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

March 4, 2002, Meeting

STATE AND LOCAL LABORATORY PERSPECTIVE

MR. SCHMITT: All right. If everybody can move back to their seats, we'll get back on track here.

We've very fortunate now to have a panel who will discuss backlogs, and they will frame some reduction issues for us that face laboratories. And we'll also have a breakdown of the federal government's investment in the DNA backlog reductions programs at NIJ.

We're very fortunate to have four, very well-informed folks with us today, all of whom you have met in some form during the course of the day.

And so I'll just let them decide who is going to go first and introduce themselves. And we'll get on with the presentation.

MS. CROUSE: My name is Cecelia Crouse and I'm from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Laboratory.

And what I would like you to know is that you've saving me a lot of money in therapy in allowing me to do this.

(Laugher.)

MS. CROUSE: So some of the things may be reiterated, but hopefully it's not just personalized to our laboratory; that it is kind of symbolic of what's going on in many laboratories.

I want to concentrate on a ten-month period. The first ten months of last year, specifically. But let me introduce you to where we are. We're the largest county in Florida and maybe the largest county this side of the Mississippi. We have 34 local police agencies, individual agencies, plus the entire county. We have the medical examiners office, the local FBI agency that we do work for, the local DEA.

We have some out of county agencies and out of country agencies. We have the University Police at two universities, and we have about a million residents. And in June 2, 2001, the headlines were West Palm Beach, Florida ranked seventh in crime the United States. No applause.

(Laughter.)

MS. CROUSE: So this is the group we have. We've lost one person. In 1992, we had four people. And today, as I sit here, we have five. And this is the contribution to actual casework, because there's a lot of other things going on. You have to keep up with the QAQC. You have to keep up with the CODIS and you have to keep up with the administrative duty and the technical leader duties. We have the equivalent of about 3.75 people max.

But we've become very dependent on NIJ grants. And we participated in the DNA Identification Act grant, and we originally requested $411,000, but we ended up with $421,000. The work that I'm about to show you was done by me going out and - I was going to say soliciting, but I didn't solicit.

(Laughter.)

MS. CROUSE: I went out - I'm a working girl. I went out and tried to get someone to come into the laboratory for free for 12 months to 18 months, and I was able to procure in this time period three-visiting scientists that overlapped each other that could carry on the duties to get this grant moving so that we did not have to have our lab personnel taken aside to do validation work or whatever it is we were pursing. Plus we had five interns in this period of time.

So before we got the money we were doing dots. Some of you may remember those. And we thought we were in heaven until we started getting mixtures, of course. And we were also doing polymarker DQ OFA and silver staining the loci CTAT. And then we got our dollars and things began to book.

So in 1996-97 we ended up by February of 1998 validating the two PowerPlex system. We had all 13 CODIS cora loci going. And recently we shut down the laboratory for six weeks. We just flat out shut it down. We told the State Attorney's office that we wanted to do PowerPlex 16. It would save us an ordinate amount of some, and they let us do it. We shut down and we were trained and we validated this system and went online December 2 of 2001.

So what do we do in casework? This is just really briefly what we do. I mean, we meet with the detective and we say, What's going on in this case? And we don't meet with them unless they've called. We don't go to a file cabinet and put out the next case. We meet with the detective when they call. They go on a clipboard. We rank them into emergency, emergency and emergency.

(Laughter.)

MS. CROUSE: And we go to the evidence custodian and we get our evidence. And we find the stain. We request the standards which may or may not hold up the case. We now have four judges that will not allow standards unless we show there's a foreign DNA profile. And this has really been very difficult.

Whatever that disease is it's contagious, because it seems like every time we get a new judge, we're getting a court order to do the work first before they'll give us the standard. Then we conduct the analysis and then we do DNA. What is in this black circle is DNA? That's it. It's you extract the DNA. You quantify it. You amplify using PCR and you get a DNA profile.

Then you interpret the data. Then you go through data review. Then you get the report. The only thing about this flowchart that is predictable is what's in this little black circle, and that's it. If you give me 25blood stains, I can tell you how long it will take me to process those to DNA profile.

So what do we do? We'll, we're trying to increase our efficiency. In the extraction area, I'm now vaguely familiar with the ABI Prism 6100, which I'm desperate to try. This should help exactly what George was talking about with extraction.

We purchased the Hitachi CCD-Bio, and that's helped us with quantitation. Our system is a lot more efficient. We rerun, you know, less samples. It's just been wonderful for us.

With regards to the profile, like I said, we're not doing PowerPlex 16. So everything that was in that little black circle, I'm not sure what else we can do to make it more efficient. Because we had these dollars, we also now actively participate in CODIS. And that's been wonderful for us. Dave Coffman is not here. Is just - he's an incredible administrator. I know. I was kidding.

(Laughter.)

MS. CROUSE: And last year because of the grant that David got we made a concerted effort to do no-suspect cases and 20 percent of all cases that went out last year were non-suspect cases. Real honest to God we don't know who did this. And 80 percent were suspect.

So now let me tell you the numbers in these first ten months. Three hundred and ninety-six cases were submitted in the first ten months of last year. We got out 160 reports. Now, that's not cases, because I had one case that had four reports because of the trickling evidence syndrome.

So about 40 percent of the cases were done. That included 677 submissions. These are bags and boxes. When we open those bags and boxes for those reports, there are 1,432 items or nine items per case. There were 3,335 plus or minus one stain examined, which is about 21 stains per case. Of these, about 1500 plus went to DNA profiles. This doesn't include the ones that we had to go back and rerun because maybe we needed to load more sample and get more data.

But that's where we were in the first ten months. So when we adjust for cases with more than one report or those that will not be prosecuted, 60 percent of the cases that came into our laboratory in the first ten months of last year were never opened. It breaks your heart. They were you just never opened. And this is part of the problem.

We lost an analyst. And this analyst, it took me about 15 months to get her trained. And now she's gone. She left in June. And that was in the first five months of what I just showed you. So we were back down to 2.5 analysts.

There isn't this problem with people wanting to be become forensic scientists. The problem is you're trickling in and training one at a whack. And it's really very difficult. When you lose one, it has a tremendous affect on the system. Screening the evidence, we've already gone through that.

But in this particular case, terror was given a leopard skin king-size top sheet, a bottom sheet, eight pillow cases, a comforter, and a pillow that was on the side. So we got the omni light, and we all got trained on the omni light. But she found 37 semen stains. And we had to narrow that down because we're not going to do 37 semen stains. We did 17.

That's still too many. That's still too many. And with a condom, this was the inside and the outside. That was it. But we got like seven donors on the outside - well, what I think is the outside. There wasn't a tag on it so I'm not sure one was inside and one was outside.

(Laughter.)

MS. CROUSE: But regardless there's a lot more interpretation than it looks like there would be. And then we have exactly what was mentioned before. We have five people. Four of them are dead. And here's your scene. And they're trying to reconstruct.

I'm not sure what to do about evidence screening, and I'm not sure why I have such a tough time saying no all the time. And, you know, we've talked about this many times, and maybe this is the therapy part, but I really think this is a huge issue here for getting cases through the system. So it can take hours to days to screen the evidence. There's your bottleneck.

Now, here's the generation of the data that Mark Perlin talked about, okay. So I generate some DNA profiles and I interpret the DNA profiles. And then I give it to the second analysts who will review my data, interpret the DNA data and then generate the review documents.

And then we have a data consensus party where we figure out, you know, what was agreed upon and, of course, if you need a third person, you do. However, that second analyst isn't sitting at their desk saying, I wonder where Cecelia's profile is. They're busy. They're very, very busy.

And it usually takes days to receive the secondary review results, unless you need them immediately. But these - we're in the laboratories doing this - doing the other work on that flow chart. There's our bottleneck. We need to have the expert system.

So we need a better idea. And one of them is the NIJ casework backlog grant. We are extremely excited about this. When we heard about this in June, we got back to our lab and we immediately started looking at everything, and we narrowed it down to 40 old call case homicides before 1997 was our definition.

Two hundred and twenty-four sexual assault cases where the evidence is preserved in our minus 20 freezer, but we haven't had a chance to get to it. But there isn't any pre-screen for semen at this point.

Ninety-eight sexual assault cases are still with the evidence custodian that we have to go get, but we will do that. And we have greater than 100 non-suspect cases for burglary. So we're ready. We want to do this. But the cutoff was 1999. We just had to choose a date and go for it. Our backlog was just too huge.

The computer-assisted DNA interpretation, we want to be able to have more input. And something that doesn't take up an entire analyst time. And Mark Perlin has been very generous in allowing us to participate in his program. And I'm excited about that.

And finally with case analysis, we have to have fewer items to screen. I wish I had a dime for every time I've said that. Fewer stains with DNA that actual go. And we try to charge the agencies and that didn't go over well at all. That was a huge problem, because we have very poor agencies down there. I mean, Pahokee and Belle Glade and some of these places, they do not have the money, and they would be left out. And we just - we cant do that.

But to increase the number of DNA analysts, you give me six more analysts and our lab will be humming. And that's what we need. This is what we do it for.

So we go to court and we say DNA is good and this is why it's good. And it gets in and then you end up being able to actually accomplish what you're supposed to be accomplishing. We want to do this stuff. I'm not sure I know the answers, but I sure know the problems.

This is what it is.

(Laughter.)

MS. CROUSE: You know, we're that poor, little rodent in the middle of road and something has got to move the rodent out of the way.

I especially want to thank NIJ for inviting me today and hopefully we'll get some insight with some of other people of how to handle this.

MR. COFFMAN: So I guess I'll go next know. I know a lot of you are going to be shocked, but I actually do not have a Power Point. So I just thought I'd tell you to hang on, Lisa. That's right.

(Laughter.)

MR. COFFMAN: I just thought I'd tell you what we've gone through as far as our offender program in Florida. And I think it was Mark Nelson who said this that the bottleneck just keeps changing, and, you know, you solved one and you created it somewhere else and that's exactly what happened to us.

We've been collecting samples since 1990. And basically we were caught up in late '97 for the first time. And then within six months we had an immediate backlog because the technology switched to STR. We're currently at a three-month backlog right now. We hope to have that taken care of by - management says July, probably August, September, but we hope to totally be current. We're receiving about 3,500 new samples every month. And we haven't even completed going to all felons yet. Our laws are phase an approach.

But just to let you know where we started we were having to do our DNA on extraction by hand, and we were just falling behind. And what I started doing is I wasn't kidding. We've been living off of federal money in one shape or another for the last seven years.

And in one of our federal grants I put in there visits to other lab systems to see what they're doing. Because sometimes we don't communicate with each other unless you just happen to be at a meeting when someone happens to talk about these issues.

So I'm going to throw my little suggestions in as we go along. But one suggestion is if NIJ comes up with a funding for a laboratory system to implement some innovative process. I think we need to have that advertised and sent out to the community that says here's a modular or process that this person saw if you're interested. And here's a list of equipment and what it would take to put it in there and the specifications of it.

We've been automated totally as far as the DNA extraction since 1996. But as technology changed - and also one of our big problems in the state has been compliance with getting the samples collected. We were only getting at the most about 30 percent of the people who go on probation in our state. Those are the people we want. Those are the people out committing the crimes again.

So we waited until we could find someone who developed an automated procedure for oral swab collection. They seem to all kind of converge at the same time, but the one we chose was the - well, RCNP in Canada came up with an automated procedure for doing oral swabs. In fact, they used concepts of this procedure in analyzing the samples from the Swiss Air disaster.

So we went up and mimicked what they set up and brought it back to our lab. Not only did we mimic their process, but we also purchased the LIM system, the laboratory management system, for their database to be used in our lab.

Now, we had to modify it some because of our specific needs, but we now have that in place. As I've said, we've had - I probably shouldn't say, because this is on the record, but we're actually overstaffed right now for our scientific people. I'm doing special projects that we needed to do as far as the offender program, by the way, not casework. We're not overstaffed there.

But all the new procedures we put into place that keeps making us more efficient and now the people I've asked for over the years I'm giving them special projects to do, but they keep finding more efficient ways to do it and keeps feeding the problem, you know, keeps feeding the issue here.

But where we're not overstaffed, and this is where I think our bottleneck has become. It's not the science. It's not doing the DNA. Believe it or not, with our situation, it's not even the day to review. It's that front-end work when the samples come in the door where in Florida, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, with our commissioner, the buck stops with us.

We don't ever say, That's not my job, or we don't send it back down to someone else to use. So if they send us a sample and they haven't put all of the information on the submission form, we have to research the prison database or the juvenile justice database or the criminal history and find all the information and fill all of that information in.

So it's the front-end work now that not even the science, the data entry that we're extremely bottleneck. How we're looking to approach that or to correct that problem, well our three-year plan, it's already underway, is we're reintegrating our AFIS system, our criminal history system, and our DNA database.

What that will do is when the samples come in we're always collected the fingerprint. The fingerprint will be run through AFIS. When a name comes back and it's verified that that individual matches the name on the form, then the criminal history is updated to say that we have a DNA sample collected. And then our LIMS system, or our management system, will be updated from the criminal history information, all the pertinent information so we don't have to do near the data entry. But we're a long way from that.

So right now what we've done is we put our DNA demographic information, you know, the name of the individual, where he was collected, if the sample has been analyzed, it's on our own version of the CJIS WAN. We have a SJ network in the State of Florida that's run that anyone can access in the criminal justice community.

So what that has done is it's kept our duplicate submissions down to less than 5 percent. We only get about 5 percent duplicate submissions coming in our door so we don't have to reanalyze these samples that are unnecessary to analyze and then you have to take out later when you match them with the same guy you collected five years earlier.

When we first started in '90 and '91, we were actually getting 50 percent re-submissions of convicted offenders. So we had to manually do searches. So we've kept our duplicates down to about 5 to 7 percent.

Another thing we're implementing is probation and parole is really online since we have gone with the oral swabs. Our sample collections have increased by 1500 samples a month just purely from changing the medium that we collect on. More people are being compliant. But one thing that probation and parole is doing to us is they want a hard copy in their file that says that that person has been collected.

So we were having to send out over 5,000 faxes a year. The three people I have doing data entry on top of everything else had to send out verification and the sample had been collected. Well, part of our LIM system is now when someone calls to ask if someone is in the database, we do a search.

If he's in the database, we can ask them if they want an electronic copy of that. We click a button and it would send a report to them electronically that they can then printout and put it in their file.

So that's helped us dramatically too. So like I said, everybody is at a different stage. But right now our biggest problem is the administrative end at the front. That's where we're having our issues rights now.

Now, as far as my kind of concept of this meeting was to just maybe suggest ways that NIJ could spend their money. And so I'm going to do that. Basically a lot of people have already said this. I think training is important. Any time you even get one person to train you basically take another person off the bench to train them. So that needs to - we need to have - the community needs a place to basically send someone to be trained and come back to where it's minimal. And I think what Paul is doing in Virginia may be a way for NIJ to fund the institute since the whole community benefits from it.

So training has to be looked. I don't have the answer as to how, but that need to be looked at. I think in a hybrid of something that was suggested earlier about contacting the local law enforcement about types of cases to send for the no-suspect case reduction efforts.

A lot of crime lab directors don't want to - they don't want to put their head out of the sand, but there is a bigger backlog than what came in their doors. I go around the state talking about our offender collection. And every county I go to tells me that they have a case that they would like to search but it hasn't been submitted to the lab and it's five-years old and whatever.

The law enforcement community is not necessarily sending the labs all the cases that are out there to be worked. I mean, one city in our state we had a press conference about a serial rapist that we connected to the database. We went there, and just in conversation with the sheriff, he said he had over 600 rape kits that he had never submitted to FDLE.

Now, we've actually put out letters requesting them to send - in a way we need a backlog to justify more positions, you know, but they're not - law enforcement is not stupid They're not going to send us all the cases that they don't need next week, because they're afraid it'll slow down the cases they need right away. So there's a larger backlog out there. And local law enforcement probably needs to be brought in rather than just dealing with the crime labs.

IT support is absolutely needed. Our LIM system has increased our efficiency dramatically. We're getting to the point now where I think we're going need to have a Tera Watt - I just learned what that was during the grant period because Cecelia asked for one. But I think we're getting to the point to get a Tera Watt for our state database.

We can't just keep storing - when the database fills up, archive it to a end tape or a disk. You know, we need to have all the data readily available in an IT system.

Artificial intelligence for the automatic data review I think is an important step, especially for offender laboratories, but, of course, we do have to get the FBI standards look - you know, we'd have to look at that to allow that sort of option.

Fund automation for casework. Somebody has already said it, but there is ways out there right now that we could easily automate every burglary in the country. And it's not necessarily - it's bringing law enforcement involved and may be creating a collection kit specifically designed for burglary where it comes to the laboratory ready to use in an automated system like maybe small sponges to collect the sample and transfer it to FTA paper and use the punching systems that are out there now that databases are using to batch a lot of burglaries.

There's not going to be one bullet that will solve every type of crime, but we got to start somewhere. And I guess that's about - that's kind of about all of my suggestions right. I'm sure I'll think of some more. But I want to thank NIJ for having us and we just couldn't be where we are without the federal funding.

We're trying to get our state to foot the bill totally for us soon, but with the hit Florida is taking with tourism and everything else, I don't know if it's going to happen, but thanks for inviting me and we appreciate it.

MR. FERRARA: Success breeds success. And continued success breeds backlogs. It's as simple as that. Many of us in this group were members of the commission on the future of DNA evidence, and I shared the working group at that time along with Cecilia and others that were in the group where we were trying to provide the Attorney General at that time how we could address this issue of backlogs.

For purposes of clarity, we broke the backlogs down into two areas. That of convicted offenders and that of casework. Some of the initial recommendation that we made with respect to the reduction of the convicted offender backlogs were taken to heart and the National Institute of Justice took the lead and then a few very short years since that panel made its recommendations we've seen - you've already seen the great success that we're making with respect to the reduction of the backlog of convicted offenders.

Of course, again, success breeds success. And then just about the time we think we're getting close to being current, even as states expand their statutes to include all felons, then we come along and start talking about arrestees. Several people have been very interested in the passage of this arrestee testing bill.

When the Attorney General Of Virginia asked me for my support in his initiative, my first remark to him was, you know, General Kilgore the fact of the matter is that I'm not going to be able to have federal money to do those samples. The same samples that I would be doing upon conviction we're not going to able to have federal money, presumably as long as the 1994 DNA Identification Act limits the use of a national database system to convicted offenders. So ironically while we could include theoretically misdemeanants, we cannot include arrestees for rape and murder.

With respect to crime scene evidence, it was our opinion in the commission of the future DNA evidence, and we've heard it continued today, this is the bigger and the very most difficult not to crack the backlogs of crime scene evidence.

You have heard it over and over again. I think we have only scratched the surface still of the amount of evidence and the number of examinations that are going to be required by the criminal justice system across the United States.

We have seen - I've borne witness to it over the last 13 years now that we've had a DNA data bank law in Virginia and a DNA program. I did 37 cases in 1989. Last year, we did almost 1,900 cases. We anticipate doing close to 3,000 this year.

We've talked about training. And I won't belabor the point except to say that the American Society of Crime Laboratory directors anticipates need of about 10,000 new forensic scientists over the next five to ten years. As the explosion of pieces of evidence and subitems of evidence within crime scenes is collected, as we better train our law enforcement agencies, our prosecutors, defense counsel, sexual assault nurse examiners, my God we're training high school science teachers today about forensic science in an effort to help them have more interested students to understand the practical applications of science.

We control a lot money. NIJ could throw a lot of money at Virginia. But as we've heard, the fact of the matter is there aren't people, qualified people, to hire. So training of forensic scientists through universities, but more importantly the on-the-job training in working forensic science laboratories, the whole key to the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, and I believe in most laboratories around the United States, I don't care whether you have a Ph.D. in molecular biology or genetics, I need you for a year in the laboratory before I'll let you near real evidence. And there's no place to do that.

I hope that the National Institute of Justice would be able to assist laboratories, institutions, and it's not just the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine. Barry Fischer in Los Angeles is working in California developing such a program, a similar program in conjunction with the University of Chicago and in the Illinois State Police system.

We're training defense attorneys. By statue, in Virginia right now, I don't know how many states have a statute. For an attorney to be considered to be appointed as counsel for the defense in a capital murder case has to have formalized training and DNA technology before he or she can be appointed to that. And up to this point it's the Virginia Division of Forensic Science and Medicine that has been providing that training.

So clearly there's a tremendous amount of work to be done. Cecilia pointed it out. We've talked and we've heard excellent talks about presentation of automation of the analytical process, what really takes up the time, and we're not going to automate.

It ain't going to go away overnight as the tremendous amount of time it takes for a very highly qualified forensic scientist, not just a DNA examiner I might add, but all forensic scientists to go through hundreds of pieces of evidence looking for some probative piece of evidence, biological, or physical, or otherwise. That's not something that's got to be rushed through. It's not something that a robot can do. It's something that is unique to forensic science and is always going to take time. We have to accept that.

Having said that, the analytical methodologies that some of the new technologies that Dan and Mark talked about robotics and chip technology, TrueAllele, is all going to help tremendously, and to the except the NIJ has supported those efforts, our undying appreciation.

Now, I do have a - I believe that NIJ could well serve the forensic science community in the development of mitochondrial DNA capabilities. I may offend some folks, but the fact of the matter is I get nervous as hell every time my microscopic hair comparison reports go out the door without a mitochondrial backup.

I'm sorry. Ten years ago I tried to eliminate microscopic hair comparison. Steve Sigal and the director of my western laboratory may remember that. And the prosecutors came down on me like a ton of bricks. How dare you take away our microscopic hair comparison.

Well, at that time it was the best available technology. That's no longer the case. Arguably, we should not be - I mean, we have changed the language of the certificates of analysts on microscopic hair comparisons to properly reflect the weight with which those examinations should be taken. I don't know how universal that is. But I'll feel a heck of a lot better when mitochondrial DNA analysis is used routinely.

Now, hopefully, and George - I don't remember if it was George or Mark - is right that it's secondary. There's not that many cases. But those cases where I cannot find any nuclear DNA to support a microscopic hair comparison. My recommendation as to the prosecutors is you go out and you get mitochondrial DNA analysis done. And for those of you who in the business know that the means of prosecutors looking at about a $5,000 bill for one hair and one reference blood sample. And that needs to be done in the laboratory. The local criminal agencies can't handle that kind of money.

Forensic laboratories, like my own, we're in the process of establishing mitochondrial DNA capabilities. When the current fiscal impact in Virginia cut my funding, cut a million and a half dollars of your funding to my Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine and cut $500,000 out of the start of my mitochondrial DNA program.

Last Friday, that same Attorney General came through our laboratory and says, Paul, I promise you I absolutely will want you to start doing mitochondrial DNA testing. I can't do it and give you the money this year, but I'm going to give it to you next year. And I told him about this meeting and I said I would express to the National Institute of Justice the concerns there.

Tim made a very, very, very - Tim Schellberg made a very, very good point and others have to about the need for collection of data, facts, figures, numbers, criminal history, criminal justice information, and statistical analyses. That data that Tim showed you I sat down through our little - what little information we have. I spent about four hours trying to just fair it out among 600-plus hits. Some of the data with respect to the types of crimes solved and the types of previous convictions.

It's ludicrous I should be doing that, but I don't have resources, and I don't think in many of our laboratories have resources and the luxury of having people who can do a statistical evaluation, the chronology of the events. I know I could prove to NIJ how NIJ funding has saved lives.

It's simple as that. I know it anecdotally, but I can't prove it statistically. But there's tremendous savings, not only in victims who don't - would-be victims who don't become victims, but innocent persons who will become exonerated quickly.

Finally, I do have concerns. And something that hasn't been touched on, but I think it's worth consideration. And that is an impediment to the productivity of forensic laboratories at least in Virginia has to do with what I call the redundancy of audits and reviews by various bodies of these public and private forensic science laboratories.

I believe every laboratory that's part of CODIS is an ASCLD-LAB accredited laboratory. ASCLD-LAB uses the DNA advisory board standards. Those standards include mandatory proficiency testing. Those proficiency tests are reviewed by a proficiency review committee of ASCLD-LAB. Sue Narveson was my first chair of a proficiency review committee for DNA.

Audits. Annual audits are required by those DNA standards and by ASCLD-LAB.

Now, most recently, as a result of the recommendations of the Office of the Inspector General, they are now charging the FBI with establishing yet another board, the National NDIS Review Board where all those audit documents that have already gone through the process get looked at again by yet another panel.

I have in my suitcase a stack of correspondence with OIG mostly through the bureau. A tremendous efforts and waste of energy in terms of the way the Office of the Inspector General interprets its responsibilities of oversight to CODIS, which was to the FBI's credit, has been doing fine.

Here we have non-scientist, non-people who are unfamiliar with - unfamiliar with forensic science making decisions as to which crime scene forensic profiles will or will not or can or cannot remain in NDIS. I removed some 400 forensic profiles buried from NDIS because the Office of the Inspector General indicates that since we had a telecon memo in one file where a person identified with DNA was not indicted that they interpret that as that person is no longer the putative perpetrator of the crime, and, therefore. That crime scene profile cannot stay at NDIS.

Well, the person wasn't indicted, but that person was in fact the perpetrator. The implication of that, at least in my mind, was that unless I know and follow each and every database hit and established that ultimately that person was or is the punitive perpetrator, I have to. I cannot keep those forensic profiles up at national level.

I don't know - I don't think the Office of the Inspector General audits all forensic labs that provide latent fingerprints to IAFIS. I don't know what can be done, but I think that's - I know among my counterparts that's a real - a lot of effort and expended unnecessarily.

Finally, the CODIS 6.0, I'm very interested in. I understand the need for perhaps something that's going to ultimately handle millions of profiles I suspect on a national level, if not tens of millions. One of my concerns quite frankly is every convincing that the Virginia General Assembly that we are to no longer maintain or be responsible for that data. Now, how that all can be worked out? But there's an awful lot of state legislators in Virginia who have told me, for example, with respect to retainage (sic) of evidence for post-conviction - Paul, I don't want the clerks of the court keeping the evidence. I don't want the law enforcement agencies keeping the evidence. We want you keeping the evidence. I'm going to get that same reaction with them with respect to the DNA data bank samples. So I suspect that might be somewhat problematic.

Barry asked me about - just before he left - about BNA beta test site. We've been a beta test site with the bureau right from the beginning. And I'd like to hear, but ultimately as you heard from the questions, I do have concerns with respect to how the states maintain their data and the responsibility for the integrity of the data and still have a CODIS 6.0 system. How that works and how NIJ can assist in that remains to be seen.

And with that, it's 2:15. I get us back on the schedule I hope. Thank you.