have problems with people. New York State's law doesn't allow you to collect from people who are convicted of attempted anything. If you rape someone, you're sentenced and convicted for rape, we get your blood, convicted and sentenced for attempted rape, we don't get your blood. But the jailers love to get blood, so they get them on attempts anyway.

Them we figure out, whoops, that's not the right guy, we have to do an administrative removal process and get that blood out of there.

We have some people who know in localities, the jailer knows that this guy's a dirty scumbag. And even if he is not convicted of an index offense, he'll collect him anyway because he knows he is going to do something down the road. Well, that's great, but it increases the cost to the system.

We are on the road and we want to do the right thing but we've got to have all the pieces of this puzzle in the right place at the right time.

Again the goal, rapidly populate CODIS, minimize the cost and errors and create a firm infrastructure.

There is money to do this with. I would argue again that I think the samples we have on hand, let's get them done quickly and populate CODIS. The other ones, let's prioritize and do a good job with them.

Overall a successful database again, you know this but just to remind you, it identifies the right person and exonerates the innocent. Gives us the ability to link cases and ultimately saves a lot of lives. That's why we are doing all this. That's why you're here.

You're going to cause a lot of people to think outside the box. What you do here is very important. It impacts everybody, laboratories and those that collect blood for CODIS especially.

I wanted to make sure I acknowledge people who helped me with this. That includes people in New York, people in Florida, and my lab for letting me be here.

Before I slide out I do have a little bit of time for questions to help you with anything I can then I will be leaving and the dust will settle later.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: First, on the samples owed, are you telling us by intuition, are you telling us by some data that those are mostly coming from people that are on parole, probation, time served, people on some form of supervised release in the community?

MR. SELAVKA: Anecdotally from the states are whom I most discussed, I'm most familiar. That's our data. Prisons are not a problem. Prisoners we are getting.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: So in other words, it's the people that are on the street that could commit crimes which we could actually type with the database that we have to capacity to get and type at this point.

MR. SELAVKA: That is exactly the point. We want to get the ones under the least supervision first because they are the ones that can commit more crimes now and they are the ones whom we've had the most problems because of missing infrastructure elements.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: Do you have any sense whatsoever of how many old unsolved cases there are that can be typeable.

MR. SELAVKA: There is a lot more hand waving on the number of cases for which we don't really know. I can only tell you, you know well in New York we tried to get that number. It's very hard to get at.

COMMISSIONER CLARKE: Doctor, on the convicted offender strategy, aren't those people who are on the streets who have done time served, aren't they going to be actually the most difficult to find and the costliest to obtain samples from as opposed to somebody who is under some type of supervision or in custody.

MR. SELAVKA: I think the first part of your statement is absolutely correct. They would be the ones that are most important to get. I don't think they're the most difficult, if we use Florida's very new example of how to go about this.

What we need is for the conditions of sentence, this basically means we have to work with district attorneys, clerks of the court, and judges. Work with them in order to make it a condition of sentence even when the sentence is time served, that they provide that blood prior to hitting the street.

COMMISSIONER REINSTEIN: I agree if there is a sentencing order they can make them do anything. But I thought you were talking about capturing samples of people who were already on the street and going back to get those old ones that have been released in the last several years.

MR. SELAVKA: I look at that question somewhat pragmatically. If we believe in recidivism we will see them again. And what we can do is try to create the traps to hold the person in a stranglehold until you get the blood the next time at the very worse. And at the best, send letters to the home of record and do the best to find these people. Notify them of their obligation to provide the blood.

In some jurisdictions we've had district attorneys who actually chase this problem down. They know where the guy lives and they get a bench warrant to go get it.

Again, this is a local problem. It's kind of like politics. It really comes down to an individual district attorney or assistant district attorney believing in the program and making it work.

Everything we do at the Federal level is about providing funding for them to do it. The states ultimately have to work with the localities to make it happen.

COMMISSIONER SMITH: Are all these backlogs blood backlogs or are some of these systems designed to do swabs?

MR. SELAVKA: There are definitely states that are doing buccal swabs. But I talk blood because that's the world I live in, but I believe more than equal states are moving to buccal swabs.

COMMISSIONER SMITH: This may seem tangential, but if in fact probation and parole agents have no contact with the people who are stated on probation or parole, then I'm not sure that the most important thing to do is to collect blood samples. It seems to me the most important thing in jurisdiction like that is to see to it that some contact is achieved. And if some contact were achieved, and it weren't blood we were trying to get, then maybe the kind of contact ought to include a brief swipe at the cheek I would think.

The idea that people have no contact at all with their probationer or parole is in itself something really to worry about.

MR. SELAVKA: I hate to say this, but what I found in my two years experience in New York, and I'm sure I'm going to find in Massachusetts when I get unenjoined, the DNA databank is acting like a quality control measure for the entire system of criminal justice.

We are findings database errors in AFIS, we are finding criminal history errors, we are finding unreported crimes and sentences, and we are finding everything through the provisions of DNA samples. It's horrible, but it's reality.

COMMISSIONER BASHINSKI: You were talking about the unfunded mandate. Our estimates are with the new changes in our new databank law that it's going to cost -- these are blood draws -- about a million dollars to draw the samples, that is the first year, of the people that we don't have that we are supposed to have. And the legislature passed a law without any money in it. And it's an unfunded local mandate which it's supposed to come out of the department of justice's budget.

MADAM CHAIRMAN ABRAHAMSON: Is that California's department of justice?

COMMISSIONER BASHINSKI: Yes. Not Massachusetts.

The other issue is that we have I'd say about 25 percent of our sex offenders, they're registered sex offenders, no one knows where they are and they are supposed to register every year.

MR. SELAVKA: Yes, ma'am. That is why let's get our blood early on in the program and use that to find the sex offenders the next time around.

MADAM CHAIRMAN ABRAHAMSON: One of the issues before the Commission is whether we should propose that this backlog of samples collected should be put into CODIS and that we should put the money in to get this backlog into CODIS.

And the question that is arising is whether there are in these samples, whether you can prioritize them so that you get the ones that are on the street first or the ones going to be released first, et cetera.

Do you have any views on that versus putting the money into collecting samples now and then testing?

MR. SELAVKA: Yes, ma'am. I would think if the money is available, outside testing goes quickly enough that prioritization becomes moot. In the impact that those samples being populated into CODIS would have, it would be very quick compared to the number of cases that need testing.

I think we will save money in the long run doing the previously selected offenders' samples. Just test them. Don't even brother trying to prioritize them.

There are a lot of missing data links, there's a lot of errors you can make. On the other hand, prioritizing the cases that need to have testing done in a way that tries to get those that will have the greatest probative value most quickly and challenge the database that you now populated with the other money and take the power of the database forward.

I think a little of both. Don't prioritize the collected samples, prioritize the owed samples, and definitely prioritize casework samples.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: Did you just say prioritize everything? What are you going to do about the owed samples of the people on the street?

MR. SELAVKA: If the people who are on the street and under no supervision at all, you can do the best you can. But the money may better be spent in jails and people on probation and parole. If they are sentenced to time served, we could say they're the priority, but the amount of money it will take to get them may outweigh the benefit.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: But people -- I guess I'm just confused about this. Why is it that you can't -- you have collected samples from people that are on probation and parole, right, and those were the first ones we typed in New York; true?

MR. SELAVKA: Yes.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: And when we asked them, they said oh, you can't do that but then you made them do it. True?

MR. SELAVKA: Yes.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: So it's not like you can't do it, it's just that somebody, your point of light or whoever it is in a particular State, makes you do it.

MR. SELAVKA: Let me say how I did it, maybe that would be helpful. Five summer interns. We had to go through it by hand on criminal history records. By hand. So most states will not have this availability and make it happen quickly.

If you have a blood sample in the freezer, I'm arguing test it. Don't bother prioritizing, test it. For those that are uncollected, prioritize them and go after the ones that you know are the low-hanging fruit. Get them first. Everybody gets five summer interns.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: How much do five summer interns cost?

MR. SELAVKA: Zero. They are unpaid.

DIRECTOR ASPLEN: Were those subsequently tested? How long did it take to test those that you prioritized?

MR. SELAVKA: It's still ongoing.

DIRECTOR ASPLEN: So that wasn't a scenario where we are looking at the cost benefit analysis of testing them immediately like we are in a context of outsourcing. So under that context, we'd still be in that process. With the five interns.

MR. SELAVKA: As I was saying before about the local overlay, this is Federal money being used for out-testing and it's RFLP, it's not a STR model, and it took a while. I would suppose if we had done the prioritization and followed up with STR testing we would have been done by now.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: We couldn't use the money that we wanted to use to do STR testing, we had to use RFLP testing.

MR. SELAVKA: I'm not even going to touch that. I love the NIJ.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: I'm not an administrator.

COMMISSIONER FERRARA: Carl, these individuals who owe samples, now the statutes across this country indicate that upon conviction a sample has to be taken, correct? And that is how most of them are phrased.

MR. SELAVKA: New York City says the sentenced offender shall provide. It doesn't say who is going to collect it, it doesn't say ask him, it just says he shall.

COMMISSIONER FERRARA: So what you're saying is the difficulty is with the way the statute is written.

MR. SELAVKA: Yes, sir.

COMMISSIONER FERRARA: And carried out. Not a funding issue necessarily.

COMMISSIONER SCHECK: It doesn't say who should collect it, you mean?

COMMISSIONER FERRARA: The law is inadequate in that it doesn't address one, that the sample should be taken upon conviction, and that who should do it. So the issue is the inadequacy of laws and the collection of samples in at least 49 states because we don't have it in Virginia. It can be done and it can be done right.

MR. SELAVKA: I agree.

COMMISSIONER FERRARA: I don't think it's a funding issue. I think our working group will get into it tomorrow and discover that most of the problem is that the officials in the states are not carrying out their duties, neither the jails or the prison officials. If eventually you shouldn't have anyone on probation or parole who owes a sample. They shouldn't have a sample when they got convicted or sentenced. And once you've done all those individuals you get caught up, you don't have a problem trying to track people down around the street.

COMMISSIONER THOMA: But, Paul, at the very origin what Jan was referring to with RAB1332 that just passed, there is no funding of it. With regard to the actual collection, it doesn't really matter whether it says exactly who should collect it or not. They are not funding whoever could do that collection.

COMMISSIONER FERRARA: No one got funded in Virginia. I collected 175,000 samples in corrections, no one has received one cent. A sample of blood is taken normally upon medical examination when a person goes to a jail or goes to correction. A second tube is drawn at no extra cost and a sample is in the databank. 175,000 samples have been collected without one cent of money for the collection.

So I don't see that money is an excuse. It's a problem of the statute and the way it's written and enforced and carried out.

DIRECTOR ASPLEN: Hold on. We are going to have a entire discussion tomorrow on sample collection, we're going to have another presentation on sample collections, the road blocks to that and then we will discuss it more in the context with our database discussion. That's exactly why we did this so we would engender this kind of discussion, but I need to let Carl go because he literally has to catch a plane.

So if we could save the rest of this discussion until tomorrow I would call back the postconviction folks.

COMMISSIONER ABRAHAMSON: Let's thank Carl.

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