DNA Database Another Reason to Fight Felony Charges in Ventura County
The Ventura County Star reports the sheriff's department has used the state's DNA database to solve a 2009 vehicle burglary.
Ventura criminal defense attorneys know that DNA evidence is not all it's cracked up to be on TV shows like CSI. For starters, state labs are often overwhelmed and getting evidence tested can take months. And, for the most part, the technology has only been used in cases involving violence, like rape and murder.
Yet, with each passing year the number of cases increases as more and more samples are added to the system. If defendants needed another reason to fight a criminal conviction, keeping their DNA out of the state database would certainly be high on the list.
In November 2009, a Moorpark man reported his vehicle had been broken into -- the sheriff's crime lab collected a blood sample on shattered glass. That sample has reportedly been linked to a 52-year-old Moorpark man whose profile was already in the database.
He was arrested March 12 -- about 18 months after the crime -- and booked into Ventura County Jail.
Proposition 69, the "DNA Fingerprint, Unsolved Crime and Innocence Protection Act" was passed in 2004 and now permits a DNA sample to be collected from all felony offenders and certain misdemeanor offenders, according to the California Department of Justice.
As of the end of 2010, more than 1.7 million samples had been entered into California's DNA database. They are also made part of the Combined DNA Indexing System (CODIS), the national database of criminal DNA samples.
And many of those being flagged as previously unknown defendants in unsolved crimes find themselves facing far more serious charges than the charge for which they were convicted and ordered to submit a DNA sample.
Of those whose DNA profile has been linked to a murder, rape or robbery, 25 percent had their profile submitted to the database for a drug offense and 18 percent for property crimes. Throw in certain DUI convictions, fraud and other criminal convictions, and only 39 percent had been convicted of an underlying violent crime.
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