Category Archives: DNA Legislation

Standing underneath a projection of their daughter’s high school senior portrait, Hannah Graham’s parents watched Gov. Ralph Northam sign legislation they hope will help prevent violent crimes similar to the one that took their daughter.
More than three years after the University of Virginia second year was abducted and murdered, state legislators this year passed two bills that mandate DNA analysis for people convicted of misdemeanor criminal trespassing or assault and battery.

Police in the German state of Bavaria will have new powers to use forensic DNA profiling after a controversial law passed today in the Landtag, the state parliament in Munich. The law is the first in Germany that allows authorities to use DNA to help determine the physical characteristics, such as eye color, of an unknown culprit.
The new DNA rules are part of a broader law which has drawn criticism of the wide surveillance powers it gives the state’s police to investigate people they deem an “imminent danger,” people who haven’t necessarily committed any crimes but might be planning to do so.

On May 25, the state Senate Appropriations Committee will decide if two bills that would demand the speedy testing of California’s large backlog of rape kits and the timely testing of all newly-collected rape kits will move forward.
AB3118 requires the first-ever statewide inventory of untested rape kits in California. At present, state officials have no idea how many kits are sitting on shelves across the state.

CLEVELAND, OH (WOIO) -It’s a healing environment for sexual assault victims. A place where survivors can tell their story when no one else will listen.
Jennifer Schlosser is with the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center and is glad that legislation is being proposed to remove the statute of limitations on sexual assault cases in Ohio.

Several years ago, the Supreme Court considered the case of Alonzo Jay King Jr. Arrested in an assault in Maryland, he ended up being charged and convicted in an unsolved rape case after a sample of his DNA, which police collected while booking him, returned a match in a statewide database. King, who had been sentenced to life in prison, argued that the Maryland law allowing the warrantless, suspicionless collection of his DNA violated the Fourth Amendment.

While NIST is not a teaching institution per se, teaching comes naturally to many of us who work here. We’re always describing our work in scientific meetings, so it’s not a giant leap to actually teach courses on what we do, though it’s perhaps a little more challenging to teach people about technical subjects they’re not familiar with. And that’s especially true when your students are judges whose understanding of the power and limits of certain types of forensic evidence can have such a profound effect on the lives of others.

If it becomes law, the DNA-related legislation could add a half-dozen or more misdemeanors — including assault and battery, domestic assault, petit larceny, trespassing and destruction of property, obstruction of justice and shoplifting — to the list of crimes that require a DNA sample from a convicted offender.

South Africa- The committee on Tuesday expressed its concerns about the “gaps” in the act, and has instructed the Civilian Secretariat of Police to fast-track processes towards the amendment of the act.
The Criminal Procedures Amendment Act provides, amongst others, for the taking of specified bodily samples (buccal samples) from schedule 8 offenders for forensic deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) analysis. The DNA profiles are then stored in the National Forensic DNA Database (NFDD).

A coalition including police officers and prosecutors on Monday proposed a California state initiative that would end early release of rapists and child traffickers and expand the number of crimes for which authorities could collect DNA samples from those convicted.