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

Monday, October 21, 2002

SOUTH AFRICAN POLICE SERVICE FORENSIC SCIENCE LABORATORY

MR. SCHMITT: Thank you, Sarah, and let me add my thanks to all of you for your participation here today. I look forward to visiting with all of you at the break and at our meals.

We have a very interesting agenda for you that I'll get to in just a minute. A couple of housekeeping matters. We're in a much more cozy environment that we were before, so I hope you will all feel free to get refills on your iced tea. If you didn't get a chance to get the dessert that's out there, you should do that.

Because the court reporter will kill me if I don't do this, I'm going to ask Gena to send a sign-in sheet around the back table because the microphones could not pick up the names of everyone who was at the back couple tables, and that way we can make sure we have a record of everyone who is here today.

I invite you now to take a look at the agenda that we have prepared for this. You will see that we have alternating sessions of serious discussion followed by events that we hope are informative and interesting to you to kind of make it also more worthwhile for your participation here today.

We wanted to give you some perspectives of the way DNA and DNA analysis are being used in other countries or in other organizations so that you will get a chance to see how other folks are thinking about these issues, and we have tried to intersperse some of these presentations around the actual working sessions that we have scheduled for the next day and a half.

The order of march more or less is to look at this issue in about four broad areas. In that regard let me first call your attention to something that you will see is entitled executive summary towards the top. What we've done is to ask our people to go over all of our discussion from the last meeting, the first meeting of AGID-LAB, and kind of synthesize what we all think you all came to a consensus on and to summarize it here in this executive summary.

I ask you to look this over during the presentations if they're not as exciting as you would like them to be, during the breaks, in your rooms this evening, and then call to our attention in some fashion, either one on one or in a large group setting the items that you think perhaps we got wrong or we didn't get as complete as we should have so that we do in fact have a record of the consensus that we think you all reached because at this meeting we hope to talk about areas in which we didn't get consensus either because we talked about it and there really wasn't one yet or we just didn't talk about it yet.

That brings us to the second piece of paper that you have that says AGID-LAB discussion topics and draft recommendations for October 21 through 22. We have lumped these into four categories, IT integration and information sharing, transforming practice through competency building, DNA databases, and legislative and policy matters, and we're going to discuss them more or less in that order as you see on the agenda.

When we get to each of these sections, we'll talk about some of the introductory paragraphs that we've put together. We've numbered those for your ease in following. It pretty much introduces the subject to those of you who maybe don't have as much familiarity as others here. We understand that each of you has a different focus, a different use, a different entre into this subject, and so different parts will resonate with you, and some you will know and some you won't know.

Underneath each of the numbered paragraphs we have something that is listed in italics as recommendation, and this truly is just a stepping off point for our discussion today based on our staff work here at NIJ. It may be that at the end of the discussion time we will be completely 180 degrees away from what the recommendation said. I hope we aren't that wrong in predicting where you all will come out, but my point is to say that none of this is cast in stone. We truly want to know what you all think is the right way to go.

We will go over the list in order, and then at the end after the numbered paragraphs we have something called other discussion items. We don't have a lead-in there. We don't have recommendations. They're just items that we think ought to be discussed, and we'll get to those as well.

You will also see on the agenda that we've interspersed one or two additional areas, quote, unquote, of things to discuss that didn't fit in one of the big categories. There were just so many things that we came up with that we didn't want to lump them all together, and so we just put them in, and that's our 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. area of discussion this evening.

After we've gone through this it will be time for public comment for those folks who are not on the AGID-LAB group, but who are here today, and I hope that they will also feel welcome to pigeon hole the participants during the breaks and suggest to them things that they should say or should enlarge upon. We will hear from them directly at the end of the afternoon, and we'll repeat this again tomorrow, and you see the agenda that's down there.

I am going to try to play time broker and ringmaster as we go forward. Just as the transcript got Sarah's quote wrong, I think I had said the last time that time was an evil taskmaster as opposed to time was an evil taskmaster. Whether by needle or whips and chairs or whatever happens to accomplish it, time marches on, and I will try to keep us within the parameters so that you don't all walk out at the end of the day tomorrow and we're only halfway through the agenda.

We had hoped that we might have Maureen Casey with us here today. We asked Maureen to take on that role, but Mayor Giuliani has dispatched Maureen and one of the other members of Giuliani Partners down to Mexico City. I think they had landed a big deal with the Mexican government to try to clean up the crime problem in Mexico City. It's a big job, as you might imagine, so Maureen and her colleague have been dispatched down there. We'll still, of course, invite Maureen's comments on what we discuss today as well as the comments of other folks on the panel who perhaps could not be in attendance with us so that we get their views and recommendations.

So Sarah and I both will try to be facilitators. I think I'll do more of that so that Sarah can listen and chime in and take notes, and then I'll also be taking notes as well as the rest of the staff, and we will at the end of the day try to summarize where you all have made recommendations and what the next steps will be after we conclude tomorrow.

Let me just pause for a moment and ask if there are any questions from anyone at this point as to how we're going to go forward.

Well, that being the case, we're going to move to not the substantive discussion, but to a portion of information receiving by you. We are pleased, as Sarah mentioned, to have two members of the South African Police Service with us here today to discuss the ways in which they have been developing their program in their country. We're pleased to have the commissioner of the forensic science laboratory, Dr. Keith Morris, and also Mr. Johann van Niekerk – I apologize if I just massacred your name - who is the gentleman who has been developing the DNA program in the forensic science lab. I'll turn it over to them.

Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming all this way to be with us and to share with us the work that you're doing on DNA.

MR. MORRIS: Thank you. Today we would just like to present a few of our ideas regarding the automation of DNA casework as we perceive it in South Africa, and before I go into too much detail I would just like to give you a little bit of the perspective on South Africa to perhaps place this discussion into context.

Today we would just like to thank first NIJ and specifically the director, Sarah Hart, and Dr. Lisa Forman for their invitation to come out to Washington and give us this wonderful opportunity to meet people that maybe we've only read about or found information on the Internet and speak to them face to face.

Forensic DNA in South Africa, I'll give you a little bit of background, and then we'll go into what we define as laboratory automation and then look at the automation of samples both for offender samples and for crime scene samples, what is our methodology there, maybe in terms of the reference samples what we have already put in place, and the development which we've got in place for the crime scene samples and how we're going to approach this problem, and then shortly just a summary of what we have said, and if there are any questions, we might be in a position to answer those.

First of all, the ladies and gentlemen who are doing all of the work for us, Johann van Niekerk is here with me today. The others who weren't able to make it today are Arnold Greyling, Christo Weitz, and Carene Snyman, and we would like to say in their absence thank you for all the work that they've put into this program.