MR. ASPLEN: Thank you, Chief. The commission staff has been exceedingly busy over the past couple of months on issues that are not exclusive to the commission, but we've been acting as a resource for a lot of the pending legislation that's going on that both Paul Ferrara and Tim Schellberg are going to talk about, both federal and state. It is a very busy legislative season, as most of you probably know, on the DNA front, and a lot of the commission's material is proving to be very useful to individual legislators and legislatures across the country.
Also, we have been providing the postconviction document to more and more state legislators, and in fact, Judge Webster just requested more copies of it for -- he has been asked to be counsel to Governor Ryan's commission on -- Blue Ribbon Panel on Innocence in Illinois, and they are --he's been asked to provide them our materials on postconviction matters. The million copies of the pamphlet, “What Every Law Enforcement Officer Should Know About DNA Evidence,” has exhausted its supply. We have run out of them, which I think is a good sign, and NIJ has committed to printing another 500,000 of them, given the nature of the demand that we have.
And to give you an idea of that demand, we have our first confirmed case which was solved by nature of a police officer having read that particular pamphlet. And it's a case in Texas wherein an individual -- there was a serial rape-murderer, if you will, who, as I understand it -- we're waiting for more detail but as I understand it, used both rubber gloves and condoms. However, in that particular case -- it was a strangulation case -- the individual when he strangled the woman used his teeth to tighten the ligature with his other hand, and because the police officer had read about the importance of DNA testing the ligature in a case, they actually got a DNA result off of the ligature and solved that case not too long ago. And again, they've connected him and identified him as being a serial offender. So congratulations to the commission in that regard,and I think the next 500,000 copies will be money well spent.
I have a number of other commission updates, but to help us keep on schedule, I will pepper them throughout the rest of the event.
There is, however, one most important commission piece of business that dwarfs everything else, quite frankly. On February 17, Samantha Pauline Clarke entered the world, and so, Woody, Pops, on behalf of all of us, congratulations to you.
MR. CLARKE: Thank you very much.
JUSTICE ABRAHAMSON: Okay. We'll move on to the next order of commission business. We turn to Judge Reinstein, and it's the postconviction working group, the model statute. And do we have the model statute?
MR. ASPLEN: It was passed out.
JUSTICE ABRAHAMSON: Okay. Ron?

Previous	Contents	Next
Back to National Commission Main Page