MR. ASPLEN: Thank you. I can now bring that progress to a screeching halt. A couple of matters regarding some Commission business but also kind of where we hope to go with this particular meeting today and tomorrow, what our thought was in designing it the way we did, and also some looking towards the future, some plans for the future of the Commission.

First of all, I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce a few folks who are with us, who are in the audience, if you will, the public section.

Kim Herd is the Director of the DNA unit for the American Prosecutors Research Institute, which is the training and education affiliate, if you will, of the National District Attorneys Association. We appreciate her presence here, and input, as we go through this process.

Also, Clay Strange is with us. Clay is a prosecutor in Austin. Clay is the former Director of the DNA unit at APRI and is also a member of the crime scene working group for the Commission.

Mr. Frank Weathersbee is also here. He has come in. He's going to be speaking to us tomorrow and involved in that discussion. He's the State's Attorney from Anne Arundel County, the Annapolis area of Maryland.

I see Dr. Rau there.

Dr. Lee Colwell, you'll be hearing from later on today, is the Director of the Arkansas Criminal Justice Institute and will be speaking to us this afternoon about rural law enforcement issues.

We also have Mr. Ed Koch, who is here from -- as a representative from Mayor Schmoke's office in Baltimore, as Mayor Schmoke could not attend today.

Also, as I understand it, Phil Reilly will be here, albeit it a little bit late. He had a speaking engagement in Bethesda this morning.

And I know that Judge Reinstein is here.

I know that Mr. Scheck is here.

And other folks will be joining us shortly.

So, those introductions having been done, let me go to today's meeting and carry through to tomorrow.

The hope in -- the hope of the staff today is that we use the opportunity to listen to the working group reports and identify the issues that they're handling and to use the Commission to really make sure that the working groups are really traveling down the paths that the Commission wants them to go, if you will, and to use the Commission to provide some guidance to them, see if there are any issues that the Commission would like those working groups to address, and then to hopefully identify other issues and identify some other folks that we should bring into this process.

It's the nature of the structure that we've created here with the Commission and then the working groups that we have to revisit them with the full Commission occasionally and really make sure that the working groups are doing the work of the full Commission.

That being said, the fact that the laboratory funding issues working group report is not listed on the agenda, as I'm sure you all noticed, is not an indication of the extent to which we don't want input on that matter.

It is purely a typographical error on my part, and we will fit a discussion in on where that group is going with Paul today or tomorrow, depending upon how the schedule goes.

We've talked about, at our last meeting, some crucial issues, particularly as they pertain to the collection of database samples at our last meeting in -- we had a meeting at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, a meeting in Florida. So, we'll talk about that a little bit today, also.

What we really need to do, quite frankly, is -- believe it or not, we're halfway through this process, actually a little bit more than halfway through the process.

The charter for the Commission lists its termination date as this coming September. However, because the Commission took about six months to get up and running, by the time all the paperwork was done, we'll need to extend it to some extent.

I hope that you can all continue through for that extension, and we'll let you know when that has been done, but we really are about halfway through the process, and as such, we need to look towards wrapping the Commission's work up, which is really what we want to do today.

We want to define exactly where it is -- where we'd like to go with the different issues along those lines and wrapping things up.

The material that you've received in your packet of information before the meeting included, aside from the agenda and the biographies of some of the folks who are going to be speaking to us today and tomorrow, you also received a three-page recommendation which is the -- simply the written version of what the Commission approved at the last meeting.

Now, at the last meeting, we had talked about putting it in writing, sending it out to the commissioners, and having you folks send it back with your sign-off on it, but in speaking to Chief Justice Abrahamson about it, we thought that it would be more appropriate to take more time with it and bring it to the group, and our hope is that this language will be suitable to you.

The Chief Justice has gone over it several times, it's been through several different versions, and this is what she thought was appropriate to bring to the group, and as such, we'd like to work towards a resolution of that issue.

If we can get that signed off on today, we can forward it to the Attorney General directly. It will be forwarded to the Attorney General under cover memo by Jeremy Travis from the National Institute of Justice, as this is a National Institute of Justice-administered function.

Also included in your packet of information is the legal issues chapter of the post-conviction recommendations. Again, those recommendations were discussed and voted on at the last meeting, in the absence, however, of that chapter, and we said that we would get that to you.

Again, we thought it important not to do it by mail but to do it in a form where we took some time to discuss it if there were some thoughts on it, but our hope, having gone through and revised that chapter several times, is that will meet with approval, and again, we can get that matter off the Commission's list, if you will.

Let me say this, though. I think the way that that will necessarily have to proceed is that we approve the recommendations as they are and that the appropriate changes have made, also, aside from legal issues, the appropriate changes have been made that were suggested at the last meeting.

I believe that Ms. Wilson has passed out the full copy of the recommendations, all the chapters, you should have those also, to show that we did incorporate the changes that were listed by the different commissioners at the last meeting.

What we probably cannot do is produce the absolute final product and then bring it to the Commission for final approval in that form, for this reason.

Once it goes from the Commission, it then has to go through the editorial channels, the legal channels of NIJ, of the Department of Justice, actually has to go over to main Justice to be approved, and then sent back.

What we would be put in a position of, then, at that point, after it was in final form, was then to come back to the Commission and say, okay, do you approve this, and then, if there were changes to be made, quite frankly, it would be very difficult to do, because we would have to reprint and reapprove, etcetera, etcetera.

So, I think that, when we address that issue, we will ask the Commission to approve the recommendations as they are, with the understanding that NIJ will include an appendix of resources, a glossary of terms, appropriate illustrations, and appropriate, you know, shadow-boxing of different sections and things like that.

Again, it would be impractical for us to get it in its absolute final form and then bring it back to the Commission for approval.

So, we'll seek to do that today, also.

The other thing I'd like to say about this particular meeting is that I had an opportunity, along with Dr. Forman and the Director of the Office of Science and Technology, a couple of weeks ago, to go over to main Justice, to the Department of Justice, and speak to the --Attorney General Reno's chief privacy officer, whose name is John Bentivoglio, and we were there essentially to educate Mr. Bentivoglio on some of the issues, some of the privacy issues that the Commission was considering, and as we talked about it and we talked about the Attorney General's desire to develop policies and such on some of these issues, we were able to say, you know, the Commission is already starting to walk down that road, we already have these particular speakers scheduled for the upcoming meeting, would you like us to expedite our process in that regard, to which the response was yes, we would, and he went back to the Attorney General, and Attorney General Reno has now specifically requested of the Commission to expedite our discussion on those privacy-related issues and that we resolve -- or that we develop those recommendations by August 1st.

So, what we will need to do, beginning with today's meeting, is identify what issues need to be addressed, how we should address them, and then coordinate the efforts of the working group and the efforts of the Commission as a whole so that we can, in fact, accomplish that goal of providing the Attorney General some guidance on these issues before August 1st.

One of the ideas that we'll talk about a little bit later is the idea of a national symposium.

Now, that could not be done in that time frame, a national symposium on some of the legal issues. We couldn't get a symposium in place of the quality that we'd like before the August 1st deadline. However, needless to say, there are a number of other issues that can be addressed in that forum, and we'll talk a little bit later about that, when Professor Smith discusses the legal issues working group.

Does anyone have any questions at this point?

[No response.]

MR. ASPLEN: That having been said, I am actually a little bit early, so I will turn it back over to Dr. Crow.

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