Supporters, opponents debate expanding Iowa's DNA collection

At 4 a.m. on June 5, 2007, Micah Matthews broke into a 50-year-old woman's Iowa City home, woke her and forced her at gunpoint to drive to an ATM and withdraw cash.

Matthews then pistol-whipped her, sexually assaulted her and bound her wrists and ankles with a phone cord. The woman survived but endured months with her attacker free and unidentified.

It wasn't until Feb. 1, 2008, that investigators got a hit on DNA evidence discovered at the crime scene. Matthews had been required to submit a DNA sample after a separate conviction for felony burglary, and it matched genetic material collected from the 2007 sex assault.

In February 2009, Matthews was convicted of the violent crime and sentenced to life in prison.

But, had Matthews been required to provide a DNA sample after he was convicted on an aggravated misdemeanor in 2005, authorities said they might have caught him right away. That would have provided reassurance and closure to the victim and kept him from committing another crime.

“DNA is used to identify people who have committed other offenses,” said Johnson County Attorney Janet Lyness. “So if you expand the (DNA) database, you solve more crimes.”

A bill that proposes doing just that – expanding the state's DNA sampling to include everyone convicted of an aggravated misdemeanor instead of just felonies and sex offences – is under consideration in the Iowa Legislature. Many in law enforcement support the bill's passage, but opponents call it an unnecessary violation of privacy.

The bill passed through the House in March and has endured proposed amendments in the Senate. Sen. Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the bill remains “under active consideration” but faces some challenges.

Currently, it's on the Senate's unfinished business calendar, and officials with the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa are hoping it will stay there.

“We think this bill goes against a common sense approach that Iowa prides itself on,” said Rita Bettis, legislative director and staff attorney for the ACLU of Iowa. “We think it's unnecessary and expensive and is going to put thousands of more Iowans' DNA in a database every year – where it will remain after they're dead – for low-level offenses.”

OPPOSITION

Iowa law currently requires people convicted of felonies or sex offenses to provide DNA. Those samples then are entered into a database that compares them with unidentified DNA samples taken from crime scenes, both locally and nationally.

Supporters of the proposed bill say the DNA database has been a tremendous tool in helping to solve crimes, and some other states have or are considering taking the same step – like New York and Colorado. But opponents say the bill is too broad, too expensive and too invasive for people convicted of low-level offenses.

“DNA contains the most personal information you can obtain from our bodies,” Bettis said. “The government should have a really good reason they should have that information.”

And repeat convictions for marijuana possession or drunken driving should not qualify as a good reason, Bettis said. If legislators want to add specific crimes to the list of those requiring DNA samples, they should name those crimes and focus on a limited few, according to Bettis.

“But we think this is the wrong approach,” she said.

The ACLU also is concerned about the impact this bill, if passed, could have on law enforcement-related racial disparities in Iowa.

“The passage of this bill would make that problem even more invasive, resulting in disproportionate gathering and data-banking of the genetic material of minorities in the state,” according to a press release.

And then there's the cost. Bettis said that with legislators debating how much to spend on education and tax reform, the idea of expanding the DNA database seems frivolous.

“This is expensive for being unnecessary and an invasion of privacy,” she said.

Paul Bush, criminalist supervisor for the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation's DNA unit and administrator of the state's DNA database, said passage of the bill would require the state lab to process about 5,700 additional DNA samples a year.

“That would about double the amount of offender samples we would be receiving,” Bush said. “If the bill passes, we would request additional funding and personnel to help allow with the additional samples being collected.”

Without additional resources, he said, expanded DNA sampling would create a large backlog in the state's DNA database, delaying samples from being entered into the system and possibly delaying the resolution of some crimes.

SUPPORT

But the Iowa Department of Public Safety supports passage of the bill, Bush said, because of the power the database has in helping to solve crimes.

“The more samples we get entered into the database, the more hits that will result,” he said.

DNA technology is improving all the time, making it easier to use and more common in criminal investigations. As states continue to build up their databases, more and more hits roll in, Bush said.

“Statistically, you would expect to get more hits,” he said, “and we are.”

Iowa has gotten a total of 1,245 DNA hits through the state or national databases since it began entering evidence and samples in 2002, Bush said. Those hits are criminals or crime scene evidence that found a match in the system.

Johnson County Attorney Lyness said adding DNA from individuals convicted of aggravated misdemeanors makes sense, in part, because many of those folks originally were charged with felonies and entered plea agreements to a lesser charge.

Additionally, many crimes that qualify as aggravated misdemeanors in Iowa are called felonies in other states.

“So this would put us in line with a lot of other states,” Lyness said. “And getting more evidence is always helpful.”

It's not just useful in solving crimes, she said.

“It can exonerate people too,” Lyness said.

Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek said he has been lobbying to expand the state's DNA collection parameters “largely because many of the hard core criminals out there commit a large number of crimes and do it for their whole life.”

But, he said, some can go years or their entire life without getting convicted of a felony because of plea agreements and other factors.

Iowa City police Chief Sam Hargadine said that after seeing what the database can do – like in the Matthews investigation – he fully supports expanding the database.

“I see it as the same as a fingerprint,” Hargadine said.

Some of the amendments that have been proposed for the bill include excluding individuals convicted of aggravated misdemeanors who receive deferred sentences or excluding specific crimes.

But Rep. Clel Baudler, R-Greenfield, who is sponsoring the legislation, said those aberrations are “unacceptable” and that the bill he proposed is very bipartisan.

“It's a tremendous tool for law enforcement to convict the bad guys and eliminate the innocent as suspects,” he said.