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| Few N.J. Inmates Use DNA Testing to Challenge Guilt |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 07/15/2002 |
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Few inmates in New Jersey's prisons have taken advantage of the state's offer of free DNA testing to help them challenge their convictions, and not one has been cleared in the year since the program began. Less than a dozen inmates even responded to the offer to have their DNA tested. And one prisoner whose DNA was tested died before a definitive finding could be obtained. As a result, the state has largely abandoned ''The Truth Project,'' in favor of a new program, adopted by the Legislature, which will begin next week. Aside from not telling inmates the program even existed, prosecutors in New Jersey do not routinely preserve evidence from old cases that might contain DNA. ''The response was minimal at best,'' said Assistant Public Defender Dale Jones, whose office teamed up with the Attorney General's Office to provide representation to inmates who qualified for the test. Almost all of the inmates who did ask for testing were promptly rejected. ''Most of the cases were old homicides where the question became the state of the inmate's mental health,'' Jones told The Star-Ledger of Newark for the July 5 editions. Former state Attorney General John Farmer said he expected more prisoners to step forward, but said the fact they didn't was probably an indication the criminal justice system was working well. Inmates may also have been reluctant to offer up their DNA out of a fear they could be tied to other offenses, Farmer said. As part of the program, test results were going to be compared with DNA taken from unsolved crime scenes, potentially linking participants to other wrongdoing. Aliza Kaplan, deputy director of the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, a group that has used DNA testing to free more than 100 inmates in cases throughout the country, called finding old evidence a ''huge problem.'' Evidence in almost three-quarters of the cases the New York program approves for legal action is later deemed misplaced, lost or destroyed, she said. Two dozen states have enacted laws in the last several years to preserve crime scene material, Kaplan said. In New Jersey, a new state directive now requires evidence from homicide and sexual assault cases to be preserved for five years after convictions. |
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