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P R O C E E D I N G S
Working Lunch [1:20 p.m.] DIRECTOR ASPLEN: If I could have your attention, we're now in the working portion of the lunch and we have time later on this afternoon, I hope David is here, because as you can see from his comments already this morning, I think it's crucial to what we're doing. David has also officially joined the working group recently and is already a tremendous resource in that regard. He is currently the crime laboratory analyst supervisor in the Department of Law Enforcement at Tallahassee, supervises the State of Florida's DNA investigation database and currently serves as the State of Florida's representative on the CODIS committee. He is also a member of the DNA advisory board. It's fair to state that Florida is widely recognized as the most successful DNA database in the entire country and that is largely, in part, due to Dave's efforts. His hard work and, more importantly, I think his vision has gone towards how to constantly improve their system. MR. COFFMAN: Thank you. I want to thank the Commission for allowing me to talk about the program there in the FTLE, and I put at the bottom there James T. Moore. He is our Commissioner and he's been the Commissioner for the last 11 years, and he deserves so much of the credit, because I've talked to my colleagues in other states and other agencies and if you don't have the support of the guy in the big office, wearing the suit, you're not going to go very far. So we couldn't have done what we did without the Commissioner.
I'm just going to give you a quick overview of what we're doing in the Florida. We're not to the point of all felons yet, but kind of give you a brief overview of what we've done, the successes we've had, and since this is the future of DNA evidence, I'm going to tell you some things that we haven't implemented yet, but things that we're looking at, so you can see where we're trying to gather some information and data. We began collecting from sexual assault and lewd and lascivious acts back in 19 -- our law was passed in 1989. We began collections in 1990. In 1993, we added murder and attempted murder, and in 1995, we added aggravated battery, home invasion robbery, and carjacking. Now, the aggravated battery, the reason we added that is, in our state, now, this is purely in our state, I'm not saying this happens everywhere, but that is a very common plea bargain in our state for someone who is charged with sexual assault. What happened was we take a lot of input from the investigators out in the field and they said, look, we think this guy is involved in this sexual assault, is he in your database, and I go, well, no, he isn't. And they go, but he was charged with sexual assault three times in the last five years, and we pull his criminal history and, sure enough, he is convicted of aggravated battery. So that's why we added aggravated battery. We called about 20 state attorney offices of the 67 and they said, yes, that was true, that that was a common plea bargain in those type of cases. So we added aggravated battery Our hits pretty much have doubled by that addition of one law. It's really amazing. I'm not saying that aggravated battery in your state is going to yield the same results, so keep that in mind. Home invasion is pretty obvious and carjacking, we have a very strong psychological profiling unit, they don't like to be called profilers because of the TV show, but actually our profiler in Tallahassee looks a lot like the woman on the TV show. But anyway, she insisted she wanted carjacking on there and she said the reason was that's a confrontational crime. If they wanted a car, they'd go steal a car. They picked a car with someone in it. So that's why she wanted that added. We have so few of them, it wasn't really an issue to include it. So we went ahead and included that, also. Currently, when I left my office, we had 167 hits since we began, and that's statewide. So that includes the local hits they made with CODIS and the state, and some Federal. We have had over 287 investigations aided and I always tell people the reason that number is different is one of our hits ended up linking 12 investigations. So that number is going to be bigger. And I'm not always informed of how many others they linked to it, so I put the plus at the end of it. Also, we're pretty proud of this, a few years ago, in 1997, October 1st, 1997, the statute of limitations on sexual assault was lifted in Florida. There are certain stipulations, such as you have to have reported the crime within 72 hours and things like that, but basically we have solved approximately four sexual assaults and one of them was literally a week after the statute of limitations ran out, and the individual just got out of prison. So there were other groups pushing for this, also, but this seemed to be just what it took to put it over the edge, and so they did get rid of the statute of limitations for sexual assault, which we're really pleased about, because it's very frustrating to know that someone is out of prison and you've linked them to a sexual assault that they committed within the first month the last time they got out of prison, and there is not a thing you can do about it. I thought I'd give you a breakdown of the hits by year, because as your database grows, your hits are going to grow, and I think this shows it. We had three hits in 1992, five in '93, four in '94, then 19 in '95, that's when we added aggravated battery, '96 we had 32, '97 we had 30 -- you'll see another slide. We had a law that went retroactive, and so we went from getting about 6,000 blood samples a year to we got 28,000 that year. So collection efforts hampered our analysis efforts and it's important to realize that you have to collect and analyze the samples to solve crimes. Just collecting them and not analyzing them doesn't do anything. We had 63 in 1998 and so far this year we've had ten. Now, actually, our hits have dropped off a little bit this year, mainly because we're converting to STR and we have so many people in training, not as many cases are currently being worked, but we expect that to change by next year. Here's just some -- the first correlation are kind of looking at the data I did when we started making hits was I checked to see what the crimes that we were matching, what the offenders -- why we had their blood in the first place, what was the collection crime that put them in our database. As you can see, for sexual assaults, it kind of goes down to the most common collection crime was a sexual assault, but aggravated battery was fairly high, also. Lewd and lascivious, homicide and home invasion. Homicide is pretty much across the board, oddly enough. We have actually assisted in the homicide case where the individual was in prison for homicide, but that's mainly due to the fact that they usually keep them in prison when they're convicted of a homicide. So it is a deterrent. Burglary -- and keep in mind, this shows that we can have burglaries across the board with all the different crimes. However, that number is not as large as it would be. If you look at the British system, they have a lot more burglaries that they're solving, but the fact remains that our crime labs can't possibly work all the burglaries that are out there right now. We're trying to get to that point. We don't want to give up and say you're never going to be able to work all the cases that need DNA, I think we should always be aspiring to that, but this shows the correlation that just a few burglaries, for whatever reason, were analyzed in our lab, just to demonstrate that. Now, then what I did is I looked at the criminal history of these individuals that we matched the sexual assaults and homicides and I wanted to see what their prior criminal history was. Eleven percent had a prior firearms possession. By the way, when I looked through all these criminal histories, there seemed to be about five or six major crimes that they all had. There weren't really that many unusual ones intermingled in there, so I put the top five or six. Also, you mathematicians out there that are good at adding, this does not add up to 100 percent, because some of them have all of them, all of them in their criminal history, so it does that up to more than 100 percent. Thirty percent had a prior drug charge, 34 percent had a prior grand theft charge, 34 percent had a prior robbery charge, and 52 percent had a prior burglary. So there is that burglary connection again. Interestingly enough, with the six crimes that we collect for, only 18 percent have only those types of crimes in their criminal history. So we're missing a lot of people. Now, I was -- at the PERMEGA meeting, I presented this data and I was asked a very interesting question, and I proceeded to work with our Department of Corrections and it's taken me a year -- no -- about five or six months to get the results from them. But someone -- I was asked have you compared how many people are in the prison system for burglary, how many have prior violent offenses that we collect for, and, in fact, some of the data I just downloaded today from my e-mail. They finally got some information back to us. Fourteen percent of the people in our probation and in our prison right now for burglary have had a prior homicide in their criminal history. Nine percent of the convicted burglars have had a prior sexual assault. Thirteen percent have had a prior aggravated battery. Remember, in my state I include that because that sometimes translates into something else. Nine percent had prior lewd acts. So that gives about 45 percent total, people in prison for burglary had these other offenses, which isn't that far off in the 52 percent I'm seeing with the crimes that we're connecting to sexual assaults and homicides. So there does seem to be a correlation that they just don't do one type of crime. There is a propensity to do others. Currently, we're collecting about 600 samples a month. Total samples collect thus far is 56,000 and we are current with DNA analysis. We have a DNA result of some sort on every offender now. We're converting to STR, so our STR backlog is about 53,000, but we have some DNA result on all these people. I think we were caught up for about three months before the correlations were picked, and then an instant backlog. Now, future plans for expanding the database collections. We want to add burglary next legislative session. We think we have the numbers to justify that. Additionally, if we add the burglaries, our law makes it to where you go retroactive. We'll get 42,000 samples the first year along, just burglaries. That's not include the seven to 8,000 we're already getting. Thereafter, there's about 16,000 a year that occur thereafter. Then we want to move to all felons. We would get -- if we did all felons today, we'd get 150,000 samples immediately. Then there is 43,000 per year thereafter. Now, the longer we wait, like if we add burglary and go about it slow, that number is going to drop. That 150 is if we did it today. But obviously, if we catch the burglars, we're getting 43,000 of those. So it's going to drop correspondingly. Recidivism rates, I told -- I just went blank -- Chris -- excuse me -- I told Chris that I'm getting closer and closer to dropping the ball with these presentations, because I was actually in the back of the room typing up slides from questions that were mentioned on the Commission, because we happened to have some answers to some of those. Recidivism rates in Florida, basically what I did is I asked our prison system how many people enter the prison system each year. That includes prison and that includes community control. We have 115,000 offenders that enter the Florida corrections system each year in some way; 43,000 of these offenders have never been in the Florida corrections system before. So that's a pretty constant number, about 40 to 45,000 have never been in our system at all. Now, it does not mean they weren't in somebody else's system, but it does mean they weren't in our system. So what this translates to is a 63 percent recidivism rate for all types of offenses. I haven't asked them to break it out by offense, because I don't want to tick them off. I don't want to lose my contact at Department of Corrections. But I'm hoping to write an article or a journal article and ask some specific questions and they'll get it for me, but what we're doing now is they're writing these queries for us that we can easily input different results. But that is very similar to the 67 percent for sexual assault recidivism rate that's been quoted several times from different studies. But this is for all crimes and only State of Florida offenders. These guys are -- most of them, it's kind of frightening to know that most of these individuals -- and these are convicted sex offenders, by the way, this pie chart. Most of these guys are out on the street. They're not in the prison somewhere. If you look at it, 46 percent are on probation, four percent are in local jails, which, even though that's confined, they usually don't spend as long a time in a local jail, and then 12 percent are actually on parole. Now, I'm going to air some dirty laundry in our state, because it's really been a problem for us since the very beginning. With so many agencies involved in blood sample collection, it has just been a huge task to get these samples collected. We're getting 100 percent of the samples of the people who are going through prison. In fact, I always say we're getting 105 percent, because we reject a bunch because they send us -- you know, we're not entitled to this guy, you need to take it -- you know, we destroy the blood. So they give us more than we should get. But at the probation level, we're just not getting them at all. And this shows the breakdown. We should have received 4,828 samples in fiscal year `97-98, and we only received 1,300. In the first two quarters of this year, we had only received 685. Now, I will say that in the third quarter of this year, because of some letters that we have sent out, and I'll mention that later, we have collected 672 since January. So we are making progress in the collection of these probationers. Here's the breakdown of the submitting agency types. The green is blood samples that were collected from the prisons and 1996 shows the big year where we got all the retroactive individuals. The red is probation and then juveniles is yellow. And so we are making improvements in all those areas. To improve blood collection compliance, we need to do several things, legislative changes. Unfortunately, every time we make a legislative change, it makes the problem worse. Actually, we're getting very good compliance with probationers in quite a few counties and our probation offices -- you know, the areas that we're having a problem said if you will court order it, if you could just say that they need to court order it, then we could collect the blood, because some of the sheriffs are saying we can't collect the blood unless we have a court order that puts him in our custody to do so. So what we do is we listen to them and we did require a court order and immediately a memo went out from Department of Corrections and it was faxed to everyone and some of my buddies in the probation program faxed me a copy that said stop all collections of probationers unless a court order is accompanying it. So it actually killed the counties that were in compliance. So we actually went backwards. Every time they mention legislative change, I just go, well, how are we going to mess it up this time. So that's been a real problem. But right now the law reads that if the individual is not going to prison, that the blood sample must be collected before he's released from the custody of the court. Now, that could mean he's escorted over to the jail by the bailiff or they have some sort of mechanism in the courthouse, as it stands now, but this legislation has been effect for about eight months. We have yet to receive the first sample from the courthouse. It's just -- it's hard. We've got so many agencies, it's hard getting these people to do it. And the thing is, if you find a county that you can get to comply, like I always pick on Dawn Herkenham, because she and I are friends, but I might say Dawn Herkenham is my contact in Tampa and she believes in this program and she collects all those blood samples, and in a year and a half, I notice the blood sample compliance dropped off totally and it's picked up in metro Dade all of a sudden, where we never get any samples. I call and I find out that Dawn has taken a job in metro Dade and Tampa is now gone. So it's a constant battle. I'm going to mention that later, but what these people have to do is make this part of your policy. Don't just say, yeah, we'll do it for you. Write it into their policy. Sheriffs, these community control, juvenile detention centers, this has to be part of their written policy that they do and it's not dependent on someone's enthusiasm that's in the agency. So we hired a training liaison. We have someone full-time, that that's all they do, is hit hot spots in the state when they drop off, go down, rah rah, here's what we can do for you, send us samples, it goes back up for a while. But it's just frustrating, because if we lost that person, our -- our blood sample collections went down when she was on maternity leave. I mean, that's how weak the base is for probationers. Also, this has been very productive. Periodic compliance correspondence. We used to do this once a year and we just sent out a letter that said, hey, you're not doing 100 -- no one was doing 100 percent, so it was an easy letter to send out. You just mail merge it. But we sent this letter out, you get some people calling up saying your numbers are wrong, we are doing it, you know, and then we wait for the next year and nothing changes. What we did this year, because we've made this contact in our Department of Corrections, is we can actually give them hard numbers of the number of people that should have been collected at the county level and DOC, Department of Corrections, has actually given us an Excel spreadsheet that has the people's names and Department of Corrections numbers, so we can actually compare it to who we do have and we send out a letter that not only gives them the percentage of their compliance, but gives them a list of names that we need, that weren't collected. So there is not any more arguments that your numbers aren't any good or that type of thing. Also, we send the spreadsheet that shows percent compliance, it shows all 67 counties on the same spreadsheet. So good old-fashioned competition does a lot, too, because Palm Beach does not want to be upstarted by Broward or Jacksonville does not want to be put behind the eight-ball with Orlando. So you get kind of some competition there and just to let you know, our blood sample collection has gone up 45 percent since this letter went out. We're talking this went out April 1st. Our average blood sample collection is 600 a month. We got 919 in April and the excess was all from local level jails. So we're going to do this on a quarterly basis now, because we've already got the template in place. In our state, when I first started this in 1989, we said that -- the law said FDLE will analyze these samples and provide the blood collection kits and these guys all have to go through a sheriff sometime, so the sheriffs will collect it. Well, this is what we have found out, who all needs to be involved to get this done. We have reception centers in the Florida where the prisoners go through before they're farmed out to the prisons. We have the prisons and probation and parole. They're all different entities. County corrections, we have the sheriff and the county jail, and, also, something that's sweeping over the State of Florida is private jails, where it's not run by the sheriff anymore. It's run privately, and it -- well, let me watch what I say here. From my perspective, on my project, it's a nightmare, because what happens is if you don't put in their contract and in their bid specs of what they will do, they will not do it. So we have a great collection compliance here and all of a sudden it stops and my -- you know, Dawn is still over there, so I know she still believes in the program, and it's like, whoops, we forgot to put it in the contract, so you'll have to wait two years before we can start collecting again. So I have been -- we've been sending out little mailers and calling people that says, look, if you're considering doing private contracting, put one little statement in there that says private contractor must adhere to the laws of the State of Florida. That ought to cover it, I mean, I would think. But anyway. So that's a real problem. The Circuit Court judges need to be involved, Department of Juvenile Justice, the State Attorneys, and the Clerks of the Court. We talked to the Judges Association, and this was from our Judges Association, they said, look, don't talk to us, talk to the -- they were saying talk to the clerks. I will sign whatever they put in front of me. They keep everything going, running smoothly, and they said they'd do it. So the clerks have really helped us a lot and we appreciate the judges' candor, that they are the ones that can get this going. COMMISSIONER SANDERS: Question. Are you telling us that there are private jails being run or private collection facilities? MR. COFFMAN: These are county jails that used to be run by the sheriff, are now being run by the private sector, under the -- I don't know. I just know that they exist and they've been there since 1994. They've been popping up all over the state, privately run correctional facilities. It's physically still in the same plant that the sheriff owned, but they didn't have the manpower to run it, so they got a contract to run it, and, yes, they are privately run at the direction of the sheriff, but if they don't put it into their contract, they can't make them draw a blood sample for our purposes. In fact, are you from Florida? COMMISSIONER SANDERS: No. I am a sheriff and I find it hard to believe that there are privately-run jails. MR. COFFMAN: Yes. There's private-run prisons. COMMISSIONER SANDERS: I've never heard of it. MR. COFFMAN: Right off the top of my head, Dade County, Florida, if you want to call your counterpart there and ask them how it's working, but they have a private-run jail. COMMISSIONER SANDERS: Sheriff Berry, is he from -- where is Sheriff Berry from? MR. COFFMAN: I don't think Sheriff Berry is in Dade County, but I'm so bad with names, I'm not going to attempt that. But we have 67 counties. But they do exist. Three steps to a full statutory compliance is we need to get the judges to order the blood collection at the time of sentencing. The offender reports for the blood, for blood sample collection prior to release. So if the offender comes in and they go time served, there needs to be a mechanism that they know this is on the docket, they have a contract nurse, if you're a bigger county, that you would have the case load, or the bailiff takes them back to the jail, which is what happens in Cecilia Krauss' area. They physically take them back to the jail to have blood sample drawn and then they're released from there. Then blood samples received and analyzed for the DNA database. But this is what we have to do. These guys are out there committing these crimes again and these are the very people we're not collecting, and it's a problem, I would say, in most of the country. I think Virginia has a real good handle on their collections, but they're organized differently than we are. They are kind of part of that system. Common obstacles we've been told to compliance is that, well, the judge fails to order at the time of sentencing, and, in conjunction with this, the state attorney doesn't request it. That's another issue. The state attorney needs to request it. Requires going back to court if you don't -- if the judge doesn't order it at the time. Resistance from the county jail, that they're concerned about liability; he's technically been sentenced and why they have him back in their jail, they're worried about that. Funding concerns, I've actually even had a county that would probably spend about $25 a year in mailing, saying that they could not do it because of the mailing costs. So I wrote them a check for $75 and I said this will cover you for the next three years. Of course, they tore it up and they still don't send bloods. Lack of sufficient medical staff. We have some pretty small counties. Actually, our smaller counties are the ones that are all gung ho on it. I mean, when I went -- we visited every county before this started and a very small county in our state, I mean extremely small, I was describing what we were collecting for and he said -- he goes, well, hang on a minute. He goes, Billy Ray, come here, and a guy came out that was sweeping the back room and he goes, didn't we get you for showing yourself in the park? And he goes, no, no, no, that was six months ago. He goes, okay, never mind. Sent him back. He was going to go get the blood sample from him right then, let me carry it on back to the lab. But in that county, they're at full compliance. They've sent us six samples in the last six years. And we have resistance from probation officers. Actually, the probation officers themselves are very supportive and I don't want that word -- it kind of sounds negative, I couldn't think of another word, but it's just time constraints. Our probation officers, I don't know if your states are the same way, they are so overworked and have all these new legal changes and predator registration and all this. It just doesn't get done because they just don't have the time or the manpower. So that's why we want to get it done in the courthouse. What have we learned since we started? Well, sharing information between criminal justice agencies is crucial and in our state, we're probably not much different than any other state, our prison system database does not talk to the FDLE database, does not talk to the court database. They're all different systems. You can't really get the information to just connect. So that's a real problem in our state. But what we've done is we've gotten criminal history access for our DNA database staff. We can actually go into the criminal history and if any of you know how that is, that was a tall order, and it's run by FDLE, but it -- you know, I had to sign all sorts of forms and training and whatever just to be able to go in there, but they gave us the ability to change one area of the criminal history and it's to check whether a DNA record was on file or not. So in our state, we have the DNA record on the criminal history, so we don't get a lot of repeat blood draws, because these guys are repeating. You know, before we started doing this, we had 40 percent of the bloods we got we had already had before. Now we're down to about five percent and it's normally a name change or something like that. Also, we have a criminal justice network called CJNET in Florida that is an internet within the State of Florida and it's linked up to 600 law enforcement agencies and criminal justice agencies in the state. That includes prison, the state attorney's office, police departments, sheriffs, everything. Now, this is the future part of my talk. What we're hoping to do is we're hoping to put on CJNET the database of names information on the offenders that we have and develop an interface where they can do a name search or plug in the Department of Corrections number to see if the inmate has already been collected or not. The reason we're doing that is because the criminal history record, because of the two agencies not talking with each other, their computer records, about 40 percent of the files are not marked and it doesn't mean we don't have them. It means that the name was slightly spelled different or their was maybe an error in the Department of Corrections number. So we want to do that. We also post on our CJNET any hits that we've made between cases, so local law enforcement can go on there and see that maybe these cases that were linked here, maybe it has a similar MO to a case that's in their jurisdiction and maybe they can submit that case to be analyzed, that they may not have done it before. Also, we do have access to the corrections inmate database, the DNA staff does, and so we can check records of when someone went through the system and that type of thing. Agencies involved must make sample collection part of their policies, which I already hit on that, and we're sending out the periodic status reports. Now, I'm going to go into another future aspect of it. The second part of the equation is not just collecting the database samples. We have to work these cases out there and we have to move to work all cases that have DNA typeable results. We need to work more cases without suspects. We need to work -- more non-violent cases need to be examined, such as we don't work those burglary cases for the database, because they could be linking to other sexual assault cases or violent crime. Additional personnel, though, is going to be needed to get this accomplished in most crime labs. Additional funding, obviously, because the PCR and STR process is not cheap. Also, in a lot of areas, additional space. Just because even if you went with double shifts, one of our labs is already doing double shifts and they can't -- their desk is literally about this big, it's three foot. They have the three-foot cubicle, with no side walls. It's just a flat one against the wall and they have three foot of space to work in our Orlando lab. We're just swamped for space -- or starving for space. Identify -- this is something I'm going to tell you about the State of Florida. It's been shown in several states, it's about 67 percent of violent offenders repeat their crime. The average number of sexual assaults per offender is about nine, and that means there's people with a lot more and people with a lot less. In Florida, this is the uniform crime report, we had 13,224 forcible sexual assaults in Florida last year, in 1997. We received statewide, this includes county, city and FDLE, 3,755 serology service requests. Now, any of you who work in a crime lab knows that it's going to be something less than that, because sometimes you get multiple submissions on one case. So we're not working all the cases that are out there. Now, before I go any further, I am not trying to say that there are 10,000 cases that we haven't worked for DNA. Not all those would have evidence that could be tested. A lot of these are reported months and months after the crime occurred. A lot of these, the investigator has deemed that this case is not going to go any further. So I'm not trying to say that, but what I'm saying is there is a difference and I have called local sheriffs and local police departments and just asked them, are you withholding cases that, in an ideal world, you would have sent to have DNA done on them, and they said yes. The range was between 20 and 60 percent. So we would probably say we're guesstimating 30 to 40 percent of cases that need DNA done on them are not being done. So we're thinking in Florida that we have about 2,000, 2,000 cases that have evidence that need to be looked at and it's not being submitted because they're worried about bogging our system down. I mean, I asked them, I said, are you not sending them because we've told you not to, and they go, well, no, you haven't said that in the last two years, but you did for the first 30 years of your existence, don't send cases without suspects. So it's re-educating them. But they told me, they're not stupid, if they had the cases going to trial and they need results in six or eight weeks, they don't want to send you the 400 they have in their refrigerator that they know has to bog us down. So they're choosing not to send them. So we're trying to come up with a way to alleviate that problem. Possible solutions. We could keep current case work acceptance and analysis policy, keep that the same. Work with local law enforcement to identify sexual assault cases that are not being submitted and find out why. I mean, a more formal study, rather than just me calling up and asking. And we need to -- we could -- on these cases that are not being sent to us, we could limit the analysis on these cases initially to only the sexual assault kit; in other words, do the blood standard and the cotton swabs from the rape investigation, because looking at the sexual assault kit only is better than not looking at the case at all. Limiting the type of material to examine, such as a blood standard and a cotton tip swab would allow streamlining and potentially automation of the technique, and that's what we hope to do. Search the DNA profiles against the database to aid in the investigation and if no semen is identified, the contributor may -- the law enforcement contributor may want to submit the remainder of the evidence using the current case acceptance policy. So that's the pilot that we've proposed. We're going to identify about 250 cases that local agencies have not sent us, all sexual assault. The analysis of these cases would be performed using existing funds and we're going to use database funds, because we have found a way to cut our costs, but I don't want to say anything about it because I'm afraid the vendor will up their price. No, I'm kidding. But we can fund it from our database resources to work these cases. We could use existing crime laboratory resources and each region could perform the pilot, or we could utilize the DNA database staff and a case work staff for the initial pilot and then roll out to all regions when the manpower for the new case load is addressed. Because what we want to do is we want to use this to maybe get legislative support to double the crime lab staff for DNA or whatever it would take. Now, this -- by the way, this -- I was in a leadership class within FDLE and this was my class project. I didn't have any idea that they would like it. So that's why I'm presenting this. We are proceeding with this. But I had two options. We could have the case work lab do the pilot. There's pros and cons. The pros are there is less training required for the crime lab analysts, because they're already currently trained. It would also provide crime laboratory analysts valuable experience in the interpretation of mixtures using the new technology in a more simplified case, such as a sexual assault kit. So that's the pros. The con is they already have their court commitments and they already have their existing case load to maintain and if they could do 250 more cases, they would have done it already. So that's the con side of it. We also suggested having the DNA database perform the pilot and what we've proposed is all of our crime laboratory analysts have the same educational background as the case working analyst. However, only two of my analysts have case work training. So the other analysts would have to be trained in our case work training program. So the pros is the database -- we're used to streamlining and automated techniques. It's funny. You get into the mind set of doing automation and ways of streamlining and the ideas just keep coming once you see the benefit of it, and some of our case working people, they're not used to that, and it's sometimes threatening to think of automation and streamlining. So I think that's a pro in the database looking at this, because we can bring new ideas and new ways of looking at things that they hadn't considered. Also, we don't have any court commitments or rush cases to take focus off the pilot and we hope to be through with the pilot long before any of these cases ever went to trial, because we don't want to do this permanently. We just want to get the pilot for justification. The cons are most of the database staff at this time would require more extensive training to become case work qualified and, also, the database would only want to be involved in the pilot; therefore, we'd still need to implement, in case work labs, if the results warranted, because we don't want to become another case working lab. We want to continue with what we're doing, because we think we're doing good work and quality work. So these were the two suggestions, and basically we decided on a hybrid of both. The Tallahassee case working lab is going to do the pilot and because the database is located in the same facility, we're going to assist them with their automation. We'll do their PCR setup, their post-amp setup, run it and give them back their information, but they do all the extraction and that type of thing. So it's kind of the hybrid of the two ideas. Benefits of this approach is being able to examine more sexual assault cases, at least looking at part of the evidence; apprehending sexual offenders earlier in their career and preventing future assaults; and, using the results of this pilot, if positive, to obtain more crime laboratory staff and special agents to focus on violent crime. Basically, I just want to acknowledge the people in my section. I have four crime laboratory analysts, four forensic technologists. We have a computer programmer, which we would not be able to get this data from the prisons, if we didn't have one assigned to us, and Lonna Kay Kravit is our liaison with the local law enforcement. Do you all have any questions? I didn't see anybody chewing, so is this legal? DIRECTOR ASPLEN: David, if you could, given the discussion we had this morning about the need to understand what would be the value of taking DNA at arrest and needing to kind of quantify it in order to justify it legally, which is kind of what we talked about, would your system in Florida enable us to look at those numbers and look at your database records and to get an analysis of that, if we could get somebody to do a study on that? MR. COFFMAN: Sure. I think we have the access to all the pertinent information sources to get that. You brought up something that is interesting. I'm kind of on the fence right now about arrestees. I was adamantly opposed to it about a month ago and then I do see the benefit, but my point is I think there's several -- you don't start climbing Mt. Everest. You know, you learn how to rock climb gradually, and I think we should all aspire to all felons. But I do see the benefit of all arrestees, and I want to give an example of a case, if I could. I've heard people say that maybe there is no need at all to work a case where someone claims consent in a DNA case. Well, I don't know about in your state, but in our state, that became the most common defense once DNA was established, is to claim consent. And just recently, we had an individual who -- and keep -- this is kind of in support of doing all arrestees, in a way. You could look at it this way, or in support of doing all DNA cases, whichever way, but you've got do one or the other. This individual -- we just, two weeks ago, made a match to a rape/homicide/mutilation case. I mean, it was a really, really heinous crime in south Florida. The individual that we connected to, it was connected through a case-to-case match in our database. When we started looking at the case that it matched to, they had a suspect in that case and he had claimed consent. However, he had claimed consent on four crimes, on four different sexual assaults over the last five years and for whatever reason, the jury always believed him. So he never was convicted. We never got his blood sample. If they had not worked the case with consent, we would not have solved this rape/homicide/mutilation case. We have several instances like that. So it's like you either need to make the effort to work all cases or, in our situation, if we were doing all -- well, no, that wouldn't have worked even with all felons, because he was not convicted. So it's like all arrestees, all cases. There's about 6,000 cases in Florida, but it would be about 500,000 arrestees, so I'm not sure what the answer is, but that's an example that I think we can't be too focused in saying, well, just because there's a suspect, it automatically means you don't have to work it. You don't know how many other cases you could solve. And that would be dependent on your state. If you're collecting all felons and you get the individual for something else, then your problem is solved, but that's just an example that hit close to home recently and I thought it was a good example of something we don't want to forget about. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you guys. I'm enjoying this, this is my first Commission meeting, I'll be sitting in on it, I'm enjoying it a lot and learning a lot, too. Thanks again. [Applause.] DIRECTOR ASPLEN: Why don't we take a break for about ten minutes and then we'll go back in session. [Recess.]
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