Bipartisan Death Penalty Reform Bill
Passes House Of Representatives By Overwhelming Majority

 . . . House Approves DNA Reform Package That Includes The Innocence Protection Act

WASHINGTON (Thur., Nov. 6) – The House of Representatives Wednesday night approved a sweeping measure to combat crime and reduce wrongful convictions through greater access to DNA technology.  The bill was introduced in both the House and the Senate last month by a bipartisan coalition of Senate and House lawmakers, including Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

The result of extensive negotiations between Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate, the Advancing Justice Through DNA Technology Act of 2003 contains a package of reforms aimed at reducing the risk of error in capital cases and providing law enforcement with the training and equipment required to effectively, and accurately, fight crime in the 21^st Century.  Included in the bill is the Innocence Protection Act, a death penalty reform effort launched three years ago by Leahy and joined by Rep. William Delahunt (D-Mass.), Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) and other key allies in the project.  

“This is another major breakthrough in moving toward solutions to the flaws in our justice system,” said Leahy, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “We have shown that the death penalty system is broken, we know that these reforms will help, and we know that every day we delay action may be another day on death row for some innocent people.”

A former prosecutor and longtime advocate for death penalty reform, Leahy joined Delahunt and others in successfully negotiating the inclusion of key provisions of the Innocence Protection Act, which he first introduced in 2000, in the overall DNA package.  The Innocence Protection Act of 2003, included in the package, proposes critical reforms, most notably a federal post-conviction DNA testing regimen, assistance to states to improve the quality of legal representation in capital cases and increased compensation in federal cases of wrongful conviction.

The package also establishes the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program, which authorizes $5 million a year for five years – a total of $25 million -- in grants to help states defray the costs of such testing.  Leahy and Delahunt named the program in honor of a Maryland man who was wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl and who spent nine years in prison, including two on death row, before DNA testing cleared him of the crime.  Earlier this year, the State of Maryland charged another man with the crime for which Bloodsworth was convicted, after prosecutors finally ran the DNA evidence in the case through the DNA database.

Since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the 1970s, more than 110 individuals who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been freed when persuasive evidence of innocence emerged, sometimes by means of DNA testing.  And since the introduction of forensic DNA typing in the early 1990s, many more individuals who were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment have been exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing.   

“Now it’s the Senate’s turn,” said Leahy, “and we hope the Senate’s leadership will cooperate in bringing the reform package promptly to the Senate floor.  These mistakes in our system of justice carry a high personal and social price.  They undermine the public’s confidence in our judicial system, they produce unbearable anguish for innocent people and their families and for the victims of these crimes, and they compromise public safety because for every wrongly convicted person, there is a real criminal who may still be roaming the streets.”

The Advancing Justice Through DNA Technology Act of 2003 also authorizes $1 billion to states over the next five years to eliminate the backlog of unanalyzed DNA samples in the Nation’s crime labs, expand and improve the capacity for crime labs to conduct DNA analysis, train criminal justice and medical personnel in DNA evidence, and promote the use of DNA testing.  The backlog program is named in honor of Debbie Smith, a rape survivor and leader in promoting DNA use.

Sponsors of the Senate version of the House-passed bill also include Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden (D-Del.), Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

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