Transcripts of the Attorney General's Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs (AGID-LAB) Working Group

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

DNA DATABASES

MR. SCHMITT: We'll begin the afternoon portion of our substantive discussion. We're going to begin with a discussion about DNA databases. This is one where we should go to the horse's mouth for where we stand, so I'm going to ask Joe DiZinno from the FBI to update us all on where CODIS 6.0 stands.

MR. DIZINNO: First of all, as the FBI representative here, I just want to make sure that everybody understands that we are highly concerned about the user's needs, and the users of CODIS are the state and local laboratory personnel. In the redesign of CODIS we are relying heavily, if not totally, on input from those users to design an architecture that will improve the CODIS system to make it a more effective and efficient system for the users. We are in the midst of gathering that information that will create a better system for the users.

To address a couple of the questions that are in the document that we were provided for this meeting, a couple of examples of concerns that came up, the first one being the lack of authority or ability for the users to conduct keyboard database searches and victim database searches, well, as the architecture now stands, those searches are conducted by SAIC; however, the new architecture will allow keyboard searches to be done by the states, and this would include any database search of a legally searchable database in that state, and that could be done as a keyboard search.

The second concern that came up was the concern of the state administrators that the new architecture may inhibit their ability to know and regulate what the local labs contribute to the database system. Actually the new architecture will enhance the ability of the state administrators to control and regulate what the local labs contribute to the database system.

Currently there are three groups providing this input for the CODIS redesign to us. The first group is the CODIS state administrators, which meets twice a year. There is a CODIS subcommittee of SWG DAM, which meets twice a year, and finally there is a CODIS redesign committee, which I think has met three times so far, and that CODIS redesign committee consists of two FBI personnel and 24 personnel from state, local, and the city crime labs. That's where we're trying to gather the information from those users to create a more effective and efficient database system.

We currently feel that we have the appropriate personnel assembled. Some would say we have too many people giving us input into the redesign, but we feel that we certainly have the state and local laboratories' interest covered to provide us the information to create a better CODIS system.

MR. SCHMITT: Thank you, Joe. I'm going to provide a very gentile and controlled forum on which all of you can beat up on Joe or at least comment on the CODIS upgrade and ask questions to clarify that. So let's open it up, and not just ask questions, but also express what things you think future CODIS redesigns ought to do that aren't being contemplated.

MR. COFFMAN: Well, Joe was very diplomatic, but I'm one of those that thinks we almost have too many people at this point inputting on the redesign of CODIS. The CODIS team I'm lucky enough to be part of, and with 26 people you can imagine how we get bogged down on issues and getting anything accomplished.

I will say that it has answered a lot of my questions, I think having the people who are writing the bid specs for it. I think one of my biggest concerns when they were going to go to the Web-based system was will the wording in our legislation allow us to continue to be part of NDIS because now we're not technically maintaining the data. It's being maintained somewhere else on a computer; we're just adding to it.

The FBI responded - I don't know if you know Dawn Herchenham. She's just a wonderful asset to the whole community. She wrote model legislation for us to put into our laws and to help with that issue.

Then the other concern I had was because we've had CODIS in our lab for the last ten years, I guess, playing around with it and using it, it has become an integral part of the way we do business. All our LIMS systems and all our information systems actually hit CODIS and gather information from it and they talk to each other. That was another concern. And the people who are writing the specifics for the redesign are going to include the file format for anybody so they can still connect to their data long distance. So they kind of alleviated some of fears as far as this redesign process.

MR. SCHMITT: Do you contemplate that you're going to have your own mirror version of uploaded data?

MR. COFFMAN: We will have our own data locally because CODIS - you're not allowed to put name information and that sort of stuff, so we still marry those up now even with CODIS at our site, but I'm not going to - at one point we were thinking we would have to, but I'm not going to recreate another searching algorithm or system on our own because we have found that that's not as easy as it sounds to develop that's accurate.

MR. FERRARA: Joe, wouldn't it be easier, preferable, and make things a little simpler for CODIS if the federal law was changed to allow at national those samples allowed by the states - doesn't that make the architecture simpler?

MR. DIZINNO: It would certainly make it cleaner because let's say Dave in Florida wanted to search something in Virginia. Dave wasn't legally authorized in his state to search that, but in your state, in Virginia, you're legally authorized to search arrestees. The architecture has to be configured so that those sorts of concerns are addressed. So, yes, it would make it a cleaner system in that regard.

MR. FERRARA: In the way of comment, under those circumstances a lot of my problems with CODIS 6.0 sort of go away simply because within a given state there are certain samples - let's say wemaintain a suspect database or an arrestee database and such that would not be allowed at a national level. Then it almost forces me into having a stand-alone system to carry all of those.

MS. HART: One of the things, just to follow up on this, the position that the Department has now taken on this is that it supports legislation that would allow - if a state lawfully collects a DNA sample, that that would be allowed to go in and be searched. So, for example, let's suppose you had a state that permitted juveniles, you know, a juvenile adjudicated delinquent for rape who was 17 years old, and your state allowed you to collect that and put it in there. Why shouldn't, for example, Massachusetts, who might want to use that to solve a case - why shouldn't they have the benefit of that? The rape victim is still a rape victim regardless of whether the perpetrator was 17 or 21.

The idea behind it was also that it would allow flexibility because you can't predict how all of the states are going to be changing their laws and allow ultimately the state to decide what collections it wants and what samples it will allow to be submitted to the database. So that's a new development since the last time we met in terms of the Department's position and I think a very positive one.

MR. COFFMAN: Paul, I was going to tell that you one of the questions you brought up and that was made clear to me in the CODIS redesign is that they are going to have this huge computer with all of those nodes and each state has it own node. You're still going to be able to manipulate and search your data - manipulate is not the right word, but you know what I mean - change your search parameters or do whatever you would normally do at the state. It's going to seem like a seamless thing. You just won't have the computer there. It's the ability to search other states that could possibly become easier with this new format if the federal law was changed.

MR. SCHMITT: Do your statutes that authorize you to take the data and upload them, do they also specify what files you may search or do they speak to your searching? I was under the impression that they just spoke to your ability to collect and have a database of convicted offenders in the case of Florida, convicted offenders and arrestees in the case of Virginia. So I listened to the part of the discussion where it was a concern that perhaps David couldn't search the arrestees. For example, if the statute were changed such that Paul could upload all of his arrestees, I think, David, you would need no further authority to search in this database and find a Virginia arrestee if that's where the hit came.

MR. COFFMAN: Absolutely.

MR. SCHMITT: Joe, you agree?

MR. DIZINNO: Yes.

MR. FERRARA: My one concern - I mean this would really work well to everybody's advantage - one of my concerns is if Congress is ready to pass such legislation that would allow, for example, arrestees to be included. I mean that's a political issue. Hopefully with time we can demonstrate its advocacy.

MR. SCHMITT: We're going to get to some of those political issues - we're going to call them policy issues instead - in a little bit in our next block of discussions.

MS. NARVESON: One concern that had been expressed to me was with all of the data residing at one central location, in the event that there should be some kind of catastrophic hit maintained by the communication network, you know, what kind of redundancy do you have?

MR. DIZINNO: That data will be regularly updated, and I'm not certain as to how often it will be updated, but there will be a redundant system located at another site with all of the data to plan for an event of that nature.

MR. COFFMANN: Actually it's not going to be another site in the same city. I mean it's going to be elsewhere.

MR. SCHMITT: Joe, how will expungements work? Who will have actually expunged the record when there is one that is required?

MR. DIZINNO: The states would have to do that in the same manner that they would do it now.

MR. SCHMITT: So on the next upload then it gets taken out by having not been in the file that got uploaded?

MR. DIZINNO: In the new upload, yes. Hopefully that would be seamless to the states. They would address that the same way that they're addressing it now.

MR. SCHMITT: And for federal convictions then there is still the procedure that's in law where the offender will transmit the information as to his acquittal or - I don't recall if pardons are covered - to the FBI directly, and then they expunge it. If it's one that was a military, federal, or I guess D.C. offense.

MR. DIZINNO: The federal convicted offenders would be handled the same way.

MR. SCHMITT: Do I take it then that this is the consensus, that the initial concerns about the CODIS upgrade have been for the most part satisfied by further discussions with the FBI and the inclusion of folks such as David Coffman on the FBI's advisory groups?

MR. KRESBACH: I think you're still going to find in a number of states concerns of the big brother scenario where the state has relinquished its control, if you will, of its population in its database to the Federal Government. I have yet to absolutely confirm that my legislation is consistent with being able to participate in a fashion that 6.0 is intended to work, and I'm having difficulty getting appropriate interpretations of our statute from our Attorney General.

So I would imagine in particularly smaller, more western geographic states there is a little more independent streak out there that would be potentially hesitant to want to go towards this system. In some of the states it may actually require changes in state rules or changes in the statutes. I'm hoping that's not the case for most people, but I'm in support of the program regardless.

MR. SCHMITT: John, do you know if your state statute requires you to keep the records at a specific place or does it merely authorize you to keep a set of records consisting of DNA profiles of convicted offenders?

MR. KRESBACH: It authorizes us to establish the pool of offenders and their subsequent DNA profiles, and what we call our administrative center is responsible for maintaining that. Now, the definition of "maintaining" could be that I maintain it, but it just happens to be physically located on a hard drive in West Virginia versus physically located on a hard drive in New Mexico. It's that sort of subtlety that is giving some of our attorneys difficulty.

MR. SCHMITT: Joe, if I'm correctly understanding what you have described today and what I've talked to you about before, the states still - using the active verb maintain - the states still maintain their portion of their database through their uploads.

MR. DIZINNO: The data would be retained in the main computer at the FBI. They have the option whether to maintain a mirror image of that data in their state.

MR. SCHMITT: I guess my point is that it gets to you because they sent it to you affirmatively. If they're going to expunge a record, that occurs because they've taken some affirmative act in the state to have that file not be there at the next regular upload of the data to you.

MR. DIZINNO: That's correct. Once again let me offer the services if you are having legislative issues of Dawn Herchenham, who has a great deal of experience with DNA database legislation and would be glad to help you with any problems that may arise in that regard.

MR. SCHMITT: Joe, let me ask you on the advisory groups that you discussed are there representatives from the civil liberties community or is there some other means by which the FBI gets their advice?

MR. DIZINNO: Dave could probably answer that better than I can. I know that there are states and local lab representatives. I don't know that there is anybody from the civil liberties community.

MR. COFFMAN: No. Basically I think the original thought was we're designing functionality on an existing program; we're not trying to make policy decisions. So they weren't purposefully excluded. They have just never been part of the design process in the past, so there is no representation.

MR. CLARKE: Just in that same vein, I know with various forms of legislation and proposals obviously one of the swords we use is the criminal behavior that we make out of misuse of that information in many contexts, and I know at least as of some time ago there still has not been to my knowledge a documented instance of misuse of that particular information. I'm wondering if that is I assume still the case.

MR. COFFMAN: Yes, it is.

MR. DIZINNO: As far as I know, yes.

MR. CLARKE: Because I think that's very important as additional states seek to expand databases that we be able to continue to use that.

MR. FERRARA: It might be also worth just pointing out that in terms of maintaining the data, the Bureau CODIS has a profile and a bar code. All the personal information associated with those profiles would still be maintained at that state level. I think that might help alleviate some of the big brother is watching you concerns, I think.

MR. SCHMITT: I want to turn our attention now to Item No. 2 under the DNA databases category, the other discussion items, and specifically let's begin with the notion of owed offender samples. David, I was intrigued and delighted to hear you say that you have cleared your backlog of offender samples, and I'm certain that means the ones that are sitting on the shelves waiting to be processed, but does that also include all owed offender samples?

MR. COFFMAN: No, it doesn't. For the last eight years we've actually had one member of the section who was hired specifically to help keep compliance up on collections mainly for people who received probation or community service or who go to county jails like Mark was talking about or Tim.

Basically we are at the point now - we get from the court system the people who have entered or who are eligible for our database each quarter. At the end of the quarter we get who entered the system or who was convicted the past quarter, and then our computer program compares who we've received to who we should have received, and then we issue reports to the state attorneys, judicial circuits, and also all the crime directors in the state to try to get them to keep compliance up.

We're very pleased that we've reached - and this is a long road that we've gotten this far - we've actually broken the 50% barrier. We're actually receiving 50% of the people who do not go to state prison, but that still means there is 48 or 45 percent of people who receive probation or community supervision we're not getting.

I've called around because when we started doing this, I called other states as recently as a few months ago to find out what they were doing, and I was surprised that not many are working to get the probationers. So I think that's a pretty good number for our community now.

MS. HART: What do you perceive to be the impediments for getting that?

MR. COFFMAN: Well, the standard thing is it's always unfunded mandate, and even before the states took a hit with their budgets we've heard everything from well, we're going to have to pay for the mailing of the kit, and so we've offered to pay for the mailing, and then there was another excuse. I just think it's something else they have to do. In all honesty, sometimes the people involved in collection aren't the ones that receive the benefit of a database hit. They're somebody else. One county jail in the state actually told me when we went to go speak to them why do we care if you're going to catch more criminals? We don't have room for the ones we have now. I won't tell you which county that was, but that is kind of the feeling.

MR. SCHMITT: David, is it the case in Florida to the extent you know that every offender who is incarcerated and who then comes out and is required to give a sample gives that sample before they come out?

MR. COFFMAN: Well, actually the answer is yes, that even when we have an expansion to the law, like we're going to all felon states and we're in our third year of that, and this year was robbery, we only have about 1,800 robbery convictions a year, but we've also received 12,000 robbery individuals because they go by the time of release from jail because our law is retroactive.

So we are definitely getting everybody who is in the prison system. In fact, we're probably getting a few people in addition to what we should get because sometimes the prison system doesn't keep up with a past conviction being overturned, and so we have had to make some expungements because we collected too many, but it's really the people who don't go to the state prison that we're missing because the state prison is a large organization, they have computerized systems in place, and when we add a new statute, they have a new program now where they type in the new statute and it flags someone to be collected. So it's really hard for someone to miss someone in prison.

MS. HART: One of the things that we have been talking about at NIJ is the whole issue of trying to encourage collections that are cheaper, easier to use, you know, disseminating best practice information just to make it easier for people to do it as well as I think the education piece of this.

So I throw that out if anybody has any suggestions or things that they think we ought to be considering on this. Whether they think it's a good idea, bad idea, generally I would like to hear your thoughts.

MR. COFFMAN: I'll get my spiel out first. We went to oral swabs in July of 2001, and our collection compliance went up about 1,000 samples a month for people who go on probation in community supervision, so that helped a lot. But really the big issue, and we're hoping our live scan initiative in the courtrooms that we hope to get implemented in the next few years will solve this, but a lot of it is just filling in the information that we require to have good information on the sample being submitted to us.

With the oral swabs that we collect on FTA paper it's no longer the collection is oppressive. It's we don't know his Department of Corrections number and we don't want to go look it up or they put down an alias rather than his real name, just all of those kind of bookkeeping-type things.

50% of the samples we receive have missing information on our form, and we only ask for about eight items of information. So that's kind of what we're getting into. I think they're always going to complain whether it's easy or not just because there is information we must have.

MR. FERRARA: With the advent of the arrestee log coming up in January, that law also goes on to say that the person who is arrested must be tested before he or she is released from custody. We had been intending in the course for some time to get away from blood samples in Virginia, and this particular aspect precipitated us finally implementing a testing method that is based on an oral swab. We have just actually awarded a contract to a private vendor to provide us a new sample collecting device not only for arrestee samples, but we're going to take the same collection device - I have an example of one here - and use it for the collection of convicted felons as well as incorporating it in our physical evidence recovery kit and for known samples from, for example, victims instead of an intravenous blood sample, a buccal swab can be taken.

We're going to go with a kit - we've designed this - it's an oral swab fundamentally, but it's also designed in such a way to work with an automated punch system in the laboratory, so that when the sample comes in, rather than dealing with swabs or something where it would be difficult getting a uniform sample, this particular device allows us to knock out a three millimeter punch and have a sample ready to go.

We tested 50 of these devices. The other side of this thing is if you're going to do it on arrest, you've got to have something really idiot proof, so to speak. You want something very simple, something that can't go wrong. As an experiment what we did is, of course, we developed instructions. When we got the first 50 of the prototype kits, we gave them to police officers who had never seen them before, asked them to open the kit, and to sample 50 people in my laboratory, and all 50 of those samples came out with a single profile and we got beautiful recovery. We've got 50,000 of these on their way. It's called a buccal DNA collector. This particular one is manufactured by Body Technology Group.

MS. HART: How much is that costing per kit?

MR. FERRARA: The entire kit is $4.25. Of course, as Dave mentioned, by statute you have to collect a certain amount of information, and the main balking on the part of law enforcement agencies and booking stations is not the sample because they love the sample device because they no longer need aphlebotomist; they're not paying somebody 25, 50 bucks just to draw an intravenous blood sample, to say nothing of all the logistical hazards and problems associated with the transfer of blood samples, their biggest gripe was that there was so much duplicate information on the form that they have to fill out adding to the cost of this kit, but only 80 out of some 300 law enforcement agencies in Virginia have access to live scan, which can be modified to provide and fill out all that information for us.

The collector itself, if you look at just the collector, we're looking at about a buck and a quarter for just the collection device. That's what we'll put in our rape kits to use so you don't have to subject the victim or consensual sex partners to intravenous blood samples. The storage of the device and everything is very straightforward and simple.

All of these steps go to obviating at least in Virginia a problem with owed samples. Our biggest problem is duplicate and triplicate and quadruplicate sampling. But that's the way to go, I think.

MR. SCHMITT: Let me ask if anyone else is from a state where they do not have the retroactive sample collection statute where people who are incarcerated for crimes that would be qualified offenses at the time of enactment do not have to give a sample. Is that a problem for anyone who is here today?

MS. HART: Did everybody understand that, meaning you have a state and if you were convicted prior to the effective date of the DNA statute.

MR. SCHMITT: I thought it was clear.

MR. CLARKE: Just to follow up on what Paul mentioned about sample collection during the life of the commission, and Paul was chair of our laboratory funding working group, we struggled with that problem of continuity. We have 50 states. We have I don't know how many tens of thousands of different jurisdictions. It's very difficult to provide any consistency. The one location in the process that we identified there is consistency is the fingerprinting process, which is basically for all custody crimes or even lower than that.

We had discussions of things like I think there was a laser lancet machine automatically deposit blood on a card and so on. We know in the fingerprinting process the Bureau I believe still dictates how that process occurs in terms of the cards and their ultimate deposit with the Bureau, I think.

So we know it can be done. Of course, that also relies on the legality of taking samples at arrest as opposed to a later time period. I think it was certainly I think our unanimous view that that was the only time in the criminal justice process that law enforcement is used to doing an act of that nature. Otherwise we run into the difficulties of trying to create a new procedure and again thousands, if not tens of thousands, of different jurisdictions. But we never came ultimately to a conclusion because it relies on state law.

MR. SCHMITT: Does anyone have a success story for us of working with the probation and parole people to get them to be willing to do this?

MR. KRESBACH: Our original statute did not indicate who was responsible for doing the collections. Luckily we had a secretary of corrections of which our probation and parole division falls under inclusive of the prisons who is a former prosecutor from Florida and had known well of Dave's system.

He basically ordered that his probation and parole division and the corrections division would be responsible. They would take the ball, if you will, in this to be responsible for doing those collections. Of course, at first there was a large amount of resistance. It was one more thing they had to do and this and that. We have always had an all felons law. We have always used the mouth swabs, and after a very short catch-up period for all practical purposes we had no backlog in the collection of people that were on probation/parole.

Also at the same time to minimize the number of people coming out of prison, because that was also a huge collection curve, if you will, to try to catch up on those individuals, those that went on to probation or parole subsequently the probation and parole division learned that one of the requirements to go on parole was that you have to be in compliance with all state law. If you refuse that specimen, you're not in compliance with state law and you can't go on parole, so we had suddenly a rash of people wanting to give their specimens all of a sudden so they could go out on parole.

So we've actually had very good luck now with our Department of Corrections, and we're very interactive with them to try to minimize the number of duplicate and triplicate and quadruplicate collections. We've generally got a person five days a week at a phone so that if any of these probation/parole officers or corrections officers have any question or issue as to whether the person has been collected from before, we can in a matter of just a minute or two tell them yes, the person has been collected, you can indicate that in their file, and you need not do an additional collection.

So that is our success story, that we have for all practical purposes about a 99% complete collection to date of all felons in New Mexico.

MR. SCHMITT: But it took that leadership at the high level to make that happen.

MR. KRESBACH: Absolutely. Luckily our program is covered by a nine-member oversight committee. We don't answer to the state Department of Public Safety. We don't answer to the City of Albuquerque. We answer to the oversight committee. One of those nine representatives is from the Department of Corrections, so they have had their input from Day One. Before this statute was ever passed and the implementation of any rules, the drafting of those rules they have had fair input. Of course, it was the people lower down the rung that were less than enthusiastic about doing it, but once they realized our training that we provided, that it was a relatively simple matter, that it was a noninvasive, basically a nonmedical test, and was no less health conscious, if you will, for them to collect than someone who was chewing gum or tobacco or spitting sunflower seeds in a trash can, a lot of the worries were gone, and we really have no problems whatsoever with the day-to-day activities that have to go on part of dealing with those individuals. We've been lucky.

MR. SCHMITT: Any other comments on that point? Joe, let me ask you if you know to tell us how things are going with the Bureau of Prisons on collecting federal offenders and with the military on collecting military offenders now two years after the statute was enacted that requires those two groups of people to start giving samples.

MR. DIZINNO: I can't update you on the Bureau of Prisons. I'm not aware of how the military is doing with their collections. I can tell you that to date we have approximately 15,000 samples collected from federally convicted offenders for input into the CODIS system. We do have the same problems with probationers and parolees as far as collection of those samples.

MR. SCHMITT: You said 15,000?

MR. DIZINNO: Yes.

MR. SCHMITT: What is the estimate as to how many offenders are owed samples?

MR. DIZINNO: That's a very good question. With the passage of the Patriot Act the number of offenders that would qualify for a collection is greatly expanded, so at this point it's a very difficult question to answer.

MR. SCHMITT: What about military offenders?

MR. DIZINNO: I honestly don't know.

MS. HART: Lisa mentioned that before the Patriot Act she thought it was about 26,000.

MR. DIZINNO: I think that's about correct.

MS. HART: We just touched on the issue of retroactive collections. This was actually the subject of some discussion last time where, frankly, after the meeting Sue Narveson and I had a discussion about it, so I thought I would try and just raise this and see if I can get some clarification.

One of the things that had been of great concern to me back when I was in Pennsylvania was the fact that we had a DNA statute that did not cover sex offenders who were convicted prior to the effective date of the act, so we would be, for example, taking DNA samples the minute a convicted murderer was coming in the door and was going to be facing a life sentence or multiple life sentences, and it may even be someone that had a DNA sample for solving the crime, but we were taking that and with federal funds getting that tested right away, and at the same time we were having 3 to 4 hundred convicted sex offenders who were so bad that they weren't even getting paroled coming out the back door of the prison when their maximum sentence expired who were not going in the database and their samples were not being taken because Pennsylvania law did not permit it.

I will tell you that since then Pennsylvania has passed a law that now allows that to be taken, and I'm greatly pleased since I live in Pennsylvania that that happens, but one of the things that we had talked about the last time we had some discussion and then, as I said, we had a followup discussion - one of the things that when we talk about kind of long-term issues and short-term issues is that long term we can look at where we want the system to be down the road, but in the meantime we have some very limited resources and limited lab abilities, and sometimes some very tough choices have to be made about who we test and why we're testing them.

One of the issues that we talked about last time is that there are some competing interests here. We have, for example, for that convicted murderer who is going to be doing a life sentence, he may have rapes that could be solved and the victims would know that those cases were solved if we tested him right now, but at the same time if we've got convicted sex offenders going out in the community, we have people who are potentially going to be committing future crimes and creating future victims, and this is also an issue, too.

I'm not quite sure how to balance those difficult questions or whether we should even attempt to balance those difficult questions because they are very, very difficult ones.

Susan, do you remember this conversation that we talked about the last time? I think originally people - when you read the transcript, it looks as though people - that this group was saying that the most important thing was to solve the past crimes as opposed to preventing future crimes, and based on later discussions I didn't think that was quite what people meant. I don't know if you want to follow up with that at all.

MS. NARVESON: I think Arizona is probably a good example of why it's so important to test these people as they're coming back out, actually before they hit the streets again, but I think it's an issue of trying to make a decision between public safety and victims' rights. Obviously the victims have rights to have their cases looked at, and those who have been convicted have those profiles in the system so you can hopefully solve the crimes, but I think when you have to prioritize, I do think that public safety probably takes a slightly higher level of importance in my mind at least in the short term. The optimum is to be able to do both.

MS. HART: I think we all agree that that's what we would be wanting to be shooting for as soon as possible is a system that can accommodate all of those concerns. I have this conversation with Dwight Adams. Every once in a while a case comes up that we see where you look at it and you say if we had had the system in place the way we wanted it to be, this crime or this murder would not have happened, this rape would not have happened, and I really look forward to the day that I don't have those discussions with Dwight and don't see those articles and think that.

MR. SCHMITT: We are at the point in the discussion where we had scheduled a break, but we're way ahead on this, which is good. What is the consensus? Do you want to take a quick break or do you want to drive on to the next topic and take a break after that? Hearing no preference, we'll just continue on and we'll be able to get you out early today.