Jim Crow (left) and Christopher Asplen (right) CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: First of all, that is -- is that working? DOCTOR CROW: The interpreter. CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Okay. First of all, the apologies were not Doctor Crow's to make, but rather that is our administrative mistake somewhere along the line, and we do apologize for that, but we can do a couple of things this morning before the rest of the folks arrive, and we do expect to have a pretty good turnout today that will not require any deliberative process that can act as more of a necessary update, but there are certainly things that we can update some of the other folks on a little bit later. First of all, let me say this, that pursuant to our responsibility regarding having a sign language interpreter, as you can see, we do, in fact, have one. If there is anyone here who does, in fact, need the assistance of a sign language interpreter, please let us know at your earliest convenience, and we will make sure that the individual who is behind me continues to be behind me; however, if that is not necessary through the course of the day, we will give him and any of the colleagues that he has here with him a rest. All right. Secondly, in terms of today's meeting, what we would like to do is rather than reserve all of the public comment for the end of the meeting tomorrow, in speaking to Doctor Crow this morning, we talked about providing some time, kind of on an interim basis throughout the next day and a half, to allow input at the time perhaps at the end of particular sessions so that we can reap the value and benefit of your comments at the time, rather than wait until the end of the day where we simply take note of it and move on.

We do have a number of representatives here from various parts of the DNA community, if you will, and as such, we do want to reap the benefit of their knowledge and their input at the time of the discussion.

Also, let me give you a general update of some of the things that the staff is doing when we are not meeting and some of the things that are going on.

First of all, regarding some of the presentations that have been made, some of the different speeches that have been given recently since our last meeting, there one was one that I participated in at the National District Attorneys Association meeting in Florida last week. They were kind enough to include on their agenda a session on the future of DNA technology where I had the opportunity to explain to them the work of the commission and to talk to them about the various issues that we are addressing, particularly as it pertains to not just presentation in the courtroom, but rather the investigative issues, also. We talked about the database backlog issue. We talked about the arrestee issue. We talked about the nonsuspect case issue; and as such, I think that prosecutors across the country today have a little bit better understanding of what the issues are, although I will say that there was a significant amount of surprise at the nature and quality of the database backlog and the implications thereof. The point being, I think that there needs to be even more education on those issues, regardless of how much we talk about it, and we are sensitive to the issues. There is still a tremendous amount of education that needs to go on out there.

I also had the opportunity about every two or three months to speak to the prosecutors' DNA training class, which they have at their national advocacy center in Columbus, South Carolina,and that particular training is a week long training seminar for prosecutors from all over the country on DNA-related issues, particularly as they apply to the courtroom; however, the past four times that I have participated in that, what they have asked me to do very specifically is to talk about the issues of postconviction DNA recommendations. And, again, that is based on the commission's work, and the last four opportunities I have had, I have taken them, the draft recommendations for postconviction analysis, have used it there and have asked for their comments; and a number have, in fact, sent their comments to me at the -- at the NIJ, and all of them have been very favorable, quite frankly. So that has been a very beneficial way to disseminate the information, disseminate the work of the commission, and I believe that that will continue.

I have a meeting in August with their curriculum development advisors, and we are going to talk about making that a permanent part of the program.

I will say specifically that at the National District Attorneys meeting last week in Florida, Attorney General Reno was there and spoke to a number of issues; however, DNA was one of them, and she specifically raised the issue of prosecution training and education on DNA issues.

One thing that the commission will find itself talking about more in the future, I believe, is as the issues come up will be character, predictive characteristics of genetics and its application in the courtroom and what that will mean for prosecutors and defense attorneys. That will be a very big issue that we will attempt to tackle. We'll talk about that more later, but quite frankly, I think those issues will pale in comparison to the issues that have arisen in the use of DNA simply as an identification tool, but it's something that prosecutors do want to be on the cutting edge of, and we'll try to continue to educate them through meetings like the National DAs conference.

There is also a presentation at the recent Cambridge Health Tech meeting in Tysons Corner that was chaired by Doctor Crow and was also attended by Woody Clarke, I believe, who was there, and Judge Reinstein was also there and spoke about the various working groups that they are involved in for that particular audience, which is composed primarily of scientists and laboratory representatives, but was yet another good organization or another good conference to get the message out in terms of the commission working the issues that we are dealing with.

Also, I think importantly, next Tuesday, Doctor Forman and I will be speaking to the National Conference on State Legislatures in Indianapolis, where we will be talking primarily about DNA in the context of the recommendations that have already been presented to the Attorney General, specifically the backlog issue and the arrestee issue, and we will also be talking somewhat about the uniform statute matter that we will talk about later on today and any other relevant issues that the legislators feel need to be addressed, but that is especially for those two issues for the backlog and the arrestee issue, that is, I think, a very significant audience to say the least. Most of these funding issues, as we have recognized, are less matters for the federal government in spite of the first recommendation that went out, but are really more matters for funding agencies coming from the individual states, and this will be a good opportunity to prepare them for those issues and to alert them really to what the issues are.

So that having been said, there has been a significant amount of the commission's work in the public eye in other ways besides the conferences that we are speaking at, and that is through the media. You may have read a number of the articles that have come up in USA Today, in the New York Times and various and sundry other newspapers, but also on various television shows. Largely that was a result, so that you all know how it works, it was the result of the headline in USA Today, and what happens oftentimes is once a DNA-related story hits one of the newspapers of national note then it -- then everybody else picks up on it, and we start getting phone calls from everyone else. And what happened was USA Today ran the story on the mass -- what they termed as mass testing, which I think was a little bit misrepresented in the headline. Factually, the story was correct, but the characterization was somewhat off. And as a result, we got a number of phone calls for story interviews for the press, but then also for the news media, the television news media, to which we were very -- for which we were very thankful particularly to Paul Ferrara and Woody Clarke for stepping in and being on the Today Show, or CBS This Morning, or MSNBC.

Is that what you were on, Woody?

GEORGE CLARKE: The letters seem all different.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Yeah, they all run together, but they were very, very important. The show is to be on for the purpose of kind of clarifying what the commission did at its last meeting and what that really meant. And again we appreciate those folks doing that.

One thing that I would like to say publicly is I want to say a special note of thanks to Doctor Ferrara. I was talking to Paul about a month or two ago about some of the things that he was talking about; and from the beginning of this process, Paul has been one of the people to talk about the problems that are going on in Virginia; and when we talk about the examples of the tragedies that can occur from things like the database backlog, Paul has always been willing to talk about his cases and what has happened in Virginia that have been very negative and that have been a bad thing, and that takes a lot of courage. And I told Paul about two months ago that I, you know, respected that and really appreciated his courage in doing that. He says, you know what, nobody has ever said that before. So we do appreciate that.

PAUL FERRARA: Hear! Hear!

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: It's true. It's a hard thing to do. And I will add to that. I see Dave Coffman here, also. Dave is another one who speaks to the issue and is not afraid to say, you know, here is what can go wrong, and here is what does go wrong, and that is why we need to fix it as opposed to simply saying, no, not in our backyard. We don't have those kind of problems. And that is very important if we are going to solve the problems. So again thank you on those counts.

To give you somewhat of an idea of where we are going to go today and tomorrow, aside from just what is printed in your -- on your agenda, what we would like to do is talk about the postconviction statute that we have got.

Oh, Robin, do we have copies of the crime scene publication, the pamphlet and the postconviction document?

ROBIN STEELE WILSON: I have hard copies for your conference, but I don't have them available for everyone.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Okay. Do we have one? Do we have them here? I will just hold them up and show them.

The postconviction discussion today will focus on the statute itself to see if the commission feels comfortable with that statute recommending it, but also how can that statute be recommended; what is it that we want the Attorney General to do with that statute, if, in fact, it's approved by the commission. And Judge Reinstein will do that.

In terms of the crime scene investigation -- thank you -- in terms of the Crime Scene Investigation Working Group, we will talk about what happened at the last meeting and talk about whether or not this commission would like to kind of make a broader statement about law enforcement issues in general and law enforcement training and education in the face of advancing technologies.

What we have talked about is the extent to which DNA provides us a specific example of law enforcement's need and desire for training on technology issues; and if we are really going to have law enforcement do what we are asking them to do, it's going to require -- it's going to require rethinking the resources that we provide them, particularly in training and education, although implementation is another factor.

We will also take a look at, and it may have been -- has the survey been passed out?

Okay. The survey that we spoke about at the last meeting, we finally have something from PERF on that in preliminary fashion. We can take a look at those issues.

The evidence storage issues that you see on your agenda, we have invited some folks here from the Los Angeles Police Department, and the reason that they are here, quite frankly, is because they called us and asked us what we are doing about it. I got a phone call about a month ago asking if we had, as a commission, made any comments or any recommendations regarding evidence storage issues. And I said that we had not done that yet, but the issue of how long should we store evidence, given the nature of success in DNA technologies years later; and more importantly, how to store that evidence, be it frozen, be it dried, et cetera, were issues that we needed to address. And I said basically no good deed goes unpunished so would you like to help us with the discussion and tell us what your experience has been, what the issues are that you are facing so that we can kind of use your example as a way to focus our discussions. So they were kind enough to do that at the last minute, and we have three representatives from LAPD to talk about that.

Tomorrow's laboratory funding report will consist, I think, primarily of two areas. One will bethe issue of database sample collection and the recommendation for that and how do we create -- how do we encourage pilot programs that will provide models throughout the country for effective database sample collection. To say the least, we are not getting 100 percent participation.

Is that right, Mr. Coffman?

DAVID COFFMAN: No.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: And I know -- and I know that Dave has been more successful than most in database sample collection and is -- is undertaking some efforts there, but we are going to talk about some ideas we have about developing pilot programs for that.

And then we have the issue of database sample retention. We have received a specific request from Attorney General Reno's office from her privacy advisor, Mr. Bentivoglio, to talk about that issue at this meeting and to -- to try to come to some consensus, at least lay out the analysis of what the issues are regarding database sample collection.

We have forwarded, and I believe she has received, the recommendation that we made on arrestee testing for sampling at the last meeting, but one of the specific issues you may remember from her letter to us was the issue of sample retention. So we will talk about that from Doctor Ferrara's working group standpoint.

And then after that, you will see on the agenda there are privacy considerations and database sample retention. We will then, to some extent, turn things over to Doctor Reilly, and Doctor Reilly has offered or -- I won't say offered. He agreed to help us with that discussion in the privacy considerations surrounding that whole issue.

The working lunch, we have asked Lynn Fereday to come from Forensic Science Service to talk to us about DNA and fingerprinting. And it is positioned where it is on the agenda for a particular reason, and that is in the Legal Issues Working Group report we are going to talk about the constitutional analysis that David Kaye has put together with the commission and the working group's help; but one of the issues that came up in that constitutional analysis is the issue of invasiveness and the extent to which taking DNA either venously or by buccal swab may be deemed too invasive. Well, this is an instance in which this technology may directly affect the legal analysis if we can, in fact, expect in the future to be taking DNA from fingerprints, that is a legal analysis that will be greatly affected. So we will proceed that way.

I believe that when last we met, we had shown you what the -- what the final version of the law enforcement pamphlet looks like. This was the one that was, in fact, selected by the commission at the last meeting. This is the one that is, in fact, being -- is going to be printed. It is rumbling through the process that is internal review with the Department of Justice, and we anticipate that in about the next month, month and a half, this will be ready for dissemination, again, in conjunction with the recommendation that we spoke about last time having the Attorney General recommend -- bring together representatives from the various law enforcement communityagencies to talk about how to distribute this and to talk more generally about the issue of education, DNA education, particularly in the context of identification, preservation and collection.

The same is true with this particular document, the postconviction document. It is in its absolute final phases, I am told, and I trust that that is the case. We are -- we are in the process of getting approval for things like whether we can, in fact, have this cover, because this cover involves three colors and needs special approval to get three colors on your document. So we are doing that. We are adding things like Department of Justice boilerplate pages, and making sure everyone's appropriate seal is on the document and such; but again, that will hopefully be done in the next month or two.

What we are considering right now is the possibility of presenting these two documents to the Attorney General at the next commission meeting, which will probably be held in Washington. And what we are considering doing is inviting the Attorney General to the meeting and presenting them to her at that point. We'll keep you updated on if we are going to be able to do that at that point.

The only other thing that I would like to talk about before we move to Judge Reinstein is to give you an update on the legislative process and what is going on with the database backlog.

About two months ago, the Senate passed legislation, which included $30 million over the next two years for database reduction -- elimination, I should say. And the program, it was designed to be a cooperate effort between the bureau and the Office of Justice programs, but I would say tracked the commission's recommendation fairly well with some of the same requirements, some of the same quality assurance concerns; and that, as I said, was passed by the Senate; however, when the House was considering its kind of parallel legislation, if you will, there was nothing included in the appropriations, the House appropriations language for that project. That was not the only victim of the House appropriations process, but it was a significant victim.

The matter now goes to the conference committee for the House and the Senate to see if they can come up with the bill that the President can sign. So the issue is the extent to which the Senate pursues this particular issue strongly enough and whether or not it can be worked out, but that is where the process is right now for that particular issue. I don't believe that they have yet selected the committee members, so we don't even know who is on the conference committee, but we will try to keep you updated and posted on that particular matter.

We'll have to see whether or not that actually comes to fruition. I will say that we have had opportunities on several occasions since -- since the House version did not include the money to speak to Senator staffs about the issues. So we have communicated at their request to Senator Thurmond -- yes, Senator Thurmond and Senator Dewine's staff about the issue.

They said that there is a potential that they would have hearings on this particular issue, but we don't know that yet. And as always, we give -- when we are asked about these issues at NIJ, we go to them with a briefing book that includes everything about the commission, not just thatrecommendation, but also includes the membership list, and we encourage them to contact you folks and you commissioners and not just the commissioners, but other working group members, because you were going to be the people that they need to talk to, not us. Quite frankly, we have an obligation not to lobby for money one way or the other, and that is -- and that is entirely appropriate. You folks are the ones who have the specific experience to answer their questions about the implications of the backlog and things like that. So if you get a call from a Senator somewhere along the line, don't be surprised if the reference came from us.
Yes, Paul.

PAUL FERRARA: Chris, this is Senate Bill 903, if I recall.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: I believe so.

PAUL FERRARA: Is it possible, do you have copies of the language of that bill? I had one very rough copy of it, and I would love to get it.

ROBIN STEELE WILSON: We can copy -- I know where it is in the bill, and I can get it off the Internet.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: And I quite frankly probably have a copy of it in my file somewhere. We will photocopy and get it to people today.

Any questions about any of the commission business?

DOCTOR CROW: I'm impressed having heard Chris talk totally unprepared. I wonder how good he is when he is prepared.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: I get all confused then.

DOCTOR CROW: The other thing I noticed is that the colors on this document are black and blue, which seems particularly appropriate for this commission.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: There you go.

DOCTOR CROW: I think we are ready to proceed with Judge Reinstein so the floor is yours.

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