CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - A Wyoming legislative committee on Tuesday scaled back a proposal to require people arrested on serious charges to provide DNA samples.
The Senate Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee on Tuesday amended the bill proposed by Sen. Leslie Nutting, R-Cheyenne, so that DNA testing could occur only after a person was charged in court, not immediately after arrest.
Sen. Ogden Driskill, R-Devils Tower, said the state needed to guard against creating an incentive for police to arrest people on trumped up charges solely to collect DNA.
“The example I use is they can falsely charge some type of felony, and they take you in and test you, and Monday morning, they say, ’sorry, the charges are dropped,’ but they’ve already grabbed your DNA,” Driskill said.
Nutting responded that she saw that as the point of the bill.
“That actually is the benefit of the law, in that you can find out more quickly if this person is innocent, or more quickly if there have been other serious crimes that the person was involved in,” Nutting said.
The bill is called “Katie’s Law” - named in memory of Kathryn Sepich, a New Mexico State University student murdered in 2003 and whose killer was identified with DNA evidence after he was convicted of another crime.
Sen. Leland Christensen, R-Alta, recommended changing the bill to allow DNA testing only after a prosecutor had reviewed why a person was arrested and determined the case against them was strong enough to merit filing charges in court.
“There’s quite often a difference between what the original officer hangs paper on versus what actually gets entered in court and charged,” Christensen said.
Linda Burt of the Wyoming ACLU told the committee that her organization believes that testing people on arrest would be unconstitutional by allowing the government to search people without probable cause.
“If your DNA can be taken on your arrest and they can look for other crimes, it sort of turns the entire situation of our law that says you’re innocent until proven guilty backward,” Burt said. “And says, ’we’re going to look for something, we don’t know what it is, we don’t really have probable cause, but we’re going to look for it until we find it with your DNA.”
Burt said the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled on a similar testing program adopted in Maryland and found that a DNA sample couldn’t be tested until a person was arraigned in court.
Rep. Ken Esquibel, D-Cheyenne, spoke for the bill, saying 29 states now have some sort of DNA arrest/testing law.
Esquibel said the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, an arm of the state Attorney General’s Office, currently has 39 unsolved murders on its books. He said that doesn’t cover cases at the local level.
Current Wyoming law specifies DNA testing after a person is convicted of a felony. “DNA is mostly left and cross referenced if there is a hit on a murder, or some type sexual assault,” Esquibel said.
“I would say the way we do it now is trying to perform CPR after the funeral,” Esquibel said. “Because if this guy is convicted and he goes to jail, who are we protecting? His cellmate?”
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