When the truth isn't enough to set you free
takes six to eight weeks for results, runs about $1,300 per sample. The FBI once did basic DNA testing for free, but backlogs prevent the agency from accepting outside cases.
In a Lafayette, LA, search for a serial killer, authorities are using DNA screening to eliminate suspects. Ray Wickenheiser, director of the Acadiana Criminalistics Laboratory (the lab police are using for this investigation), says DNA testing costs between $200 and $450 a sample. Of 286 samples, 269 suspects have been eliminated, and 17 samples are "in the works." If such a procedure had been done during the investigation of Dianna Green's attack, her husband would never have seen the inside of a prison cell.
To date, DNA evidence has cleared at least 138 inmates, according to an advocacy group in New York City called the Innocence Project. Barry Scheck (DNA expert for O.J. Simpson) and his colleague, Peter Neufeld, founded the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1992. The project represents prisoners who have been wrongly convicted. "With the advanced technology that we have now, there's so much you can do to catch the guilty and exonerate people that shouldn't even be arrested in the first place,'' says Schreck.
Many of the cases the Innocence Project takes are from inmates convicted of crimes before the 1990s, when DNA testing became widely accepted. Neufeld has found that in about 75 percent of the capital cases they take on, potential DNA evidence has been lost or destroyed. Green was fortunate that the rape kit was still around after so many years.
Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted (2000), by Peter Neufeld, Jim Dwyer, and Barry Scheck, features several cases of DNA exonerating innocent people, including Kevin Green's case.
Sources:
DNA Denials by FBI Director William Sessions
DNA testing costs put squeeze on crime labs
DNA Testing: The Next Big Crime-Busting Breakthrough
States Resist DNA Tests That Could Free The Wrongly Convicted
The Other Side of DNA Evidence: An Innocent Man Is Freed
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