Forensic DNA Tests

James Baines, a Florida man, walked out of prison after 35 years locked up for a crime that evidence now says he never committed. The story rattled whatever faith people still hold in the courts. For those same people, though, the reason he got out ought to repair some of that faith, because what sprang him loose was careful DNA forensics.

Across the country, 246 people who were convicted of things they did not do have been freed and cleared through DNA testing. None of them sat behind bars anywhere near as long as Baines, who stepped into open air for the first time in a third of a century with that trusting, cheerful face of his. Florida law does hand him at least a token form of repair: an automatic payment of $50,000 for every year he lost to a cell he should never have seen.

So the trust this country puts in DNA forensics is heavy, and it has earned that trust. But there is still, as the saying goes, many a slip. The rules that govern collecting DNA from known criminals are reportedly so confusing to most police agencies that, a lot of the time, no sample ever gets taken at all. One state estimate puts the figure near a million: samples that prison officials could legally have collected and simply did not. When they do collect, the samples often vanish. Wisconsin authorities recently discovered more than ten thousand of theirs had gone missing. That kind of thing happens, given how buried these departments are.

There are said to be close to a million samples sitting untested on shelves nationwide, because there aren't enough trained people to run them. Give it a little time and they may well ship the whole backlog off to some poor third-world country, outsourcing the work we can't staff here. Where that road leads, nobody can say. A year or two back, Apple went looking in India for a call center to take on its work. Steve Jobs, they say, came home with nothing, because the quality of the call-center work there fell short. Picture handing off DNA forensics to a place where even the phone work doesn't make the cut. Then again, maybe that beats leaving the samples to gather dust on a shelf for a decade over here.

In the United Kingdom, the laws covering DNA collection haven't really matured either. Police there are now accused of racial profiling, pulling in black residents "on suspicion" mainly to get their DNA onto the record. For all that, DNA forensics remains the strongest shot at justice we have right now.

It just has to survive all the sorry habits of the people who handle it.