Massachusetts Prisoners Join State Dna Web
DNA technology has the potential to offer greater support to police and prosecutors, says Michael Bellotti, sheriff of Norfolk County, Ma. Bellotti and his staff have implemented a new DNA system for tracking felony convicts as Massachusetts commits to making greater use of the DNA technology.
The state has changed a law to allow authorities to keep DNA samples of any person who has been convicted of a felony on file in the Combined DNA Indexing System. Previously, authorities could only take the blood samples of people who had been convicted of violent crimes.
Law enforcement officials say the DNA felony convict database will help authorities solve more crimes. “We are actually able to link an older [unsolved] crime with an individual we have” [in the database], says Robert Pino, head of the State Police DNA database. He adds that the DNA technology has helped link 114 individuals to about 200 crimes since its launch in early 2000. “We are sitting on so much intelligence and information,” says Bellotti.
Workers from the State Police Crime Lab take the blood samples of prisoners, seal the samples in envelopes, and cross-check numbers on envelopes for errors; the envelopes include a bar code number for cross-referencing.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Patriot Ledger (04/20/04) P. 1; Tatz, Dennis .
