Tipton exploring DNA legislation

DENVER — Rep. Scott Tipton and Sen. John Morse are exploring legislation that would require DNA collection from anyone arrested on suspicion of a felony.

Tipton stressed, however, that any version of "Katie's Law" would have to consider the costs associated with DNA collection and storage, as well as provisions to protect suspects who are later cleared of felonies.

"It's got to be a serious offense," Tipton, R-Cortez, said a few hours before hosting a lunch discussion about Katie's Law in Denver Wednesday. "If we've got a serious crime going on with a gun or a violent offense of some kind, we're going to collect that DNA."

Jayann Sepich of Carlsbad, N.M., is pushing Colorado and other states to adopt a version of the New Mexico law named for her daughter, Katie, who was 22 when she was raped and strangled.

Skin and blood was found under her fingernails but not matched to her killer for more than three years after her death. The killer, Gabriel Avilla, had been arrested just three months after Katie's murder, but was released on bond. It was only after his DNA was collected in 2006 that a match could be made. He is serving a 69-year prison sentence.

"This is an important law enforcement tool that can be used not only to convict the guilty, but to clear the innocent," Tipton told the Daily Press.

"We want to be cautious in terms of how we do this. There are a lot of questions we would have to address. We would want to make it a fairly tight bill in terms of what kinds of arrests we are going to look at in terms of collection of DNA.

"I can't over-emphasize we want to be thoughtful in terms of our constitutional rights."

The American Civil Liberties Union in 2008 decried federal legislation that would create "incentives" for states to collect DNA samples from arrestees. The organization believes such mandates violate people's rights to presumption of innocence. An arrest is not a conviction.

Tipton said the ACLU had valid concerns, but so do Katie's Law supporters. He stressed a Colorado version was only in exploratory stages.

Tipton said he'd like for any Colorado version of Katie's Law to require the complete destruction of DNA samples when a person is cleared of a felony by acquittal or plea to a non-felony. He said any documentation associated with the sample should also be destroyed, but this would have to be addressed in the bill itself, which has yet to be written.

"My sense is this is a tool we need to explore," he said. "If you're found innocent of something, we have no business keeping it, period."

If the costs of collecting and storing samples falls to local jurisdictions, it could create an unfunded mandate, Tipton added.

However, he believed the Colorado Bureau of Investigation could store the DNA samples.

CBI already houses more than 90,000 samples collected upon felony conviction, public information officer Lance Clem said.

But far more people are arrested for felonies than are convicted and CBI's Denver labs are hurting for space as it is. The passage of Katie's Law could also create more work in the IT department.

Clem said Denver-area district attorneys have been advocating for a version of the law for some time. "It remains controversial," he said.

DNA: Controversial history

The DNA "fingerprint" was developed in the 1980s by Alec Jeffreys of the University of Leicester. The first person cleared through DNA evidence was Richard Buckland, who'd falsely confessed to murdering English schoolgirl Dawn Ashworth. He denied the earlier murder of Lynda Mann, from the same town, a few years earlier.

DNA led to the arrest of the girls' real killer, Colin Pitchfork. The DNA was collected as part of a massive sweep, in which police took voluntary samples from 5,000 Leicestershire men, one of whom, Ian Kelly, posed as Pitchfork. Pitchfork was arrested after the deception was discovered. He was sent to prison for life for the Mann and Ashworth murders, and also for the murder of local farmer Tony Allis in a boundary dispute.

Since that time, the use of DNA evidence has exploded. It is so standard that it is now a staple in television crime dramas — sometimes to the extent that real juries dismiss real cases as weak if they are not presented with DNA evidence, a phenomenon known as the CSI Effect.

Some governments are looking to expand their forensic DNA databases, ABC News Australia reported in 2007, to mandate samples from suspects in even petty offenses, such as littering — a prospect that horrified Jeffreys.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled the UK's DNA database violated privacy rules by indefinitely retaining the DNA profiles of people who hadn't been convicted of a crime.

There is growing reliance on DNA for non-prosecutory purposes as well, which is raising eyebrows among ethicists and privacy advocates in the United States. Legislation to curb the use of DNA to determine a worker's tendency to heritable medical conditions was signed into law in 2008.

Staff and wire reports; information from ABC News, NationMaster and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.