Provides that people arrested in connection with a felony must submit a DNA sample

Section 2 amends the executive law section 995-c to require that felony arrestees provide a DNA sample to jailor detention facility personnel upon booking following arrest.

Section 3 amends the executive law section 995-C to clarify the procedure in which an arrestee who is not convicted of an offense for which DNA is collected may get his or her DNA expunged.

Section 4-11 amends various provisions of the criminal procedure law dealing with the requirement of taking fingerprints in accordance with 160.10 to also include a requirement for taking a DNA sample appropriate for DNA testing.

Section 12 provides the effective date.

Existing law

DNA upon arrest is not currently permissible in New York. Under current law, a DNA sample is collected upon conviction of any felony or 18 specified misdemeanors.

The database, known as the Databank, began operations in 1996, when individuals convicted of homicide and certain sex-related crimes were required to submit a DNA sample. The Databank was expanded in 1999 and again in 2004, but still only required samples from 14 percent of convictions in the state until 2006 when a new law was passed in New York requiring the collection of DNA from all felony and some misdemeanor convictions.

From 1996 to the end of 2007, the database had 4,142 offender hits to crime scene DNA samples. Nearly a third of those came in 2007, the first year after the new 2006 law went into effect expanding the database.

Justification

Carol Nelson was 65 years old on the morning of July 1, 2007. She had two sons, two daughters, and eight grandchildren. She had recently retired as a nurse at St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse, New York, where she had been employed for 25 years. While walking during the early morning hours in a suburban Syracuse neighborhood to her granddaughter's house, Carol was hit in the head multiple times, sexually assaulted, strangled and left for dead by Glen Shoop, who had been arrested and charged with rape, sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment of another victim a year earlier. When he murdered Carol, Shoop was awaiting sentencing in the 2006 crime, in which he pleaded guilty to first degree unlawful imprisonment, a felony. Because DNA was not collectible for Shoop's 2006 arrest for rape, as this bill proposes, his DNA was not taken prior to Carol's murder. Had it been, he would have been linked to a forensic profile in New York's DNA database relating to an unsolved 2000 rape at Colonial Laundromat in East Syracuse. With an investigative lead like that, it is almost certain that Shoop would not have been released to murder Carol Nelson pending his sentencing. When Shoop's DNA was finally taken and entered into the DNA database due to the unlawful imprisonment conviction, he was linked to both Carol's murder and the 2000 rape. He received 40 years to life for the combined cases.

This proposed legislation seeks to address the flaw that cost Carol her life by requiring law enforcement to take DNA upon the arrest of individuals for certain felony crimes that have resulted in the largest number of hits against the database in the past.

Since the database's inception, there have been a total of 7,980 hits. In 2008, there were 1,673 hits, a 30 percent increase from 1,285 hits during 2007. Fifty-one percent of all hits since Databank inception occurred during the last two years, subsequent to the passage of legislation that expanded the database to include all felony and some misdemeanor convictions. Obtaining DNA upon arrest for certain felonies would undoubtedly result in more and earlier hits, thereby solving more crimes and preventing future ones.

New York needs to join 21 other states and the federal government which have already passed laws collecting DNA upon arrest. As of August 2009, the DNA Databank in New York contained DNA samples collected from 330,411 offenders ("offender profile"). There are 28,858 forensic samples in the database, which are DNA samples taken from crime scenes in New York. Nationally, New York's offender profiles represent 4.55 percent of all DNA profiles in the united States while New York's unsolved crimes constitute 10.4 percent of all unsolved crimes in the united States. Requiring the collection of DNA upon arrest for crimes specified in this bill is the way to responsibly increase the DNA Databank and solve some of the hundreds of thousands of crimes with crime scene forensic profiles that go unsolved in this country every day.

Legislative history

None.

Fiscal implications

To be determined.

Effective date

This act shall take effect on the 180th day after it shall have become law.