MR. ASPLEN: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. How am I doing? Can the folks in the back hear? Does this sound all right?

On behalf of the United States Department of Justice and Attorney General Reno, NIJ and the National Commission on the Future DNA Evidence, I want to welcome you to Washington, D.C. for this event.

It's my job for the next couple of minutes to explain exactly what it is that you're doing here because we realize that it was only just about a month, month and a half ago that you received a letter from you saying, Hey, you are considered by nature of your position or by your colleague's recommendation to be an important voice in the law enforcement community, and as such, we would like to bring you together to talk about some DNA-technology issues.

In that regard, let me start by explaining what the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence is because it's because of that Commission that you are here.

The National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence was established at the request of the Attorney General and is administered through the National Institute of Justice.

It was established by the Attorney General in response to a number of cases in which she read about in which individuals were essentially being freed from prison who were shown to be wrongly convicted by nature of DNA testing. Ten, 15 years after their original conviction going back looking at the original evidence, DNA testing proved that they were, in fact, exonerated or actually innocent.

And upon looking at those particular cases, she began to ask the question, Is there more that we can do, or is there more that we should do to really maximize the value of DNA evidence in the criminal justice system?

She asked that the Commission be established, and what the Commission did was they recognized that there are certainly a number of applications, far beyond the post-conviction application, that are important to the use of DNA in the criminal justice system.

So the Commission was created about two years ago, and we established five different workinggroups, one of which was a post-conviction group working on post-conviction cases.

Another working group was a legal issues working group that dealt with what are the general considerations as we attempt to integrate this technology in the criminal justice system.

A third working group had to do with laboratory funding. Oftentimes it all comes down to money.

A fourth working group had to do with crime scene investigation, and a fifth working group had to do with research and development.

The crime scene investigation working group has done a number of things, but perhaps one of the most important things that they have done, and ultimately that the Commission has done, is recognize that the future of DNA technology in the criminal justice system in the United States is really about application. It's less about bells and whistles and databases and such than it is about empowering law enforcement to actually use what we can now technologically do.

It's about putting it in your hands, and as the chiefs of police, assistant chiefs of police, sheriffs in this country, you are the folks that need to be the advocates for that happening. The future of DNA lies in actually using it.

A good example of that, I think, is a comparison of the way the DNA developed in the United States as opposed to the way it developed in the United Kingdom, and we'll hear tomorrow by an expert in the United Kingdom, Don Dovaston, about what they're doing, the kinds of applications that they're performing in the United Kingdom, but in the United Kingdom DNA developed as an investigative tool. It developed as a way to help law enforcement identify perpetrators.

In the United States, DNA developed primarily first as a prosecutorial tool. It developed as a way to prove cases in the courtroom once you had identified the perpetrator through the traditional investigative techniques.

We put a tremendous amount of resource and attention in the laboratories. We put a tremendous amount of attention and work into the courtrooms to get it admissible. What we didn't do was spend a tremendous amount of attention and resource at the crime scene and with law enforcement.

This discussion is a way to really promote that application. It's a way to get the word out of what those issues are that really inhibit our full integration of DNA technology into our systems from an investigative standpoint.

Now, given the Commission's mission, if you will, and what we're doing here today, please understand that you are now part of that Commission process, and these proceedings will be included in the work of the Commission that will be included in the recommendations that ultimately go to the Attorney General. As such, there are a number of considerations that I'd like you to keep in mind.

First of all, it's that you'll notice in the agenda that while we have panel discussions on each of these various topics, at the end of most of those there are discussion sections of a half hour, 45 minutes. Those discussion sections are probably infinitely more important than the panel discussions.

Don't get me wrong, we quite literally have the best experts in the country and in other countries here to talk about these issues in the panel discussions, but what is most important is the discussion that is generated afterwards, the discussion that is ultimately generated by you folks as we try to address these issues, as we try to make recommendations, as we try to get that information out to people that's so necessary.

One thing is very clear, DNA works. DNA is perhaps our most powerful tool in law enforcement to come along since the fingerprint. What we need to do is we need to empower law enforcement to use it.

Now, there are a couple of administrative matters that I should attend to as we get started. First of all, the air-conditioning has been turned down, so it should start -- I can feel it's getting a little bit cooler as it is.

We're putting some more chairs in the back and hopefully give some folks a little more breathing space, but it's great to see the response in terms of the number of people that we have here. My guess is we'll probably have some more folks tomorrow.

We've going to be in a different room tomorrow. I think that room -- I've been told that room is a little bit bigger. We'll have instructions as to how to get there for those of you who may have had to struggle to find this room in what is perhaps the largest building next to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Another extremely important piece of information is that the rest rooms are down the hall, through the double doors and to the right.

Also, as you can see up front, we do have sign language interpreters. If there's anyone who, in fact, needs that service, please let us know and we'll make that there's an individual interpreting some sign language through the entirety of the conference. However, if not, those folks will simply stay in the back in case the need arises throughout the conference.

These meetings will be transcribed and they will be put on the Internet, the transcripts as such will be.

As such, when you do participate, notice I say affirmatively, when you do participate during the discussion sections, please identify yourself, who you are so that we can attribute your comments to that unless you don't want your comments attributed to you, in which case don't, but please know that we will be transcribing these.

For any of you who -- to kind of start this discussion off and for those of you, I know we have afew prosecutors in the audience, and for those of you who are not prosecutors, you've been in law enforcement long enough to have sat next to prosecutors in trials enough to know that when you're trying a case, you're always kind of looking for that hook. You're always looking for that one thing that's really going bring the point home to the jury.

I supposed I should have introduced myself first by giving you a little bit about my background. I was a Deputy District Attorney in Bucks County, Pennsylvania for about eight years, and I prosecuted sex crimes, particularly child, sexual crimes against children, and then I was the DNA director of the National District Attorney's Association for about two years. Now I am an Assistant U.S. Attorney detailed as the Executive Director.

So I'm often looking for that, that bit of information or that hook that will really make the point that I want to make.

Did anybody read the USA Today? Thank you. We've got some participation already with some hands. I appreciate it.

Inmates offered free DNA tests. The sum and substance of that article is extremely important. I think it's one of the most important things going in criminal justice these days.

The article references the fact that San Diego County is proactively looking at about 580 cases to see whether or not DNA evidence may well act in an exonerative capacity. They're not waiting for defendants to come to them, and we have the person who's actually quoted in the article here today, Lisa Weinreb, from San Diego to talk about that a little bit.

That is an extremely important, important piece of work not because I think in any way that we're going to find a tremendous amount of wrongful convictions. I don't think so at all. My guess would be that what we're going to do is confirm the reliability of the criminal justice system.

But I think here's the point: Imagine if what this headline read was Law Enforcement Allowed to do DNA Testing or Law Enforcement Empowered to do DNA Testing. That's a headline that would meet the savings of thousands and thousands of lives as we will learn over the next two days, and that's really the point of all of this, how do we empower law enforcement, how do we make law enforcement part of this discussion so that we can put the most important, most powerful technology to come along in years in your hands in a much more practical way.

With that, let me get the presentation started by introducing Julie Samuels. Julie is the Acting Director of NIJ, and as I mentioned, NIJ is that governmental entity that administers the Commission. It's through the Commission that it does its work.

Perhaps more importantly, it is through the NIJ that the Commission's products, such as some of the things that you'll see, are administered. NIJ is what pays for the pamphlets that we'll talk about, the CD ROM that you will see and has put this conference together. It's the entity that has supported the Commission's work.

Julie received her AB in political science from Brown University in Rhode Island and her MPP in public policy from the University of California at Berkeley.

She was designated by the President in April 2000 to serve as the acting Director of the National Institute of Justice. She began her career with the Department of Justice in 1979. She comes to the NIJ from the Criminal Division's Office of Policy and Legislation. It formally was the Office of Policy Management Analysis for the Department of Justice.

So Julie is well steeped in the policy considerations of things like technology integration, and these are policy considerations. They are considerations that need to be discussed in settings like this that help us make the decisions that get technology in to your hands.

From 1990 to '93, she served as a Secretary for the Chemical Action Task Force mandated in '90 by the '90 Economic Summit to ensure precursor and essential chemicals were not diverted to manufacture illicit drugs.

Again, she has a good grounding in the advantages and the power of technology to support not only the Commission's work, but to support the products and the discussion that will come out of this particular conference over the next couple of days.

So, again, I welcome you all and I invite Ms. Samuels to come to the podium.

(Applause.)

MS. SAMUELS: Good morning. Thank you, Chris. I'm very pleased to be able to join you this morning to kick off this National Law Enforcement Summit on DNA Technology. It's very exciting to see all of you, sort of a full house here today, participating.

As our nation's law enforcement leaders, you're in the unique position to harness the power of DNA technology and convert it into a valuable investigative tool for law enforcement officers on the street.

At NIJ, we are keenly aware of the traditional barriers that separate laboratory science from practical tools needed to fight crime on the streets. We attempt to break down those barriers by convening discussions such as these and by producing training manuals and interactive learning tools that attempt to bring science to life.

This morning I want to take a moment to reflect on the incredible pace of change in this field and to talk about how we at the National Institute of Justice think about our role in supporting your work.

Consider how far we have come since DNA evidence was first introduced in to criminal court proceedings in the United States in 1986.

At that time, there were few private laboratories and fewer public laboratories analyzing crimescene evidence for DNA markers. There were no guidelines, no standards and no accrediting bodies. Few police departments have the equipment, training or expertise to identify and collect DNA evidence from crime scenes.

Today every state in the nation allows the introduction of this kind of evidence. There are more than a dozen private labs, several federal labs and more than 130 state and local laboratories that can conduct DNA analysis on forensic evidence. There are accreditation and certification processes for labs and guidelines and standards to ensure quality and reliability.

Law enforcement agencies are collecting DNA from crime scene evidence and convicted felons, conclusively establishing guilt through unique identification and exonerating the innocent through the use of DNA evidence.

The criminal justice system is rapidly moving to a time when DNA will be a quick, readily available, inexpensive and certain forensic tool for use by law enforcement.

Today DNA is most commonly used to solve homicide and rape cases. Tomorrow we will have the power to use DNA evidence to solve other crimes where there's biological evidence for DNA analysis.

These advances are both exciting and daunting for us at NIJ as well, I can imagine, for you in the field.

DNA technology gets cheaper and easier to use. Officers get better at identifying and collecting DNA evidence from crime scenes and states expand the definition of offenses under which convicted offenders must contribute DNA samples. As a result, the backlog of 700,000 convicted offender samples continues to grow.

Equally daunting are the critical questions that surround the impact of this technology on crime and justice.

What is the appropriate population for which to collect an archive DNA evidence? Felons, arrestees, citizens generally? What impact does DNA have on the public trusting confidence of our criminal justice system? What is the appropriate balance between public safety and privacy? I'm not going to address those questions today, but I certainly leave them to you for your consideration.

I would like to talk to you for just a few minutes about what NIJ is doing regarding DNA and other forensic evidence.

We are, one, supporting research to create forensic tools. Two, funding laboratory and database improvements. Three, working with the DNA Commission that Chris has mentioned that advises the Attorney General and, four, developing guidelines and training products to make technology real to law enforcement.

I would like to discuss each of these in turn. First, research. The power of DNA technology cannot be fully harnessed unless we can make it usable by police officers conducting their daily work.

To fulfill this goal, NIJ began funding DNA technology research and development as early as 1987. In recent years, we have initiated a focused DNA research program budgeted at approximately $5 million a year with three ambitious goals for DNA testing.

One, affordability; as little as $10 per test versus $50. Two, timeliness; to reduce the analysis time to minutes or seconds rather than hours, and, three, miniaturization which would permit portability to the crime scene.

One of the most exciting advances produced as a result of this research investment is what we're calling the DNA lab on a chip.

The potential of this technology allows us to envision a day in the not so far future when a police officer investigating a crime scene would be able to put a piece of biological evidence into a microchip-testing device.

The device would identify the genetic markers, then relay the markers to a computer screen in the officer's car and to a database nationally maintained for possible identification of an offender whose DNA profile may be on record.

DNA testing done at crime scenes may not replace laboratory testing. Analysis done in the field would still be confirmed in the controlled environment of a laboratory to ensure absolute confidence in the results. We recognize the potential to solve crimes more quickly through the investigative leads that could be generated by on-scene DNA analysis.

Next, laboratories and database improvements. As police departments integrate DNA technology into the investigative process, there will be major implications for the country's forensic laboratories.

Currently, demand on the labs to process DNA samples has already outstripped their ability to respond.

In addition, there's a huge backlog of samples to be tested and entered the CODIS, or the Combined DNA Index System, managed by the FBI national database.

Further pressure on the labs results from states expanding the list of crimes requiring DNA samples from convicted offenders.

NIJ has initiated an annual meeting of DNA researchers and crime laboratory practitioners to ensure that our research and development program will continue to address the specific needs of public forensic laboratories.

To date, NIJ has invested more than $35 million, still far too little, to upgrade and improve the capabilities and capacities of more than 130 separate state and local laboratory facilities.

These funds, which have supported equipment and supply purchases as well as staff training, have contributed to the growth and participation in state and national DNA databases.

NIJ plans to continue this funding program to improve our nation's crime labs while expanding it to support all forensic disciplines.

NIJ has also committed $15 million to fund private DNA labs across the country to expedite the analysis of state's backlog convicted offender DNA samples for entry into the national database.

These backlog samples represent an untold number of crimes that could be solved with the availability of this information. We anticipate investing another $15 million into this initiative next year.

These investments represent a staff, all be a small staff, towards reducing the backlog and creating a national system that takes full advantage of DNA's power to both incriminate and exonerate.

Third, I mentioned the DNA Commission. The future of DNA evidence was becoming an issue of critical national importance in 1998 when Attorney General Janet Reno asked NIJ to establish and staff the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence.

This prestigious group, which has been chaired by the Chief Justice of Wisconsin Supreme Court, Shirley Abrahamson, and directed by Chris Asplen, includes members with diverse perspectives, including four members representing law enforcement.

The Commission's job is to provide the Attorney General with recommendations on the use of current and future DNA methods, applications and technologies in the operation of the criminal justice system from the crime scene to the courtroom.

The DNA Commission will hold its final meeting in November and is preparing its final report to the Attorney General.

NIJ anxiously awaits making the findings and recommendations of the Commission available to the field.

We've already published the minutes of the Commission, as Chris has mentioned, as well as several reports of the Commission on NIJ's web site. We can only imagine the next generation of investigative tools.

To support the development of these technologies and to deal with the issues that new technologies raise, NIJ established an Investigative and Forensic Science Division dedicated to developing and refining new tools for investigators and forensic scientists.

This broad program area today, still in its infancy and headed by Dr. Lisa Forman from whom you will hear a little bit later, is likely to contribute substantially to the field in the coming years.

Finally, I'd like to discuss the ways that NIJ gets information out to the field. In addition to meetings such as these, NIJ publishes guidebooks aimed at law enforcement and other practitioners.

To date, we have published guides for law enforcement and other responding personnel on death scene investigation, eyewitness evidence, crime scene investigation, fire and arson scene investigation and explosion bombing scene investigation.

NIJ is also developing training curriculum for law enforcement personnel in these areas.

We've also established two forensic technology centers in Florida that can provide scientific and training support to law enforcement investigations.

Today I'm pleased to announce our newest product, one you'll here more about tomorrow. It's a CD ROM that virtually takes you through a crime scene and teaches you how to collect, excuse me, how to identify, collect and properly store DNA evidence. We're very excited about this product and we look forward to your feedback.

We've come a long way, but there is much work left to do. DNA evidence has the potential to establish guilt through unique identification, to exonerate the innocent and to improve the efficiency and efficacy of the criminal justice system.

Making DNA a valuable investigative tool for law enforcement officers on the street is the first step towards making this a reality. Thank you for participating in this all-important summit, and I wish you well. Thank you

(Applause.)

MR. ASPLEN: Thank you, Julie, and, again, we greatly appreciate your continued support of all of the work that the Commission does.

There are a number of reasons to thank and applaud our next speaker, Chief Terry Gainer, who is the Assistant chief of, Executive Assistant Chief of the Metropolitan Police Department.

The different reasons are as follows: Number one, he is an active participant in the Commission as one of its commissioners and an important voice representing law enforcement in that area; however, he also took up the responsibility of actually chairing the working group for crime scene investigation, and as such, has been the leader in the division for that particular working group and particularly some of the products that you will see that we've created to help law enforcement with training and educational issues regarding DNA technology.

He has been, again, an important voice in both of those areas; however, the third reason that Ipersonally thank him is because I happen to live in the District of Columbia, and the leadership that both Chief Gainer and Chief Ramsey have shown in the District of Columbia and the Metropolitan Police Department has just been tremendous.

There have been so many wonderful changes in the District over the past couple of years that it's nice to be a proud citizen of the District of Columbia.

To give you a little bit of an idea of Terry's background, Terry was for a long time a homicide detective in the Chicago Police force. He's also a decorated Vietnam veteran.

Ultimately, his talent and credibility got him to the position of being appointed by then Governor Edgar as the Director of the Illinois State Police, and it was as the Director of the Illinois State Police that Terry oversaw the development of one of the largest and most sophisticated crime laboratories in the country.

So Terry understands and speaks well of the value of forensic science and particularly understands, and has a wonderful vision for, our ultimate application of DNA evidence in the criminal justice system. So with that, Chief Gainer.

(Applause.)

MR. GAINER: Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for that nice introduction. I guess it stands to reason that the person closest to the meeting is the one that's latest. The downside is going to the office for a couple of hours before this to try to get work done and the last person coming in saying, Can I talk to you for five minutes? And I don't know about you, I don't know when the last time you had a substantive five-minute conversation, so I apologize for being late.

Chris is much too kind in the introduction. One of the other reasons is that we're such good friends is I live nearby him and my daughter occasionally baby-sits for his daughter and doesn't have too short of notice, and sometimes I have to drive her over there and pick her up. That's one of the other reasons.

Can I also take a second to introduce the members of that working group are here because a lot of people work very hard. So would you mind just standing up and turning around here by working group. Police chief and you guys as well. Thank you very much.

Those are the ones that have really put together some of the products that you'll see over the next few days, but on behalf of Chief Ramsey, welcome to the District of Columbia. We think it's a much safer place, and we've tried to build on the proud history of what's going on here.

I certainly appreciate DOJ and NIJ and Attorney General Reno for getting us together. This is one of the groups that you feel a little hesitant about speaking to because I really feel like we're almost lecturing a choir.

So many of you and I have worked together and you know a lot about this area, but I think it'sappropriate that I try to frame a little bit some of the issues that we'll be dealing with over the next two days.

It struck me as we begin this in this technology area how wonderful and magical technology is in our profession. Global -- GPS, Global Positioning System, pinpoints where we are.

NDTs were replaced by MDCs before we got them in most of our cruisers and squad cars, and now our officers, I suspect like yours, those are the 21st century lamented they're too slow, they're broken down too much and they can't seem to get the information that they want or they lack access to the type of data that they really need in the field.

Lo Jack, of course, helps us find stolen cars and dark becomes light with the night-vision scopes that now everybody demands.

Nextel, Startecs, pagers, encryption, 800 megahertz, trunking, 911, 311, 711, * 77, communication possibilities all seem pretty endless, and hasn't videotaping changed law enforcement just a little bit across the United States, yet most people over 30 still can't get the VCR to stop blinking 12:00 hours or nearly every power-point presentation I go to requires a platoon of staff to get it working and to keep it running.

Aren't we still confounded by our own inability in own our agencies just to effectively and meaningfully communicate and get our word out to the troops about policies and procedures and core values.

But undauntedly to continue, our officers are more intelligent, they're better equipped, more scrutinized, diverse and stronger for it. They have a wonderful sense of community policing and problem solving, and they have high expectations of us now that, excuse me, and they have a wonderful expectation of us, even if I can't say it, but also technology has helped our opponents.

Laser beams guide their high-capacity weapons, encryption shields their evil messages in white-collar crimes. They scan our radios, tape our tactics and now some even contaminate the crime scene. They see the value of DNA spreading someone else's seed or sweat or practicing the rapist version of safe sex, a hood and a condom.

There is, however, a constant through all of this technology I think over the years. It started from Robert Peeland and it goes today.

It's the fundamentals of criminal investigation, and they remain firmly, solidly and happily intact. We have good, proven, understandable, legally accepted methods for reconstructing the past, linking cases, identifying suspects, freeing the innocent, testifying in court, and most importantly, preventing crimes because that's I think what our main business is.

Now, don't be put off by the inability to pronounce or remember what DNA stands for. It isn't as Chief Ramsey reminds me what we meant when completing forms years ago, Does not apply.

Don't worry that lab directors and forensic scientists and examiners or lawyers speak about RFLP or STR or genetic markers, although each player and concept does have a part in our little drama.

Soon DNA technology, DNA data banks, post-conviction testing will be as meaningful to all of us and our officers as striations, ridge endings, loops and whirls, mug shots or gunshot residue tests.

We in law enforcement must then address some of the fundamental issues which became very obvious to us as the Commission proceeded through our business in the past two years.

First is the identification and preservation of evidence right for DNA technology.

Let me give a couple of examples. First, the toothpick which most of my group got tired of hearing me talk about, but I recall shortly after getting to D.C. looking at a crime scene photo of a very heinous crime where three people were murdered, and that crime seen photo, was a toothpick laying on the floor.

When we did some investigation in that case, it turned out the toothpick was not recovered.

Now, happily, it didn't ultimately play a role in that because through the two years of work we found the right person, he's pled guilty, but it demonstrated the missed opportunity to pick that toothpick up and use it and capture the DNA that might be on there. We would just have to just look at a crime scene a bit differently.

Another example, one that we nearly beat to death, if you'll pardon the segue, was the baseball bat. On our tour of some of the nation's fine police departments and labs, we met with someone who showed us a baseball bat, and picture that bat, if you will, not in the hands of Sammy Sosa or Mark Maguire, but of a felon, and he takes the bat in a fit of rage and plunges it into the head of the victim several times blood splattering over the room and catching on the bat and the bat falling to the ground and the officers coming and doing those fundamental things that we do in crime scene investigation.

Our first reaction, I believe, would be, as I was trained at least, would be to concentrate on that bat. Again, we're assuming a lot of things have happened to that, but we would be looking at the blood on the end of the bat, and what this innovative police department did with the technology, detectives and the labs concentrated on the holding of the bat and the gripping of that in anger and the transfer of the offender's DNA to that bat. Again, it just demonstrates how we have to kind of look differently at evidence.

In one of the third examples, I think was one of our favorites, was the fired bullet. Now, this is a case, and the facts aren't particularly, need to be recited verbatim, but it turned out to be a robbery in which shots were exchanged between the offender and the victim and the victim of the robbery in that store got off a couple of shots and felt pretty confident that they had hit the offender.

Now, the offender made good his escape. There were no video cameras running in this particular convenience store. The offender was not very well described, not much evidence to go on, but the detectives doing what good detectives did, went out and started scouring some of the hospitals to, in fact, see if the offender might be located.

Lo and behold, someone walked into the hospital complaining of a through-and-through gunshot wound to the arm.

As you might suspect, the story that they gave that detective is the one you've heard a million times, they were walking down the street, heard a noise and suddenly were shot in the arm and knew not where it came from.

How many times have we heard a story like that? Now, here's the interesting, enterprising thing that those detectives did unlike what we may have done in our career.

Instead of pulling that bullet -- the crime scene was processed. There was a bullet in the wall, and instead of just traditionally taking that bullet out and sending it down to firearms for it to be tested in the hopes that either IBIS or drug firer or brass catcher could link that baby up, they first sent it to be checked for DNA because the thought was that perhaps the bullet passed through the offender, and that's exactly what had occurred. They linked the offender to that case from the recovered fired bullet in the wall.

Again, I don't think we routinely think of that when we're processing bullets. In any of these cases, it doesn't mean we're always going to be successful or the evidence will always be there, but it certainly is an indication of how we should treat the crime scenes differently.

We need not be traditional in our thinking. Now is the time to be thinking out of the box, way out of the box. DNA isn't just for murder and sex cases, and it isn't just blood and semen.

Let me give you an example of one other case, and this one I believe was down in Florida and you'll see the training value of this tape, tape on the CD that the Director was talking about.

This is a case which was a sexual assault. The detectives felt that they had narrowed down a suspect, but still couldn't tie the suspect to the case. They did not have enough probable cause to get a warrant to get any biological samples from the suspect.

What they creatively did was, in happenstance, following the offender one day saw this offender spit a nice hocker, a goober on the street. Now, I'll have to tell you, I looked it up. Neither of those words are in the dictionary, neither hocker nor goober, but I do believe it's a technical street term for what we all understand.

What those detectives, with the use of a bit of serendipity, did was get out a Kleenex, bend down and pick up that spit, took it in and processed it to the crime lab and lo and behold, the truth of the matter is the DNA from that sample matched up to the offender and they solved the case.

Now, all of these raises different issues, search-and-seizure expectation of privacy, litigation, fairness, all good issues all of which have to be debated, all of which the Commission spent some time and hopefully we'll get into a little bit here.

The second issue is very much related to the first, and that's laboratory overload. What we do take there? This is our issue. It is not to be viewed just as the lab or someone else.

There will clearly be more lab work. And do they have the capacity to handle it? And do you understand your obligation to tell your elected officials whom when we talked to them said, I haven't heard from my Chief of Police that this is a problem for them? But do you understand the funding that needs to go into lab expansion, the hiring of examiners and scientists, the providing of the latest equipment and the expansion?

Chris mentioned the work that was begun in the Illinois State Police. There are many state agencies that I'm personally aware of that have done tremendous work in here, and you'll hear from some of them, Virginia, Florida, California, Michigan.

I see Director Sam Nolan here who started and ran our lab system for such a long time and has now continued as the Director of the State Police running that lab system.

I have also sat and talked with another one of our members, the Director of the Virginia system who you'll hear from who tells the horrifying tail that he personalizes that because of the queuing that was going on in the lab, they didn't get to all the rape kits, and one of the rape kits sat in the cube, and lo and behold had that been processed, the director tells us, it would have matched with an offender in the database who was still on the street.

Prior to that lab getting that lab, that sample tested, that rapist raped and murdered again. Paul takes that serious. All of the lab directors do, and I think we have to share in our responsibility to ensure that the labs have the funding and the support they need, and we've got to squeeze our elected officials to make sure they do that.

A third issue, databases. It's been mentioned several times. Using computer info to link, hold old cases or suspects or suspects to cases yet some state databases aren't up and running. Almost half are not connected to the national database. Terrible, terrible missed opportunities.

We have nearly 1 million untested DNA samples of convicted offenders whose DNA profiles should be in those databases.

Don't you think we're missing an opportunity to link a case to a suspect or a case to a case, bring closures to victims and free the innocent and prevent a crime?

How many believe sex offenders are repeat offenders? How many have a pretty good understanding of that? Of course we do.

Do you know that we have over 180,000 rape kits that have never been processed, that are eithersitting in our police departments, in our labs or, I dare say, might be in someone's trunk as we speak today; 180,000 kits.

Now, not all of those will provide the information we need, but some of them could, and I think it's a crime that somehow the system has not pushed that issue quite a bit more.

A fourth issue, first responder training. All of the fundamentals of criminal investigation, as I said, still apply and then some. Environmental considerations are extremely important. Contamination problems even more critical.

Remember, testing under one process needs a pinhead sample; under another process needs much more, the size of a quarter. Contamination is very important.

The question about paper or plastic is much more important here than it is in the line of the checkout counter at the grocery store.

The fifth issue -- Chris mentioned it -- old cases. Old homicide cases, as you know, the clear-up rate generally across the United States hovers somewhere around 60 percent. Forty percent or so every year go unsolved.

How many of those cases would yield information about connecting one to the other, connecting to offender if we processed the DNA cases?

Now, again, you'll see that almost every one of these issues raised again goes to lab capacity in the problem there.

Chris mentioned, and you'll be happy to see, that again with San Diego the very forward-thinking process they're using on how to handle the cold-case issues.

The sixth issue is I think from whom should we take DNA samples. Commissioner Safir of the New York Police Department has been one of the very verbal proponents of taking and testing all arrestees, not just convicted individuals of sex or murder cases, which seems to be typical in many jurisdictions, but all arrestees.

Think of the debate issues in this, in this particular issue, collecting it from everybody, volume, search and seizure, retention of samples, the use of samples for other than law enforcement, current backup, crime prevention. All -- there's ying and yang to this. All need to be discussed, very much tied to lab capacity.

The sixth issue, again, the Director mentioned this, where we use DNA outside of the typical murder/rape/sexual assault cases, burglary and auto theft.

There's some very good information both from the United Kingdom and right here in jurisdictions in the United States that very much link the progression of crimes from property crimes to personal crimes, from burglary to rapists and murderers. And who of us are evenworking those issues?

The seventh issue, the statute of limitation in rape cases, again, you're going to hear from San Diego or, no, Milwaukee, excuse me, who has an unbelievably brilliant, bright, forward-thinking idea that rather than let DNA or, excuse me, rape cases fall because of the statute of limitations, very progressive, tested their kits, linked case to case and then went out and got John Doe warrants on the offender when they're identified. That's about as forward thinking as you can get.

And the eighth issue, which I think we could probably spend days on, is the whole death penalty question; our moral and legal and ethical obligations concerning that; how we hold the evidence; the destruction of evidence; the finality.

It certainly is tied in with what we do, and there has been some accusations that we in law enforcement have not been very forthcoming in holding on to the evidence, producing it when it's needed or when there's a hint that there's some type of appeal to destroy that evidence. I think we have an obligation to discuss that and take an opinion.

Now, this confab, us getting together, I think you'll see with the workshops that are set up will directly address many of these issues, and I believe it is our obligation to take and form opinions on those, offer and send our cards and letters and notes to those who help set policy and allocate dollars, and I think you'll find, as I have, over the last couple of years really focusing on the DNA that there is tremendous, tremendous possibilities.

So I look forward to working with you over these two days, and this little DNA technology tag you have is the official Washington one get-out-of-jail free card for anybody attending the conference. So thank you very much.

(Applause.)

MR. ASPLEN: See what I mean? What I didn't tell you about Chief Gainer, because I didn't want you to have a bad opinion of him before we started, was he also happens to be an attorney, and I think you can see that -- I don't know if that was the reason, but perhaps that's part of it, but he certainly knows how to make a point, and I think, again, his vision and his advocacy of the issue I think is very clear. Again, we thank him for that.

The next speaker, Dr. Forman, is going to essentially give us kind of a primer on DNA technology, and we thought it might important that we take some time to kind of level the playing field.

There may be some of you out there who understand DNA technology very well. I know there are some of you out there who understand DNA technology very well, but there are probably just as many of you out there who may not know the first thing about DNA and DNA technology.

So we thought it important to ground us in some general information about what it is that we're dealing with, and perhaps there's probably nobody better to do that than Dr. Forman.

Dr. Forman is currently the Deputy Director of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence and in that regard is an integral part and integrally responsible for the Commission's success for this reason:

As the Director of the Commission, I have to bring certain advantages to it. One of those advantages is not in any way, shape or form a scientific background. I'm an attorney by nature, but the great value to the way that the Commission was structured is that Dr. Forman is in her own right a practicing forensic scientist or was a practicing forensic scientist at Cellmark before she came to the National Institute of Justice.

She received her Doctor of Philosophy in anthropology from New York University and was an analyst at Cellmark for years. Dr. Forman has been through the DNA wars. She was one of the people out there in the front lines of the courtroom arguing the reliability of this science.

Dr. Forman is one of those people that is responsible for our ability to use DNA in the courtroom. She's also been an exceedingly important advisor to law enforcement agencies, to District Attorneys all across the country who need the kind of primmer we're talking about here, but need to know what the DNA means in their particular case, what does this result actually tell me.

Again, she is one with not just a firm, incredible grounding in science, but one also with a tremendous vision for the potential of DNA technology, but her vision goes beyond that.

She's also the Acting Director of the Investigative and Forensic Science Division for the Office of Science and Technology at the NIJ, National Institute of Justice, a recognition that there is just more than DNA out there than that while DNA provides us a wonderful example of the power of technology, as do other things, that Chief Gainer mentioned, but now there's a resource that law enforcement can come to talk about these issues and get assistance on these issues and to do research and development on some of the newer technologies that are coming out, and again, that capacity is extremely important, and Dr. Forman has that kind of vision. So with that, I would ask her to come and educate us.

(Applause.)

DR. FORMAN (Dr. Forman's PowerPoint Presentation): Thank you, Chris. That's a nice introduction. In point of fact, there are many people who could present this material; however, it's one of my favorite things to do, so I'm only too happy to be doing it.

If we could get a cadre of individuals up here to -- no. Actually, I think I can probably handle this one -- to get this started.

What I would like, if at all possible while we start, is to get a lapel mic because I like to run around and point at things on the slide. Thank you.

Okay. I have a little bit of housekeeping to do and that is ever, ever the tweaker, yourinformation about this particular talk is laid out near your seats in a conveniently three-holed punched format will which will give you sort of a run through of the slides that we're going to be talking about today, but also, I have to say, you know, come midnight that little power-point presentation was staring me in the face, so, of course, I tweaked it.

The one that you have, the one that you have in your folder is going to be a little bit different from the one that you'll be seeing right now.

We're talking about DNA evidence, so I'm going to give you the DNA 101 version. For those of you who already are familiar with how DNA works, what it is, how you can use it in the crime scene and what kinds of technologies might be coming down the pike, I hope that I will be able to add for you a few new analogies, a few new ways of saying things to add to your presentations.

For those of you who are not familiar with what DNA is, how it works, why it's such an important investigative tool, I hope that I give you a little thumbnail scale of something you can use to begin to understand what everybody is talking about when they talk about DNA.

So faster than the speeding bullet, more powerful than the locomotive, why is DNA such an important investigative tool?

I'm going to put this word up once, and I'm never going to put it up again, deoxyribonucleic acid. You only have to spell it when you're an expert witness in court because they hope you'll mess it up and then they can discredit you.

But in point of fact, the reason the DNA is so important is because of a couple fundamental characteristics.

First of all, as has been mentioned, DNA has a very high information content. With a very small sample of DNA, it is possible to uniquely identify the source of that DNA to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty to examine the person who left that DNA except for identical twins. So that is the essence of what makes DNA the most important forensic addition to evidence analysis since the fingerprint.

There are some other important aspects about or characteristics about this molecule, this DNA molecule that are important, and what I've done is just put up, you know, just a regular bunch of stuff that could happen in any old crime scene, randomly chosen, to show you that DNA can be found on any source.

You can get DNA evidence off of any kind of surface. You can get it off of mud. You can get it off of wool. You can get it off of rock. You can get DNA, you can get blood from a stone, and it is very robust. It is very durable.

So DNA evidence can last not just for the days that you could sometimes get serological evidence off of a sample, not just for the weeks that you could get other less useful serologicalmarkers off of a sample, but for years.

We are routinely, not regularly, but routinely, when we attempted, solving cases with DNA that are 20 and 30 years old.

So those cases that have been sitting on people's bed posts all of those years, there might be a solution for them. There might be an absolute solution for them, and that is the true power of DNA; its uniqueness, its ability to uniquely identify one person is distinct from another and its ability to stay on the evidence for a really long period of time.

Now, we're going to do a little basic background now. Is this working? Okay. I need 14 people to turn on the mic. I'll speak loudly for a moment and hand this off to my technology wizards over here. Can everyone hear me? Is it okay?

Okay. All right. This is the part where if you were watching television right now, probably between 30 and 80 percent of you would click the remote. All right. But we're going to do it anyway because DNA is actually very simple, very easy to understand.

DNA is an organic substance which is found in the nucleus of cells. Now, this is the part where about a third of the jury says, Cells? What's cells? And I remind the jury that probably some of them have even eaten cells for breakfast because, in fact, an egg is a specialized cell.

It has the outer membrane, the white of the egg. The albumin of the egg is the cytoplasm, and the yolk of the egg contains the chromosomes or the nucleus. It's the nucleus of the egg that contains -- it contains the genetic material which is where the DNA is located.

The DNA is comprised of four building blocks called bases. The bases have names. I won't bore you with the names. I'll just tell you the initials. The initials are A, T, G and C, and it is the arrangement of these bases in the DNA molecule which determines each one of our individual characteristics.

There is a certain structure to these bases. They can only go together in a particular way. A can only bond to T and T to A; G to C and C to G. That's the only way that this molecule can be together in a stable fashion.

The structure of DNA is like a ladder with the rungs of the ladder, these alternating base pairs, A-T, G-C, C-G, A-T and so on, and the sides of the ladder are sugar-and-frosting bonds, and then the entire ladder is twisted around itself to form that famous double-helix shape that Watson and Krik won the Nobel Prize for in the late 50's for discovering that shape.

Well, now that the remote has been used to click on to anything, I Love Lucy reruns, anything is better than this, right?

Let me just tell you that, in fact, DNA is so easy to understand. If you are, if you have a primary language that you can speak to another person that gets your wants met; Could you fill up the carwith gas, please? May I have a Coca Cola? Which way is the bathroom? If you can say all of those things to another person and they can respond to you in a way that identifies that they understood what you said and meets the need that you have, you can understand DNA because DNA is simply information.

Like English, DNA has an alphabet that I just mentioned; A, T, C and G. It's got a four-letter alphabet. We deal with a 26-letter alphabet every day all the time.

In fact, the rules of our alphabet are much more difficult than the rules of DNA. I've told you that A and T must bond together or T and A to form a rung of the DNA ladder. G and C or C and G. We have much more complicated rules in our regular, everyday language.

For example, Q and U are the only things that can go together. Can you explain to an eight-year-old child why, S-N-O-W, is snow and, N-O-W, is not snow -- I said it wrong, but you get the idea.

The rules in English are much more difficult than the rules in DNA. Going along this analogy, the alphabet that we have is used to make up these different words.

The As, Ts, Cs and Gs in DNA are used to make up the genetic equivalent of a word, which is a codon, a unit of information that imparts a particular specific bit of information to your body.

Just like words are strung together to form a sentence which gives you a much more comprehensive idea of a notion than just a word, codons are strung together to form a gene, a structural unit of information that tells your body something that it needs to do, something that it needs to make. Just like a sentence can direct you, the gene directs the body.

Sentences are woven together in a book to form a chapter, so there's something integral about all of those sentences that start you out at the beginning of the chapter and get you someplace at the end of the chapter where you have more information about what was going on than you did before you started the chapter.

Exactly the same is true when you string the genes together along a chromosome. Each normal human has 46 chromosomes in each of their body cells. So there are basically 46 chapters to a human book.

Going along this analogy, a chapter, again, is woven into a book. A book starts at the beginning, builds up in the middle, all the kinds of books I read because I only read mysteries, but there you have it, starts at the beginning, builds up at the middle and concludes at the end.

So there's a whole unit of information that by the time you're through with this particular book, you have a complete idea of what occurred that was supposed to be the plot that you were supposed to understand.

In DNA, all of the chromosomes together combine your DNA book. They make you uniquelyyou. Your human book, a book of all 46 chromosomes in a normal human complement is called your genome and many people have probably heard about the human genome project which finished way ahead of schedule in terms of identifying how those letters of that DNA alphabet, those As, Ts, Gs and Cs, sat next to one another in one person, one genome, one human being's genetic book.

They can now read one complete book of a human being, and by having that one complete book of a human being, we will now be able to take little snippets from everyone and line them up as though it was a road map. Lining up against that one genome map, we can start mapping the rest of what it is that makes us each a unique human, a unique being.

There's one other word that I want to throw at you right now, and that word is synonym in my analogy. We all know what a synonym is. It's that little bit of flavoring that makes a word mean something that is the same, but gives it a little bit of different flavor throughout the book.

So in one of my fantastic murder mysteries, I might read that the blood flowed like crimson. In another page, I might see that the red hue of the blood, the rosy hue of the blood, the rosy this, the rosy that. You can see why I like this particular business, this applied science of DNA and law enforcement. It's really right up my alley.

Okay. So there's a way of making this book have a flavor with its different synonyms. The DNA alphabet has a flavor as well.

While people have to be fundamentally the same, there will be places where the DNA will be different. And these places where the DNA different, is different, the genes in those places are called alleles.

An allele is the synonym of a gene just like the synonym of a word for red could be crimson or rose or any of those other hues. Okay. I've probably beaten that one to death, but that's sort of the background of how you can understand DNA.

That having been said, you also need to know that DNA is a very orderly molecule. I said that you should think of DNA like a ladder.

Well, if we were going to look at a DNA ladder in each human being, that ladder would be three billion rungs long. It takes a book of seven feet thick to read an entire genome. That's how much information is compressed in each one of your cells.

So we have a very orderly molecule where the genes are arranged pretty much in the same fashion or exactly in the same fashion for all human beings and those genes are comprised of three billion pairs of bases.

Now, let me talk to you a little bit about the axioms. Here is the dogma that we recited about DNA.

First of all, we always say that no two people share exactly the same arrangement their 3 billion base pairs. Everyone is unique in their DNA, and we usually say except identical twins.

As we progress further understanding how the human genome is different between people, we will find differences. We have found differences between identical twins, but for the time being, let's just say no two people, except identical twins, share the exact same arrangement of whether they have a T next to an A next to a G next to a C, and I've only said one half of the rungs because if I say they have a T on one part of their rung, they must have an A as the other part. So I just read you one side. Okay.

However, we say 99.9 percent of all people's DNA is indistinguishable. That means that you can get on a plane at National Airport, get off the plan in Sidney, Australia and immediately tell the difference between a bushman and a bush because there's great conservation between the way the DNA is aligned in all people.

Most of your DNA is exactly the same for all people on the face of the earth and probably has been for millions of years and probably will continue to be for millions of years.

Well, now how can we say that DNA is such a uniquely identifiable way of screening who left crime scene evidence if we have to say that 99.9 percent of all people's DNA is absolutely indistinguishable? How can we say that no two people share exactly the same arrangement of their 3 billion base pairs if 99.7, 99.9 percent of them is absolutely indistinguishable?

Well, what you have to remember is that 99.9 percent is most of the DNA, but one tenth of one percent of 3 billion is 3 million.

So there are 3 million sites all along this DNA ladder where you could differentiate one person as distinct from another, and I just put up this picture of Wilt and Willy because via de la France, 3 million base pairs different and that's what it leads to, but, of course, you really just have to look around at your neighbor and identify that there are no two people in this room who you couldn't differentiate from one another.

Okay. So a little basic background. We talk a lot about DNA markers. A DNA marker is simply a distinguishing DNA characteristic. That's all a marker is.

In forensic DNA today, the year 2000, we are trying to have every case to look at 13 different markers, 13 different spots, 13 different genes, if you will, although they're not exactly genes, but 13 different places along the DNA so that we can distinguish one person as separate from another based on their evidence.

All right. So let's go through what you actually see. This is the part where you all become experts. Okay. So DNA markers can be used to differentiate people and the more markers that you use, the more uniquely you can identify one person as distinct from another.

What we have here is a representation of 24 people, person one, person two, person three, personfour, etcetera displayed across this analysis. There are flanked by these funny looking things which are simply molecular ladders.

These molecular ladders function as rulers. We run them on all analyses so that when we have somebody's DNA we can line it up with the ruler and identify what characteristics that person has in relationship to the ruler. That's their only function.

Let's take a look at the particular set of 24 people, 24 people who were looking at it one genetic characteristic. Remember, I said that we're going to look at 13 characteristics, 13 markers, we're going to try to do that for every forensic case and we are going to do that for every convicted offender. This is just one.

I think that you will agree that you can differentiate one person is distinct from the other for the majority of these people.

For example, you could differentiate this person from that person, right? This person and this person, person two and three, each share one characteristic, but they are different at the second characteristic. Easy as pie to tell them apart, right?

The fourth person, complete differently from the other three and so on. You can let your eyes wander along, but you'll see -- every once in a while, you'll see somebody who you can't differentiate. For example, this person and this person.

I wouldn't be positive that these two were from different people, would you? I would have to say, I don't know. I need to look at another marker before I could tell you. I might have to look at two, three or four more markers, but by the time I was through looking at 13 markers, I should be able, I will be able to differentiate one person as distinct from another. Here's another characteristic that you should know about DNA.

You can differentiate even closely related individuals. For example, here is a mother, a father and a child. Each child inherits one characteristic from each of their parents and each of the characteristics that you need to become a human being. So this child inherited this characteristic from his mother and this characteristic from his father.

Well, these people could also have a child that looked like this and this or a child that looked like this and this or a child that looked like this and this or a child that looked like this and this. There are many ways that each child can look for each of the genetic characteristics. So that using this kind of genetic identification with all of its different alleles, with all of its different synonyms, each one of these is a synonym, allows you to differentiate even closely related individuals.

Okay. I'll come back because now it's quiz time. We're going to make everyone here an expert and, again, I just picked any old analysis just out of the archives just for fun.

Because this was so large, I had to put it sideways, so we're going to read this one sideways. All right. Now, let me orient you before you take this quiz. You see a sign up at the top that saysLamda and down at the bottom it says Lamda and another sign under there that says 1 KB and a sign down here that says 1 KB and one in the middle that says 1 KB. Those are all molecular rulers. They're all run there so that you can size the fragments of the evidence characteristics or the known standards for the people to whom you would like to compare the evidence characteristics. Again, this is one molecular marker, no more.

You also see a lane marked TDS with two bands and a lane down here marked K 562 with two bands. Those are known human controls. Those people's DNA have not been sequenced for this particular characteristic, we don't know their exact A-T, G-C next to one another for this characteristic, but we've looked at their DNA so many times that if this pattern does not appear when you're looking at this genetic marker, something is wrong. It's a clue.

You don't want to count on the analysis unless your positive controls are accurate, and I'll tell you that the ladders ran or the rulers ran very nicely and the positive controls ran very nicely and you can count on those.

Now, let's look at the evidence. Let's see here now. We have number 52 Bundy. Does anybody see a set of characteristics in the lane marked number 52 Bundy? Are they light or dark? They're light because there was just a tiny bit of DNA in that sample.

This kind of analysis, by the way, is called RFLP analysis, and I won't bore you with the actual name of it, and this is based on crude abstracts directly from the DNA itself.

So whatever was on the evidence, however many cells were on the evidence, those cells were broken open, popped open, the DNA was purified and then it was analyzed to reveal a pattern.

When there's a very light pattern, it means that there was a little bit of DNA. There were very few cells. Okay.

In the next lane, you see a lane marked 78 Boot. Does everybody see a pattern there? You should be seeing two bands. A little bit darker. There was more DNA there. There were more cells there.

The next lane is marked number 12, Foyer. A little bit of DNA, lot of DNA?

THE AUDIENCE: A lot.

DR. FORMAN: A lot of DNA. Probably 3, 4 million cells worth of DNA right there. So that's the evidence from which these patterns were obtained.

Now let's look at the known standards that were provided by people who may or may not have been involved in the case.

You know, we put their names up here, but it could be anybody. Maybe somebody out golfing lately, I don't know.

So O. Simpson, do you see anything that matches up with O. Simpson from someplace like Bundy, for example? Okay. Anyplace else?

THE AUDIENCE: Foyer.

DR. FORMAN: Number 12, the foyer. Okay. Again, not from Rocking Horse Drive, wherever that might be.

N. Brown, do see any samples that match on N. Brown? Number 78, the Boot?

R. Goldman. R. Goldman shares a characteristic with N. Brown. He is easy to differentiate from N. Brown because he only has one and she clearly has two. So you would never say if you saw these two patterns together that this person is this person. Okay. However, he could be masked in that number 78 Boot sample. We don't know. We don't know if he's there or not.

Does everybody feel comfortable reading these? . You're all experts. Congratulations.

Okay. Let me tell you a little bit about the kinds of technologies that you're likely to run into. I imagine that that last technology was RFLP technology. It is the technology that, as Chris mentioned, I spend a lot of time in court talking about. It's reliable, yes. Okay. It is incredibly reliable; however, there are some limitations to RFLP that mean that it is a passing technology.

RFLP is, requires a stain the size of between a dime and a quarter. There has to be about a million good cells before you can reveal an RFLP pattern, and while a million good cells is really not a very big stain compared to what we used to need for serology and the level of freshness that we needed for serology, it is still a fairly large stain.

RFLP is also very technically demanding. Lots of hands on, lots, limited automation, and it also requires a fair amount of time to provide an answer.

The actual work can be done in about a day to two days, but to reveal a print can take much, much longer, sometimes even weeks. So that's just not very satisfying when we know that we can turn to other technologies and, in fact, the forensic community since 1992 has been marching towards other technologies.

Those other technologies are based on the method called PCR, polymerase chain reaction.

The polymerase chain reaction is a way of copying or amplifying a small sample of DNA into a large sample of DNA.

Remember I told you that DNA is like a ladder and that the rungs of the ladder are comprised of these alternating base pairs.

Well, it turned out I guess it was around 1990 that somebody figured out that you could unzip these base pairs, you could saw this ladder in half if you simply added sodium hydroxide orheated the ladder, the ladder would pop apart.

But the ladder does not like to be popped apart. Those base pairs like to be next to one another. They work very hard to be base pairs, and so if you add synthetic bases to a ladder that you have effectively sawed in half either with chemicals or with heat, that ladder will reform itself. It will grab a synthetic T to it's a, a synthetic G to a C, a synthetic C to a G.

It will keep grabbing them until it rebuilds itself a ladder. That's what PCR. You unzip the ladder, you add some synthetic bases, it remakes itself. Now you have two ladders. You unzip those two ladders. They remake themselves. Now you have four until you have this exponential growth of DNA that you can now test.

It was the realization that you could apply this method to forensic samples that is responsible for the next generation of genetic markers that we'll be using probably for the next ten years.

Those genetic markers are called STRs, short tandem repeats, and they have the discrimination power of the earlier markers, but you can amplify them and you can, at this point at least, semi automate them, and before I'm through, I'll show you that they can be completely automated.

What you see at the top is that representation that I showed you earlier of 24 people for one genetic marker, and this is the way we have traditionally looked at DNA markers since we started using DNA in the late 80's.

So there's one genetic marker, 24 people. This is the way that we're really looking at DNA markers now. It's simply another way of looking at those markers.

Down here we have one person for one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight markers, and here's that molecular ruler again down at the bottom. And you simply line up the person's set of characteristics for each one of these funny named markers against the ruler and then you can name those characteristics as to where they fall on the ruler.

So that's the way that we're looking at DNA now, and that's the way the courts are accepting DNA at this point in time. Again, we're looking at 13 different STR markers, and those are the kinds of markers we'll be using in the CODIS database.

So let me tell you a little bit about what's going on now and for the future. We are looking at training, we are looking at tools, we are looking at toys.

We want things that we can give to you now, we want tools that you can use now, and we want things that will make the future easier.

Talking a little bit about training, this is something that you will hear throughout the course of this conference, the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence has identified serious limitations in the availability of training to law enforcement.

They have also recommended increases in funding and support to the Combined DNA Index System. Now, how many people in this room are familiar with how the combined unit index system works?

There's -- actually, you're beating the attorneys guys. It's usually only about two of those that raise their hand.

The Combined DNA Index System is a computer system that is based at the FBI that allows states to input the DNA profiles of people convicted of certain enumerated crimes in their own jurisdictions in to a national database so that those profiles can be searched nationwide by all participants who have identified biological material at a crime scene. It's a very powerful tool. It will save incredible amounts of investigative time if you can simply identify quickly whose DNA is left in a crime scene.

If that person has been previously convicted of an enumerated crime and their DNA sample is in the database, you will get a name and address associated, not, not right away, there's a few steps in-between, but you will know who that person is.

As Julie mentioned, we also are putting out a number of products of working groups, guides and pamphlets and CD ROMS.

The DNA tools that we should be talking about and thinking about for today include some of these kinds of laboratory investments that I'm not going to bore you with today, but I'm putting up here so that you can see that there is an active and ongoing effort to provide the community with tools that they can use today to give you investigative information tomorrow.

But the most important tool that we need to talk about here and now is how to implement CODIS in a way that will make your jobs not easier, I don't think your jobs are ever going to get easier, but to make your jobs more effective so that you're not pouring all of your resources, all of your human resources into cases that could be solved in a matter of days by simply searching the database.

Let me talk for one moment about tomorrow's tools. We have a very strong effort undergoing at NIJ to develop tools that, as Julie said, will bring DNA testing to a point that it is affordable for all laboratories, to a point where it is fast for all laboratories and to a point where perhaps some day, if it's appropriate, it can be brought right to the crime scene to become a better investigative aid.

Those include things like new DNA markers. I've talked about the 13 STRs that we will be using for the next decade that are the markers of use for the CODIS database and so you need to use those markers in your casework to compare against, that's true, but there are other genetic markers that we're discovering through the human genome project that can be very powerful investigative aids. Markers like single nucleotide polymorphisms that can done virtually instantly and on a chip-base format.

Those might be the kind of investigative tool that you take in to the field and then bring back other, other pieces of evidence to be looked at more fully in the laboratory using other DNA markers.

Alu sequences, I'm going to bring them up. I'm a little nervous, but I'm going to bring them up. These are pieces of DNA that allow you to identify fairly integrately the graphic source the original geographic source of the person who left that DNA. They are called ethnicity markers.

So that person's DNA might not be in the database, but you might be able to get a lot of investigative information simply by looking at the DNA knowing what the ethnic background was of the person who left that DNA might be an investigative tool.

Let me emphasize again this is very far in the future, but these are the kinds of things that could be possible with DNA.

We're looking at new methods to make things faster, better, cheaper, well, at least less expensive. Those include time of flight in spectrometry where you can take a DNA sample and look at it for 13 genetic characteristics not in minute, but in 13/200ths a second.

I told the guy that's developing this to take his time. Go ahead. Go for a full second. Don't rush things. But he assures me that he can get it done in 13/200ths of a second.

We're looking at chips. We're looking at the kind of chip that will make miniaturization possible to ease the pain on laboratories who have no space to begin with and possibly bring it to a portable format where it might be a powerful investigative tool.

We're looking at robotics to free up the brains of people to do other kinds of more important work than just extracting the DNA.

So the future of forensic DNA, we know that technology will march on. There's nothing that will stop technology.

How we use DNA in a law-enforcement format, in a criminal-justice format depends on many, many aspects of which the technology is just the kingpin, and I think it's the kinds of discussions that you'll be having here today and tomorrow that will begin to shape out the rest of the way that this jigsaw puzzle can actually work, and I thank you very much for your time.

(Applause.)

MR. ASPLEN: Okay. Folks, I think that's a great beginning to the process. Let's take a 15-minute break, and let me -- when we come back, I'll identify some of our staff in case you need anything, but right now they're out doing things for people. So if you need anything, we'll let you know who they are. Let's try to be back in 15 minutes.

(Recess taken -- 10:00 a.m.)

(After recess -- 10:17 a.m.)

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