(MAP editor's comment: Although not about illegal drugs itself, this
article shows the CJ environment in which the drug war is waged.)

STATE AMONG 7 TO SHARE FEDERAL GRANT FOR DNA DATABASE

WASHINGTON - Aided by a $1.7 million federal grant, Texas will be able
to add DNA information on thousands of sex offenders and other
criminals to a high-tech national computer database that law
enforcement uses to crack cases.

Texas is among seven states sharing in $7.2 million in grants announced
Tuesday by the Justice Department to clear a backlog of nearly 146,000
DNA samples.

The money will allow Texas to clear nearly 35,000 samples from a
backlog of 43,000 cases, federal and state officials said.

"We must do all we can to help our state and local partners employ 21st-
century technology in their efforts to make communities safer,"
Attorney General Janet Reno said in announcing the grants. "Increasing
law enforcement's ability to use DNA evidence in the fight against
crime makes sense and, ultimately, gets violent offenders off our
streets."

Under the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, Texas in 1996 began
collecting blood samples from convicted sex offenders, later expanding
to inmates convicted of murder, aggravated assault or house burglary.
DNA found at crime scenes then can be compared against the specimens
entered into CODIS by Texas and other states.

But with 3,000 new samples coming in each month, the Texas Department
of Public Safety has been unable to process a backlog of about 43,000
cases.

"We just don't have the resources at this point in time," said Dr.
Dennis Loockerman, who heads the department's CODIS program and wrote
the application for the federal grant.

"This is great," he said. "In the very near future, I think, it's going
to make a very significant impact."

To date, Dr. Loockerman said, about 10 Texas cases have been solved
using CODIS. "It takes a certain sort of critical mass to get things
going at first, and then of course, the more profiles you have, the
better the chance is that it will match against one of your unsolved
cases," he said.

The grant announcement came on a busy day on the DNA front in Texas. A
new execution date was set for death-row inmate Ricky Nolen McGinn
after a DNA test failed to exonerate him in the 1993 rape-murder of his
12-year-old stepdaughter. And Roy Criner of New Caney was freed after
serving 10 years in prison for a sexual assault he did not commit -
three years after DNA evidence first suggested that he was innocent.

The executive director of the National Commission on the Future of DNA
Evidence, Chris Asplen, said the federal grants would go a long way
toward reducing the huge national backlog. Estimates were that unless
the federal government stepped in with assistance, it would take the
states six years to plow through the backlog, he said.

"The key issue here is the importance of doing it quickly. It's rare in
the criminal justice system that time is so critical in terms of actual
lives saved," Mr. Asplen said.

The grant calls for Texas to process its cases within a year, Dr.
Loockerman said.