Fairmont vs. Mt. Notre Dame
Miami Valley styles
'Tis the Season Festival
Get latest headlines via RSS feeds
NewsVine
Del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Reddit
StumbleuponProposal would require evidence to be retained longer
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
COLUMBUS — Police and prosecutors would be required to record suspect interrogations, improve the way they conduct line-ups and hang onto biological evidence for as long as a crime is unsolved or the suspect is in prison, on parole or even on the sex offender registry, if a new bill becomes law.
State Sens. David Goodman, R-New Albany, and Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, on Wednesday, Aug. 20, unveiled comprehensive legislation that would also expand the list of those allowed to apply for post-conviction DNA testing to include ex-convicts on parole.
Current law limits post-conviction DNA testing to inmates who have never pleaded guilty and have at least a year left on their prison sentence. That forces some inmates to forego parole so that they can still try to get a DNA test – once they're out, they have no right to test.
And right now in Ohio, there is no uniform way for evidence to be retained. Each agency has its own policy. Sometimes the evidence is kept by local police, prosecutors, courts or crime labs — often under different storage conditions and for varying lengths of time. The bill would require long-term storage of biological evidence.
About 315 inmates have applied for post-convicting DNA testing since Ohio began allowing it in 2003. But more than 225 applications were rejected – often because the evidence had been lost or destroyed.
When Robert McClendon, 52, applied for testing in 2004, he was told he could not have the testing because the rape kit no longer existed. Four years later, with the help of the Ohio Innocence Project at University of Cincinnati law school, the Franklin County prosecutor's office allowed the testing of the child-victim's underwear that had been tucked away in a property storage room.
The DNA on the girl's panties excluded McClendon and he was freed earlier this month after 18 years in prison.
Goodman and Seitz' bill faces an uphill battle and will likely have to be re-introduced in the next legislative session, which starts in January.
Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association Executive Director John Murphy greeted the bill with little enthusiasm.
While the association supports statewide standards for evidence retention, there should be limits on the volume of material retained, he said. He declined comment on the requirement that police audio or video record suspect interrogations from start to finish and that they have a neutral officer who is not involved in an investigation conduct suspect line-ups as a way to cut back on possible subtle influence of witnesses.
Contact this reporter at (614) 224-1624 or lbischoff@DaytonDailyNews.com.
