MR. ASPLEN: While all the issues that we've discussed are very important, the issue that we're going to talk about now is perhaps one of the most critical in that we've talked a tremendous amount about how to educate your law enforcement officers to do more and to collect more samples, and then the next big question, necessarily what if they do collect all of that stuff that we're asking them to collect? The laboratories are going to be obviously in worse shape than we are right now. So a premium is necessarily going to be placed on law enforcement and the laboratories. So we're going to have Chief Cronin and Lucy Davis talk about those things.

Let me just say a little bit about Chief Cronin, and it is with great pride and pleasure that I call him Chief Cronin. As the Chicago department pointed out, Tom was his point person in the crime scene working group both when the superintendent could be there and when he couldn't be there. He offered top services early on, and we have used his services quite extensively ever sincethen.

Tom has been in law enforcement 31 years, and we were very pleased about a month or two ago to learn that Tom had been selected as the chief of police of Coreur d'Alene, which he refers to as God's country, and a debt of gratitude to Tom for all of his work and help.

MR. CRONIN (Mr. Cronin's PowerPoint Presentation): Chris asked me to speak about partnership between law enforcement and the crime lab. I started thinking back when I was a young detective many, many years ago, actually before I had gray hair. I was on the north side of Chicago, and we had a homicide in one of those homes where it would have been a nicer homicide if it was committed at the city dump. We had a newfangled machine on a mobile crime lab, one of those vacuum cleaners.
So my partner and I walked around the body. They were talking yesterday. We circled the body, circled the wagons, and looked around and said hairs and fibers. We will solve this case. So we asked the crime lab guy to vacuum around the body here. Then, well, the offender probably came in from that way, so just vacuum this part of the room. Well, then the offender had to have come through the dining room, so we vacuumed the dining room and the kitchen. We vacuumed three whole rooms.

We sent it to the lab. You know it took months and months of flowers, pizzas, gifts to get anybody in the lab to talk to us anymore. Mary Capruso, who now works for Sam Nolen, the director of the State Police, wouldn't even take our calls. The case never got solved. I haven't figured out how that happened.

Anyway we wanted to talk a little bit -- I'm not going to spend a lot of time because Lucy and I were told when we're finished, we're supposed to turn the rest of the lights off because I guess the rest of the building is also gone. One of the things that I'm very proud of being part of the working group, the crime scene working group was this little pamphlet that we put out, What Every Law Enforcement Officer Should Know About DNA Evidence. A million copies have been distributed, and as you heard the Attorney General this morning, they've asked for 500,000 more copies.

What I just found out a couple of weeks ago at the DNA, the full commission meeting, was not just an important piece of information for law enforcement. Other sections of the criminal justice system and victim advocate groups have found this so very concise. It took a very complicated subject matter and put it very simplified. So that's some of the reasons it's so popular.

We were talking about that CD ROM that you saw this morning, the beginning one for our first responders, and next month we're finishing up on the second CD ROM, which will take those same scenarios and go from the first responders, and basically if you kind of paid attention to it it was don't touch. We used to tell people when you come to crime scenes, the best thing to do is put your hands in your pocket. Don't touch anything. The second CD ROM, however, will cover a little little bit more for the crime scenes and evidence techs.

Along with the combination of more police, we've seen with all the cops, more cops, the grant monies and everything anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 more police officers on the street.Well, they're doing stuff. They're going to crime scenes and they're picking stuff up. That's what we do, we pick stuff up. They're sending it to the labs. We never funded the labs. We have 100,000 more police officers sending stuff in, but we didn't fund any more. Coupled with the more information -- I'm not just talking about the information from the DNA Commission, the pamphlet, the CD ROMs, but if you look at and you see magazine articles, news articles, the Internet, TV movies, how many times have you seen a police officer go right to a movie and see one of these brand new futuristic movies and then the next month it's you guys in the lab, can you do this thing? They want it done immediately. We're overwhelming the police officers with more information.

Couple that with the backlog. I think that most states -- I think Paul Ferrara and David Kaufman from Florida -- Paul Ferrara from Virginia are probably one of the few states that don't have a backlog. Everybody else has got a backlog.

I've got to tell a quick story. A couple of months ago I was still with the Chicago Police Department. I was commander of the forensic services division, and Superintendent Hillard asked me to go to Springfield to help our friend director Sam Nolen with the Illinois State Police. The superintendent called me up and said said you've got to go down to Springfield and try to talk to the house appropriations committee and get some more money for the State Police because they have $4.3 million I think it was they needed to clear up their backlog. The backlog was caused by the Chicago Police Department. About 85% of it was caused by us.

So I went down there and I did my part and left there, and I felt really good. The next day I got a call saying, yes, the house appropriations committee listened to what you said and they gave the State Police $4.3 million. I was really pretty proud of myself. I'm thinking while I was down there I should have got some for money for us, but I didn't.

About a month later I meet Director Nolen at another conference, and he walks up to me and he says thank you very much for the DNA money. I shook his hand, and he says, but now you owe me 100 squad cars. See, the legislation gave $4.3 million; they just took it out of another part of his budget. So I'm still working on trying to get him some cars for the Illinois State Police.

What this all equals is massive overload to the labs. What we need to talk to the legislation about is the previous panel talked about new monies, separate monies. What I want to talk about very briefly is partnerships. We talk about true partnerships between the first responders and the crime scene techs, a dialogue of what they heard, what they saw, what they learned when they got there to talk to the crime scene techs., to narrow or expand the search. Then we also talk about the partnership between the detectives and the crime scene techs.

Many times as the commander of the forensic services division in Chicago I was in charge of all the crime scenes in the city, and the detectives would say, I want this, take that, take this, and my guys, the forensic guys would say why? They weren't questioning. They weren't throwing the gauntlet down to the detective. They really wanted to know where you want to direct it at the lab. We're trying to get it directed to the right place so there weren't so many problems. More importantly we need the detectives and the crime lab personnel talking.

Somebody sent up this morning a very valid point. Instead of the lab technicians just doing almost factory kind of work when you go in there -- it was Clay Strange -- when you go in and talk to the lab techs. and set up some system where your detectives can talk to the lab techs., it becomes not just root work for them; they get an ownership of that case. They're much have more inclined to do a better job because they understand the case. It's not just a piece of physical evidence in front of them. That's very important.

A couple of weeks ago at the DNA Commission Darrell Sanders -- I think he has already left, but his favorite friend, Barry Scheck, had brought up the point about the neutrality of the lab, so I promised that I would say something about that.
This system that we want, this partnership of talking from the detectives talking to the crime lab people, is not to infringe on that neutrality, but it's actually going to help them manage their resources better. See, physical evidence doesn't care what side it's on. Physical evidence is an inanimate object. It tells a story. Our job is to find the evidence, to collect it, to have it properly analyzed and tell our side of the story, the more compelling side of the story, as several people have talked about this morning, which I love, the truth, the good side of the story.

Have you ever wondered how -- and I know my former superintendent talked about it this morning -- how quick things can get done in the lab when a heater case comes along, when the real pressure is on? I know I have had to call the state lab several times when it was one of those cases that the superintendent when he gets out of his car in the morning, the press is already there asking him questions about something that just happened within the last two hours, and so miraculously the lab has got to get the results done, and they do, but they do that at an expense, and the expense is all the other cases that you've got sitting in the lab. Something has got to stop. Something has got to be put on the back burner.

What we kind of hope to do is once the backlog gets erased, once adequate funding is done for the lab, and once the law enforcement, the police officers, detectives start communicating better with the lab people that the time frame for heater cases will be our regular cases, that we won't be waiting six, nine, ten, 12 months, that in a couple of weeks our normal cases will be done. That's kind of the hope of many of us who have been doing this for a long time.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist, you don't have to be a brain surgeon to realize that if we don't start working better, we're only going to benefit the bad guys. It's our chance to work together, these partnerships that they talk about.

I said to Lucy I was going to cut it down as quickly as possible because I think we have to pay if we're here any longer, so I'm going to introduce Lucy Davis. Lucy Davis is the DNA section supervisor from the Kentucky State Police forensic laboratory in Frankford, Kentucky. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Kentucky. She's trained in conventional serology, hair analysis, blood splatter, and DNA analysis.

MS. DAVIS: I will say for all of those meetings that I have gone to and I left an hour or two early, I apologize to those people. I now realize that I will stay until the very end from here on out, bottom line.

When Chris called me the other day and asked me if I would give this presentation, I said, Okay. Who told you about my soap box? Who has listened to me before talk about this particular issue as it relates to the forensic DNA laboratories? The reason why I think I was picked is because I'm known perhaps lovingly in the State of Kentucky as the evidence Nazi. I'm the head of the DNA section. I'm the one who sits there and says what evidence gets looked at for DNA testing and what evidence doesn't.

The other day I had one of my analysts come to me, and she was fairly upset. She goes, Lucy, I have this murder case that I did six exhibits on for DNA. Eddie has as a burglary case and he did eight. I don't think that's right than he got to do more evidence on a burglary case over my homicide. I said, Okay. We're going to have to go over this and look at this again.

Basically I am going to go through and explain to you all some of the issues as it relates to us down on the bench in the forensic laboratories and especially in the DNA section. You all are the law enforcement officers, so I'm going to start out with the crime scene. I will also tell you that when I talked to the officer and asked him for the pictures of a homicide scene and told him I was going to give a presentation at a national convention, he was so excited. I'll drive 45 minutes to bring the pictures to you and let you go over them and pick out what you want to use. Then when he got there, and when I told him I was going to use him as a bad example, he really wasn't that pleased with me.

Basically what we have is a homicide. You go in and there is a female found dead on her couch. First of all, the cause of death in this particular case, if you haven't figured it out very quickly, the scissors protruding from the victim's neck is usually a good hint as to what caused this victim's death. We started looking at this and looking at this whole evidence. What evidence do you really need to analyze in this particular case? Well, those scissors, that's a clue. Let's look at those. Well, when we looked at the scissors, we managed to find a fingerprint.

One of my biggest complaints about databases is that this is the second case where AFIS made the database bit before the DNA section did. AFIS got the hit off the fingerprint off the scissors and was able to identify a suspect. We have the name of the suspect due to his fingerprints on the weapon again sticking in her neck.

We also go and look, a sexual assault kit. Apparently there may be some sexual indications on this case. A sexual assault kit was taken at autopsy. There was no indication of any type of sexual assault, So we have no semen in the victim's vaginal cavity.

So looking at this as a law enforcement officer, what evidence do you need to collect? Those little yellow placards around the room kind of give you a hint to what was collected. We've collected or not we, the officer, the washcloth, the blue cup, a white T shirt on the top. There is a blue pillow laying over top the victim's face. There was a blood stain on the coffee table. There was another blue pillow laying next to the victim's legs. There is blood on the lampshade. There is a hair laying on the couch. There is a blood stain also on the couch armrest. There is on Exhibit 17 a blood stain on the victim's arm. I'll go to where that gets to be important in a little bit. There is another blood stain on the end table, Exhibit 18, and there are three bloody cushions from thecouch that all are considered part of the evidence and collected by the law enforcement officer.

All of this is important evidence and it does need to be collected, and looking at the scene and seeing what we can prove by looking at it all, you look at the blood, you do the blood typing. Now, the cushions and that type of stuff seeing if we can find semen to see if there was a sexual assault or something along those lines. We take those and we look for those particular items.

What I was going to say and Dr. Ferrara talked about this earlier in one of their cases where he talked about and the analyst found a second type going through the back of that taxicab. Analysts and evidence technicians are trained to start to look for blood stains that may be different. In this particular case you will notice this particular blood stain on the victim's arm, smear, that type of stuff, is pretty consistent looking like the victim's blood possibly from she moved her arm across. We have this other blood stain here. That blood stain, you can look at it. You're trained investigators. It looks different, and fortunately the people in the evidence collection noticed this on the body and collected it, and it is a different blood type.

The blood stain on the victim's arm, the DNA profile does match our suspect's DNA profile. So apparently when he was sawing on her neck with the scissors trying to kill her, he cut himself in the same manner and he managed to bleed on her. So now we have a blood stain on the victim's arm that matches the suspect's DNA profile.

Looking at the case and what you're trying to do and what you're trying to prove, you may want to document your suspect's movements through the house. In this particular case you go to the bathroom. You can see blood there by the sink. Apparently he has gone there to clean up. It's easy to show that he moved around. We know our dead victim apparently died on that couch. She's not going to get up, walk off the couch, go to the bathroom, clean up, and go back to the couch more than likely. So this is going to be documenting him.

You look at those types of stuff. Also, though, when you look at the bathroom, you have this blood stain on the bathroom floor. We've already got his blood by the sink. Do you really need to type the blood that's on the floor in the bathroom also?

So go through, look at all that. What about the other evidence? What other evidence do you need to look at and collect? In Exhibit 13 that hair on the couch, hair comparisons, I have done my share of them. Let me ask you, what is the implication to your case of a foreign hair on that couch? I'm not going to be able to say when this hair was put there. I'm not going to be able to say what relationship it had to the crime or not. I will guarantee you there will be foreign hair on that couch that I will never be able to account for. So if I have the other evidence that I have, do I really need to spend time and effort doing hair comparisons on something that may not ever help prove your case or not prove your case?

The semen stains, in this particular case we did find a semen stain on Exhibit 7 on the pillow. That semen stain ended up matching the victim and her husband's DNA profile from her husband, not in any way connected with the suspect at all. That's the only semen stain present anywhere near that particular crime scene. So we've analyzed that piece of exhibit.

More blood typing. How much blood do you want me to type in this particular room to prove your case? This is what I try to tell my officers. What is reasonable doubt? What scientifically can I have you realize is reasonable doubt? The suspect's fingerprints on the scissors. You have got the suspect's blood on the victim's arm with frequency of occurrence of one person in 1.9 quadrillion. You have a semen stain that matches the victim and the husband. If you want to sit there and say, well, maybe the husband had something to do with this since his semen stain was on the couch, on a side note when you go and you look at the rest of the investigative thing and you realize that usually a lot of our crimes we don't deal with the cream of society -- this victim's husband was killed three days earlier in a drive-by drug shooting. He recently had gotten out of jail, and the suspect apparently was one of her husband's friends, and when he found out that she was inconsolable in her grief over her dead husband, he came to console her. Apparently she didn't want to be consoled by him, and he decided to kill her, along those lines.

So the husband's semen being on the couch has absolutely nothing to do with the case. So how much do you need to prove your case? How much do you need from me to prove your case? This is the garbage can in the bathroom. There are Kleenex in this garbage can that have blood on them. Do you really need me to type that blood in that garbage can? If I find a third blood type in that garbage can for whatever reason, how is that going to change your defendant's story? He's going to have to explain -- if he explains that I was there at the house, I picked up the scissors, that's how my fingerprints got on the scissors, and then I left, he might be able to explain that. When you ask him how did your blood get on her arm? When I picked up the scissors, I cut myself, and I bled on her, and then I left, but I guess she didn't wash my blood off her body before somebody else came in and killed her. You've got to be reasonable in some of this type of evidence and what we really look at.

So coming from somebody in the laboratory, what all do you want and what can we do for you? Before you start to tar and feather me and before you pull out your guns and start to shoot me over all of this, I am not telling you not to collect the evidence. If you want to go and ahead and collect every piece of exhibit out there, go ahead and collect it. Please do. It's better to collect it and have it than not collect it and lose it is the bottom line. You can collect it, but just because you've collected all those exhibits, that does not mean that the laboratory has to do the analysis on all of them. You can take them and you can keep them.

The next thing the law enforcement officers say to me, they will come back and say okay. You know what is going to happen if I have this blood stain at the scene and you haven't done DNA testing on it? The defense attorney is going to come back to me and say that blood spot is going to exonerate my client. You need to test that blood spot.

We have had that happen to us before. I've politely turned around to the defense attorney and looked at him said, Mr. Defense Attorney, if that blood spot is going to exonerate your client, I'm sure this judge sitting here, who has already given you $5,000 for that expert that's sitting beside you feeding you questions to ask me -- if he has a given you $5,000 for this expert witness to help you, I am sure he is willing to give you money to take that one blood stain and examine it and exonerate your client. I will be more than happy to let you have that stain and do it. So far I've gotten away with that in Kentucky, and they usually don't push it after that. So you look atand try to work it that type of way and show them we do not have the resources to do it.

On this particular case, like I said, the detective was a little upset with me. He brought in 41 exhibits for us to do DNA testing on. We did DNA testing on three unknowns and three known standards and that's it. Our laboratory does still use some conventional serology to do our screening, so we know what we're looking for, but that's it, and he feels confident that we have proven his case enough for him that he can go to court with it.

Another thing about going to court, I will tell you in Kentucky we have been doing DNA testing since 1990. Kentucky, believe it or not, has one of the most liberal Supreme Courts. It took seven years to get a blanket Supreme Court ruling accepting DNA testing, but since we got that blanket ruling, which was a year and a half ago, we have only gone to court twice.

People ask me what the biggest impact is on DNA on my laboratory. The biggest impact apparently is it jogs a lot of suspects' memories. By the time we come back they know the DNA testing is going to be admitted. They were saying first of all I have no idea who she was. I have no idea why she would say that. The next thing they're saying is oh, yeah, that girl. She fell in love with me. She was all over me. That's how come I did it, like the case earlier where he was walking down the street, there was a semen stain there, and the victim went by and spit on top of his semen stain. They come up with some good stories along those lines.

So you need to look at this type of evidence and what they are going to say to disprove it. Why am I a DNA Nazi? Why do I not let that much evidence in? This is a partial list of the consumable items I use in my laboratory to do DNA testing. This is a list of what I have to use to do a three exhibit rape case, a vaginal swab, a victim, and a suspect. From the extraction tubes, from the amplification tubes, if you will notice, down here the profiler and cofiler reagents cost me almost $350 for a three exhibit case. You see I have to do ten amplifications. The reason why I do ten of those is because out of the three to four exhibits I end up getting I have to run six different controls to prove that I'm doing it right. This is to prove it to the defense bar. So a lot of the stuff starts to add up in cost along those lines.

So what is the cost of the laboratory to do this? For a basic three exhibit rape case in consumable reagents alone it's $165 per sample. That's approximately $500 a case. That's how come I'm so neurotic about not doing that many exhibits on a case.

The first time I presented some of these figures to my commander in my laboratory my commander I thought was going to pull out his gun and shoot me, and then once he got over this he looked at me said, well, this just goes to show you we are going to have to start charging the local PDs to do their DNA testing. The Kentucky State Police Forensic Laboratory is the only laboratory in the State of Kentucky. We are run by the State Police, but 65% of the work we do comes from the local PDs, and we provide it to them at no charge. So he looks at me and says, well, this kind of money we're going to have to start charging them, and I started laughing. I said you tell them that you're going to charge them to do DNA testing; I'm not going to tell them that. So finally the State Police decided they were going to swallow it and start to pay what they need to pay.

With a basic cost like this -- and I'm saying that's basic cost. That does not include my start-up cost, purchasing equipment, all of those fundings. We have basically set up our DNA laboratory by grant funding. Between NIJ and Burn Grant Money we've set up a full STR typing laboratory. So that money is not included in that cost. That does not include my stellar salary that the State pays me, which trust me is not that big, any of the benefits, any of the physical plants that come along.

I will admit different cases, different numbers will make that number fluctuate. I can get that number down by batching cases. The one thing when it comes to case work, you don't want to batch too many cases because then you come into the possibility of switching samples, and always the bottom line as I tell my analysts is you've got to cover your butt for going into the courtroom, and if I don't cover it and make sure that there is no possible way we could have switched -- we do not allow our analysts to work simultaneously on more than three cases, and I feel like I'm pushing it by letting them work on three cases at the same time. So those issues make it difficult to make that number smaller.

Also there are some other considerations that we've already talked about, analysts' time. There is a time out for the courtroom system, but there are also other issues. The amount of time it takes to run these tests is decreasing. When I first started this back in 1988, it took me literally three months to get the final results off. Grant you now with the PCR and STR technologies I can do nine genetic markers simultaneously. I can pretty much analytically get those answers in three to four days. That's true. But if I have to batch my cases to get my numbers down, that's going to slow down the analysis time.

I will also tell you most of our case jackets are between 45 and 50 pages in length, and putting those case jackets together, getting all that documentation to cover what we do are required for when the defense experts come in and want to re-examine our case jackets to make sure we do it correctly. That takes time. It takes the analyst time to do it. It takes the analyst time to go back and make sure the reviews are done.

Also another thing that we've talked about and mentioned here today is backlogs, backlogs of cases and prioritizing of cases. Like you said earlier, yeah, I can spit out that hot case in a turnaround time of five to six days, but everything else in my laboratory shuts down. No other cases get put out, and that makes the backlog go higher and higher. Also I fully believe in the analysis of cold cases. I think looking at old evidence is very important, and I've got a few cold cases that are near and dear to my heart we pulled out, but if I'm examining your cold case, his case that he's got a suspect out on the street is not getting examined at that point in time.

So we have to make choices about what the priority of the cases are that we run, and as long as we look at all these issues until we have additional personnel and additional funding to cover these particular costs of these cases I can't change that. I've got to look at what is going to be the most benefit to the community at this particular point in time. If I can take an active suspect off the street first, that's going to be my priority over the other cases.

I will also tell you I cringe when I hear discussions of DNA testing off honeybuns, picking uptoothpicks at a crime scene, vomit, feces, all that type of stuff. Yes, there is evidence there and there is maybe some good evidence there, and if you come in and convince me that there is good evidence there, we'll work it, but I'll tell you that type of stuff still takes more analyst time and slows us down on getting the rest of those cases out.

So what can we do now to make the system work for everybody? What can we do? That has already been discussed. The one way to do it is to start talking to each other. As I was explaining to them earlier, we had a detective in the State of Kentucky that knew how to work his laboratory. Whenever he had a major homicide, he would collect all of his evidence, bring it in, and he would also bring in a loaf of homemade bread. When he showed up at that door, we came running. We would sit down with him, talk about his case, go over the case with him, eat the bread. We were happy. We were happy to work on it. So now I tell my law enforcement officers what is the best way to get the most out of your laboratory? Bring chocolate. Chocolate works wonders in our laboratory. We are very happy.

About two months ago we got a package from one of the local PDs. It was wrapped as evidence. It was addressed to the DNA section. One of the analysts received it as evidence, signed it all in, opened it up, and it was a five pound box of Godiva chocolate. That PD gets anything from us any more. We'll do any of their evidence.

Basically the bottom line of that is you need to discuss with the laboratory what you need in your case scientifically. What is going to be probative to your case? I know a lot of jurisdictions use evidence techs. The officers do it, they take it into the laboratory, and what you're going to say is that's going to take a whole lot more time. If I take my time to go to the laboratory, sit down and talk to the laboratory analyst, that's going to slow me down. I've got better things to do.

Well, it's better to spend the time at the front end of the case than to wait until the end of the case and maybe miss something. If you come in and talk to us then, we can then sit down and work and find out what is going to be the most probative to your case.

Along this line you may want to go ahead at the beginning and discuss and consult with the attorneys in the case, what are they going to need. The bottom line is what we're going to do is can we keep the word "reasonable" in this equation and how do we keep the word "reasonable"? I give credit to the law enforcement community of having intelligent people out there. I know you all know what is reasonable, what is excessive. So if we get the law enforcement officer, we get the laboratory analyst, we get the attorneys -- and if you notice, I said pleural attorneys. I'm not just talking the prosecuting attorney. I would rather deal with the defense attorney up front in the beginning than to wait until the end and have to deal with him. Get the attorneys involved and also the judge.

I am seeing more and more the bottom line of the person to try to make this a reasonable thing is the judge. He's the one who makes the determinations of what is in, what is out, what is going to be reasonable, what I give to the defense, what I don't give to the defense. So even if in the beginning we need to get the judges into this, let's go ahead and get them into it and let them figure out what we're going to do.

Also I get these times, I've got a case, a little bit of sample, the defense called, they want us to hold the exhibits. The defense calls and says I want my defense expert in the laboratory watching you do the examination from here on out. It is our standard policy now at this point in time when they start doing that I say, here is the stain that everybody is so worried about. Prosecutor, here are the names of three private companies that can do DNA testing. Defense attorney, you pick three companies that you want to have. Mr. Judge, you make the determination.
I have absolutely no problem with not working the evidence. If they have doubts over whether or not I can do it, let the two attorneys pick a neutral lab, choose their lab, and let somebody else do it and do the work.

The bottom line is, like we said earlier, I don't have a dog in this fight. I don't care whether the suspect is guilty or innocent. The only bottom line of what I'm looking at is what the scientific truth is, and that's all I do. That's all I care about. So if they don't trust me and they want somebody else to do the examination, here. That's one less case I have to work.

But we need to get the lawyers and the judges and law enforcement working with the laboratory so we can can settle these things down and maybe end up getting more of the evidence through, freeing up more of the analysts' time, and then we can go back and look at some of these cold cases, take in these unsolved cases because I know that's where the big impact in law enforcement really is going to be.

So thank you.

MR. CRONIN: I was interested to note that Lucy is the DNA Nazi. I think that's the only Nazi I don't have in Northern Idaho. I've got the rest of them. I don't have the DNA Nazis. I'll hear about that I'm sure.

The next segment is I have a case from the Alexandria Police Department. I'm going to introduce Mr. David Baker. He's the deputy chief of the police department since February of 1991. He completed more than 20 years of service with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department prior to his appointment to Alexandria and retired at the rank of captain at the special operations division.

He has completed extensive professional training, including the 139th session of the FBI National Academy, U.S. Secret Service Dignity Protection School, and at the Police Executive Leadership Program at the University of Richmond's Chespin School of Leadership. He holds an associate's degree in administration of justice, a bachelor's degree in leadership, criminal justice management from George Mason University.

Also with him is Charles Bailey, who has served as the Alexandria Police Department's identification section commander since 1996. He has completed 23 years of service. When he was with the Metropolitan Police Department, he retired from the criminal investigation division at the rank of lieutenant. During his career at the D.C. Police Department he served nine years as a crime scene evidence technician, and as lieutenant he served five years in the department's homicide branch. Before retiring in 1995 he served four years as the commander of the forensicservices section. In 1990 he graduated from the FBI Academy. He holds a bachelor's degree in the administration of justice from George Mason. He's a member of the International Association of Identification. Please welcome the two gentlemen from the Alexandria Police Department.

MR. BAKER: With all his introductions and all, I guess it's time to leave.

I'm really glad to be here. I know that it's 4 o'clock and it's Friday and there are just a few of you diehards left, and I know you want to get out of here. I have been there and done that. You've gone through two days of fairly technical stuff, so I'm going to try to be short and simple, but I'm going to try to give you some stuff that will tell you practically how this stuff works in the police department. So bear with me. I promise you're going to get out in time to go to happy hour. I can't vouch for Charlie, though.

They've asked me to talk about a case or any case where DNA might have been significant, and let me start by saying that some of you might know that the Alexandria police are currently investigating the murder of an 8-year-old child in Alexandria, Kevin Shiflett. If you have been reading the papers and following this case in the papers, and my good friend -- I can't see him because of the lights -- John White from The Post came in, so I know he's here. If you have been following the accounts in the paper, you know that the analysis of DNA may well prove to be one of the most significant factors in our ability to close this case.

I think when the case is concluded and you have another session like this, this would be a good case to talk about for two reasons, one, the conduct of the investigation because it's very complex, and then, of course, the DNA component, but I'm not going to talk about it. I can't because many of you know that it's ongoing. We've got a lot of material. Lucy talked about this. We've got a lot of material at the lab that still has to be analyzed. We have not yet named a suspect in that case even though the papers have. I don't mean that, Josh, badly, wherever you are. So I don't want to talk about it right now, but I hope we do get a chance to talk about it.

I do want to talk about another case where DNA was a significant factor in our ability to close the case. That's the June 1998 murder of Mary Jean Wilcox. When I go over this case, I hope that my review kind of provides you with kind of a practical -- I give you a practical view of the importance of DNA, but more importantly, the important relationship in communication needs to take place between police evidence technicians, investigators, and people at the lab that are processing the evidence. Charlie will go into a little bit more detail about that.

I'm going to first give you the facts of the case, and then I'm going to talk about very briefly why the case was initially difficult, and then I'll conclude with talking about what was the significance of DNA in our ability to solve the case. Then I'll ask Charlie to talk more about this new thinking in evidence collection because of DNA and then again how important this coordination in communication relationship is between the lab and evidence technicians, and I hope you get something out of it.

Let me give you the facts of the case. This will sound like a police blotter, so if I get too Drag Netty, raise your hand and I will try to make it more interesting. But listen to the facts becausethey're interesting.

On the morning of June 29, 1998, Mary Jean Wilcox, she's 44 years old, lives in Alexandria, reported for work at her place of employment, the 2800 block of Duke Street in Alexandria. She was almost always the first person to arrive, and she was again this morning. She entered the office complex and placed her purse and other belongings on her desk, and then she punched in on the office time clock at 7:19 a.m.

At 7:35, not very much later, a courier arrived to pick up bank deposits from the previous day, and he entered the business and he found Miss Wilcox lying on the floor covered with blood in an area where there was also a large amount of blood on the floor and walls. Nobody else was in the office. No other employees were in the office. When the courier came in and saw what he saw, he ran out and use his cell phone and called the police.

The investigators determined that the office was accessible by entry through a door that was alarmed and that employees of the business had keys to enter the business and they also all had knowledge of the alarm code. There were no signs of forced entry, and there was nothing disturbed. The only thing that was disturbed was there was a small cash box and a set of keys on the floor in an office adjacent to where the cash box was usually kept.

On July 8, 1998, an autopsy was conducted, which revealed that Miss Wilcox had sustained 101 stab wounds to her head, face, neck, chest, and had sustained substantial injury to her brain, heart, and lungs. Think about this. She came in at 7:19. 7:37 is when the courier got there. She sustained substantial injury to her brain, heart, and lungs. In addition she suffered multiple skull fractures, fractures of her right and left fifth fingers, amputation of her left second fingertip, and substantial bruises and abrasions to her face, neck, back, and extremities.

The medical examiner concluded that the cause of death was multiple stab wounds and noted that seven of the 101 stab wounds were individually fatal or could have been individually fatal. The number of wounds observed on the hands and arms of Miss Wilcox were classified as defensive wounds, and this finding was consistent with initial observations at the crime scene where we observed a large amount of blood over a wide area, indicating that Miss Wilcox had a violent struggle with her attacker. Blood stains were also found in the kitchen area adjacent to the room where the victim's body was discovered, and it was determined the attack began in the kitchen. Actually what happened is she got hit on the head with a hammer in the kitchen and fell into the next room where the murder occurred. The violent nature of the struggle was substantiated by the fact that several of the victim's teeth were knocked out and the diamond from her ring was dislodged and found on the floor.

As a routine part of the investigation the detectives interviewed all of the employees of the business, including a coworker of Miss Wilcox named Roy Green. Green had worked at the business for approximately ten years and reportedly had a good working relationship with Miss Wilcox, and in the days immediately following the murder our detectives interviewed Green.

He initially became very emotional to the point where he couldn't continue the interview. He saidhe was distraught because Miss Wilcox was his friend and coworker, which at the time seemed to be a fairly reasonable and plausible answer. Green eventually told detectives that he was home at the time of the murder and that he didn't learn of the Wilcox death until he came to work in the afternoon of June 29, which was the day of the murder.

Several days later Green disappeared from the area leaving his residence at his sister's home without telling her where he was going and leaving his employment without notice and without claiming his last paycheck. We looked at Green early. We were looking at Green early, but this is pretty significant in the case because he vanished.

He was gone for a year. For the following year, for an entire year we, of course, were interested in questioning Green about the murder, but we couldn't locate him. Members of his family including his parents and his sisters and contacts that we had found out about, nobody knew where this guy was and they had not heard from him. But in seeking to interview Green detectives went to Green's sister's home, which is where he lived at the time of the homicide, and she allowed them to look in the room where Green had stayed and kept his belongings.

When they went in and they looked around, they didn't see anything usual. They were there on a consent without a warrant. Nothing was really discovered and nothing was seized. On September 21, 1998, we received a report of analysis from the Virginia division of forensic science in which a shoe print left in blood at the crime scene was determined to have come from a Reebok athletic shoe. Detectives who had visited the home earlier, actually several months earlier recalled seeing a Reebok shoe among the belongings of Roy Green, so they went out and got a search warrant, and they subsequently obtained and seized a pair of Reebok athletic shows from Green's sister's home.

An initial analysis of the shoes revealed nothing other than they were the same brand, Reebok. The print -- you all know more than I do about this, but the print didn't match, but the brand characteristic did.

Now, although the detectives and lab technicians had communicated frequently about the analysis of evidence already collected and submitted -- and Charlie will talk about that; we do that a lot -- here we worked closely to reprioritize the sequence and character of the analysis. What I mean by that is they got together and talked about a new theory, talked about something that they knew about in the case, so now the analysis at the lab included the extraction of DNA material from inside the shoes. The DNA was used to render a profile of DNA attributable to the owner of the shoes believed, of course, to be at that time Roy Green.

Detectives subsequently received a report of analysis from the lab indicating that the DNA profile extracted from inside the shoes that were seized from the defendant's bedroom was consistent with previously unidentified DNA material recovered at the scene of the homicide inside the purse belonging to Miss Wilcox.

Following receipt of this report Green was charged with murder, and the FBI in Atlanta, Georgia, arrested him on August 3, 1999, 13 months after the murder -- 14 months after the murder. Afterhis arrest detectives obtained a blood sample from Green, which was sent to the lab for additional DNA analysis, and this analysis confirmed the results of earlier testing. The forensic scientist who conducted this test calculated that the likelihood of finding another individual who had the same DNA profile as the defendant Green, which again matched the DNA sample found in the victim's purse, was one in greater than 5.5 billion, which is approximately the world's population. Green pleaded guilty to murder and received a life sentence.

So that's kind of the facts of the case. Why was the case initially difficult for us? First, Green, the suspect, worked in the office for ten years and occupied a desk adjacent to the crime scene, right next to where the murder occurred, and this at least initially limited the value of some of the forensic evidence, including the discovery of Green's fingerprints in various parts of the office, creepy parts of the office where it would have caught him in the old days. There was a shocking level of violence with no apparent motive. This was a huge overkill. There were no witnesses to the crime or the perpetrator's departure from the crime scene, nothing. No murder weapon was ever recovered.

Initially there was an absence of physical evidence at the murder scene that specifically and conclusively linked the suspect to the crime. I mean we zeroed in on Green and a couple of other people early and we had a ton of stuff, but we couldn't get him there. That's where the pivotal role in my view, and I'm not an analyst at the lab, but that's where the pivotal role of DNA surfaced in this case.

Lucy talked a little bit about this, this relationship. A shoe print made in the victim's blood was properly documented by trained evidence technicians and identified by forensic scientists as being of a certain brand. The reason I put that in there is that there is this whole new thing about training and this collaboration with the lab and the cops on how these scenes are going to be processed particularly since DNA is so prevalent. So that's a big thing.

Secondly, a pair of shoes matching the description was recognized as evidence and seized by detectives investigating the case way after the suspect had left the scene. By the way, he wore another pair of shoes. Most importantly, extensive communication and case coordination between the lab and investigators resulted in the development of a DNA profile from material inside the shoe that conclusively linked the shoe to the suspect. Finally, the previously unidentified DNA material found in the victim's purse matched the owner of the shoe and thusly the suspect of the crime.

So in short the collection and analysis of DNA and in my view how these processes were coordinated and prioritized between those investigating the crime and those processing the evidence at the lab is why we solved this case clearly. I mean if Green shows up ten years later, we might have solved the case, but this is why we solved the case at this point in time.

With that, I promised you I wouldn't talk very long. I would like to introduce Charlie Bailey, who is the commander of our evidence lab, and thank you for listening to me.

MR. BAILEY: Well, at the sake of sounding like a broken record, it looks like from looking atyour agenda everybody has already said what I'm about to say in some form or another. I just wanted to add on to what Chief Baker has already said about the importance of coordinating with the lab.

When I started in the forensic science field, my first crime scene was in 1994, so that kind of tells you my age, I guess, but when we started doing crime scenes in '74 here in Washington, there was no such thing as DNA. We really focused on latent fingerprints and we still do, but now DNA can almost be looked at like the fingerprint of the 21th century because now attorneys expect it, juries want it, and now even police agencies are beginning to realize the importance of DNA.

As Chief Baker said, it's so prevalent that those things can't be overlooked, but because DNA analysis is so time consuming, this coordination with the lab and the evidence technician and the detective is absolutely crucial, not only with the Roy Green case, but with the cases that we're currently working on. We're continuously forced to sit down and go over with particularly the DNA analyst each item of evidence and try to prioritize what is going to be examined first and what is going to be examined second.

The reason for that is we're now collecting large volumes of evidence. It's almost getting out of hand because there are so many different types of materials that can contain DNA, the kind of evidence we're looking for, but in the Wilcox case the suspect's DNA, although it was extracted from inside of the lining of his tennis shoes, we didn't submit that to the lab for DNA. We submitted it for comparison with the bloody footprint next to her body, and all they could tell us was that it was a Nike shoe.

It wasn't until we sat down with the lab and talked about this unknown DNA that we found in her purse -- you've got to understand her purse is on her desk, which is about 65 feet from her body, and it just was totally an odd place to have blood. There was blood inside her purse. There was no other blood near her purse for 60 feet.

So we had a theory early on that the killer went through her purse, and we realized from the DNA analyst that the foreign DNA was the killer. So it wasn't until we sat down and talked the case over that the analyst said maybe we can develop a profile from the tennis shoes from the lining, and that's what solved the case. That would never have happened if we didn't sit down and talk about it.

So it's really crucial. Some of the cases we're working on now we have so much evidence that we have to sit down item by item and not only decide what to do the DNA on first, but we also have to decide what test to do first. Should we do it for latent prints first or DNA first because we're finding that either way you go the test can be mutually destructive. So you have to spend time on that.

As Chief Baker said, we found Roy Green's fingerprint on the interior side of the doorknob of the office. As far as I was concerned, I was convinced that he was the last one to open the door. But the fact that his fingerprint was on that doorknob was worthless. We couldn't associate him withthe murder because he worked there. That's why DNA was so available in this case.

One of the reasons why this prioritization is so important, as I said before, is that the decision about what to process first has to be a concerted effort on the part of the analyst and the detective and the evidence technician. When you have a piece of evidence where you have to decide, well, what is more valuable to me in this case, the DNA or the fingerprint, and in the last several cases that we've worked we have had to make that decision, but we always made it in conjunction with the other people's opinion. I also ask them what is your opinion? What should we go for, but that communication is always occurring, and I think it should continue to occur.

You may ask who decides which way to go? For us it has always been a collaboration between the analyst -- in our case we also consult with the Commonwealth attorney, the detective, the evidence technician. It really is a cooperative effort, but the way I always look at it is as probability versus possibility. Sometimes they will say, well, it's possible, but it's not very probable, so if you get that kind of response, it kind of leads you to your answer, which way you should go.

The other point I want to make about DNA evidence, while it's obviously beneficial to the prosecution, I think we've also got to keep in mind that absence of DNA in my view can also be beneficial in the defense. Many times defense attorneys will ask the question after you introduce voluminous evidence defense counsel will have one question: Did you get my client's fingerprint on the crime scene? Your answer is no. He says no further questions.

Now they're asking the same question of DNA. So I think if we don't make an honest effort to recover relevant items of evidence at the crime scene that may contain DNA, then we're missing the point.

With that in mind I think it's advantageous for police agencies to reeducate their staff so they can recognize DNA and understand the importance of DNA. I think the NIJ published a training brochure that we distributed to our officers, and they listed a number of things that were sources of DNA, which included toothpicks, hats, clothing, dirty laundry, eyeglasses, cigarette butts, toothpicks, stamps, envelopes, bed clothing, fingernails, carpet. It just goes on and on. So at some point you've got to look at the reasonableness at what am I going to recover and after you recover it what am I going to submit to the lab? We do that. I tell the guys and the gals, listen, if there is any doubt about what you should recover, you can recover it and we can make a decision later whether or not we're going to analyze it.

I think this reeducation of your staff should include your first responders, those officers that are responsible for protecting the crime scene. They need to be aware of this new way of looking at the crime scene and recovery of DNA evidence. Of course, the evidence technicians that are responsible for recovery of DNA evidence have to be much more vigilant today. They've got to wear booties and gloves and space suits, and they've got to guard against contamination. We do that in Alexandria, and I would recommend any agency that wants to do a good crime search to do the same thing.

I was reading one of the brochures about DNA evidence, and I was shocked to see that it was even suggested that investigators not talk or cough in proximity to physical evidence. That's unbelievable how fragile that evidence must be.

In closing I just want to say that I think with all this new DNA technology that's available, I think that we need to take every precaution necessary to control the chain of custody, to minimize the chain of custody, and we do that in Alexandria. I would also like to see -- I think most people here are attorneys, I believe, aren't you? Are there any police administrators out there? Some police departments have part-time ID techs. or crime scene technicians where their time is devoted to patrol. When they get a crime scene, they respond to it. I would recommend that you fully support a full-time, well-trained evidence collection team because this modern technology I think demands it. Thank you.

MS. WILSON: This is not really a question. I wanted to get some comments from you all and maybe some comments from the audience members that are left, I know from my experience over the past two years I've been able to hear a lot of these discussions about how to process evidence and crime scenes and that sort of thing, and when I was at AAFS earlier this year, I was listening to a lot of presentations about whether -- there is a lot of controversy about whether the laboratories work with the departments in law enforcement about what evidence they're going to process because the argument on one side is we don't want to be biased. We know the law enforcement officers have been in this crime scene. We want to look at this case from a scientific perspective.

In my opinion I see it the way you do, you need to work together and that sort of thing, but I wanted to hear from other people about what are these issues that other people are defending trying to say no; we want to be scientific about how we approach these cases and unbiased and we want to be able to analyze the evidence that's submitted and make scientific divisions about what could be probative evidence.

MS. DAVIS: I'll start on this particular case. On the homicide that I show you earlier, in that particular case, like I said, the law enforcement officers showed up at the laboratory with over 41 exhibits. 41 was what we ended up taking. At that point in time he didn't select them. What he did was ended up bringing his notebook with his pictures of the crime scene, and he sat down and went through the pictures and went through the pictures and the crime scene with the analyst, and the analyst sat there. Even though he had his prejudged considerations of what was important, the analyst entirely independently though he was sitting there went over it and decided what may be probative looking at that type of stuff.

So even though you may be working with them, you've got to have the information he collected. We may not go to the scene, but there are a lot of ways that we can go back and independently -- and I will tell you there is a good portion of the time when the analyst has other ideas than the law enforcement officer has. At that point in time you gently explain in a very politically correct way that you think maybe he needs to look in this direction and change it around that way.

So I see that it can be independent even though you're working together.

MR. BAILEY: I don't believe there is a problem with compromising the investigation. The amount of evidence that we're collecting now is so voluminous that the sheer volume of evidence demands that the DNA analyst -- they call us. If we don't call them first, they call us and say what do you want us to look at first? There is just so much, and that's the prioritization. That's why we're talking prioritizations because I don't believe the labs can keep up with the evidence.

MR. GREENE: I'm Jimmy Greene. I'm police chief in Knightdale, North Carolina, and I represent the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police.

I would just like to say that I think it's important to collect evidence. By the same token, I think we have to respect the laboratories' opinions. You guys are the experts in that field. Many times I think, maybe as the chief pointed out earlier in this case with the Green that's no relation here, but Roy Green, the thing is, though, so many times six months, a year down the road a case can change. The facts in it can change and suspects can arise. If you have it collected, you've always got it collected. Once you leave a crime scene it's gone.

Something else that was pointed out which maybe sort of addresses this young lady's question, I think that the training is essential to the patrol officers or to the first responders, as it has been referred to, because I think cops destroy more evidence than anybody else, and with the transfer theory when you go in, you're going to take something and when you come out you're going to bring it with you.

We do respect the job that you guys in the laboratory do because I know you have a whole lot of evidence, but I do think it's important to collect it. Thank you.

MR. BAKER: I think that's a real good point because the extent that we may or may not educate our people plays big with the lab because I'm telling you there are some people that think you put the evidence on a table and a scanner goes across it and the DNA is identified. Charlie has educated me, and it's fascinating to me how it's done, but it has also opened my eyes to how that whole process is. So there is a real need to have communication with the lab if for no other reason than to understand the process.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: As a lab director and someone who has heard the criticism about knowledge about the crime scene, I think it's a ridiculous concept that just knowledge of the facts of a crime scene can create bias in someone who is trained to let the science speak for itself, and that's the approach that we always take is tell us what questions you're trying to answer about your crime scene and give us the facts about what you collected, and we'll analyze the evidence in conjunction with what you're trying to answer, but the fact that that creates a bias in the analyst I think is ridiculous.

MR. ASPLEN: I have to say it's a good sign if at the end of the day on the second day of two very long days people are still asking questions, so I appreciate that.

I think that the dynamic that we just talked about is kind of like for two days we have been talking about how to go faster and kind of rolling along and rolling along, and basically it's kindof like we just slammed the brakes on, and to some extent that's kind of what we've just done in offering a dose of reality. This is the kind of the world that we live in absent what we've learned over the last two days that we need to do to help reduce backlogs, to help laboratory infrastructure to get us where we need to go.

It would be great if Lucy didn't have to say things like I'm only going to test this amount or that amount. It would be wonderful if we had the resources both in people and technology to do that, but this is part of the world. This is the reality check here. Again, that's why there is such a premium on that communication between the laboratories and law enforcement and prosecutors also.

Also if I could also say when all you do is live and breathe DNA for three years now as I've done with the Commission, every now and then something comes along that kind of refires you up, and Alexandria Police Department's recent work especially on that Shiflett case is one of those cases when we kind of realize what they had done and how well they had done it. It just brought it all home. I know it fired me up. I know it fired everybody else in our office up, and I just congratulate you folks for that fine work.

I'm going to let you folks get out of here now, but I don't want to do it without a tremendous amount of thanks to the staff of NIJ and of the Commission, if I could have everybody from NIJ stand up, Dr. Forman and everybody down here at this table. I think this has been an excellent two days because of you folks more than anything, but this doesn't happen absent a tremendous amount of commitment to the idea, to the project, and to the recognition that everything we do on a daily basis ultimately is going to go to help save peoples' lives, and you will not find a more committed group of people in the Federal Government or in public service otherwise than the people at NIJ who helped put this program together.

I also should mention the folks at the justice management division, who many of you folks probably dealt with more by nature of the travel arrangements and things like that.

So I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors. Please realize that this was the easy part. Now the hard part starts because now it's your responsibility to go out and use what you've learned. Please realize that we are a resource for you in the future to any extent that we can be helpful. I have heard a number of comments from a number of people saying I'm going back and I'm going to talk to this person. I'm going back and I'm going to contact this person and we're going to start this coalition.

Anything you need from us at all, please do not hesitate to contact us either in terms of getting a hold of materials or having us talk about some issues with folks. We are more than welcome and more than committed to the project. So have a safe trip home. Again, thank you for your participation.

(Whereupon at 4:30 p.m. the meeting was concluded.)

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