Georgia prosecutors, the GBI and an unusual ally, the Georgia Innocence Project, hope a $424,000 federal grant will help solve some old cases as well as exonerate some people who were wrongly convicted.
The money will be used to catalogue thousands of untested DNA samples that have been in storage for years.
The grant from the National Institute of Justice was awarded last fall. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation will use it to hire four temporary workers next month to begin the first phase of the project: putting bar codes on thousands of DNA samples taken in sexual assault cases from decades ago. They will create a database of those samples, which have been stored in clear plastic bins on shelves in a cold, tightly secured vault at GBI headquarters.
Once that is completed, the Georgia Innocence Project and district attorneys will be able to easily find evidence among thousands of old DNA swabs. This could identify suspects in cold cases, or help answer questions about whether someone in prison should be freed.
“This is a big deal,” Chuck Spahos, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia said of the grant, called a Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Grant. “Prosecutors don’t want anybody in prison who doesn’t deserve to be there.”
That GBI vault now holds almost 20,000 DNA samples taken from crime scenes in the 1980s and 1990s, before DNA was a viable crime-fighting tool. Using overtime, the agency had already put bar codes on more than 9,000 of the evidence bags in the vault, and it is easy to locate them using a computer. The yet-to-be bar-coded bags, however, can only be located if someone spends hours sorting through the bins looking for a specific case number written on a tag, a problem The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported.
“It will just streamline the process of locating the old evidence to see if we have it,” said George Herrin, head of the State Crime Lab at the GBI.
The Innocence Project is using some of the grant to hire an attorney to review cases in which newly-located DNA is linked to someone in prison who believes he would not have been convicted if that DNA evidence had been available.
“We’ll see if the DNA matches someone in prison or someone else,” said Aimee Maxwell, executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization that uses DNA testing to exonerate those who are wrongly convicted.
“We have had one exoneration out of that vault,” Maxwell noted.
Willie O. “Pete” Williams was cleared of rape and freed in 2007 after spending 22 years in prison for a 1985 Fulton County rape. The testing of the DNA collected in Williams’ case identified another man.
“Nobody should remain in prison if DNA evidence exists that could prove their innocence,” Maxwell said.
The purpose of the grant program is to investigate post-conviction claims of innocence, which would include testing, so most of the money is for that purpose.
But it also can help solve long-forgotten, unsolved crimes if tested DNA results match DNA samples in a national database, the Combined DNA Index System or CODIS. There are other federal grants to cover those kinds of expenses.
DNA is unique to everyone, except identical twins. It is a genetic marker more precise than fingerprints that is in every part of every body — in tissue, blood, hair, skin and bodily fluids. And the science is so advanced now that even old or degraded samples of fluids or other DNA evidence is accepted unchallenged in courts.
Spahos said local prosecutors will be notified if there is a match in any of their open investigations. Then the DAs can can decide if they want to revive a case that may have been closed for decades.
Last June, for example, Atlanta police announced that the State Crime Lab had matched DNA collected in eight sexual assault cases from the mid-1980s to a 62-year-old man now in a federal prison in Kentucky. Five were Atlanta cases and the other three were tied to sexual assaults in Gwinnett and DeKalb counties.
“The benefit to the prosecution is they will have this database of cases that have never been solved,” Maxwell said “A vast amount of this DNA is going to relate to cold cases. Very little of it’s going to be related to cases that have gone to trial.”
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