The word in Washington is that Senate Bill 486, Sen. Leahy's "Innocence Protection Act", may be coming up for a committee vote this week. For further information on the bill, including text and analysis, go to the Libary of Congress's website at http://thomas.loc.gov/ and enter "S 486" into the search engine.

Various prosecutors, victims, and concerned citizens from around the nation have started a letter-writing campaign in opposition to the bill. TDCAA (as an association) generally does not intervene in federal legislation, but I thought some of our members might be interested in making their opinions known on this subject.

If you are one of those people, email me at edmonds@tdcaa.com and I can forward to you additional information on S. 486 and who to contact if you support or oppose it.

Shannon Edmonds
TDCAA

Folks may want to look at this thing -- I just scanned until my stomach turned and I couldn't take anymore. It does seem to include wide open federal grant funding for "development" of defense "resources" for state agencies or groups involved in furthering representation of capital defendants, apparently including just giving federal funding to pay defense attorneys "market rates" and "expenses," etc. Also has federal post-conviction DNA legislation with state grant funding tied to compliance. I probably just didn't read far enough, but where are the pay incentives to retain experienced prosecutors to wade through the boatloads of new post-conviction proceedings they seem to be proposing? And maybe I just read too fast, but the "Commission" they propose to develop national "standards" (anybody read Atkins v. Virginia to see who reads the product of these groups?) seems to be weighted 5-4 toward the defense bar.

I am sorry, but I just do not see how the Government will ever prove "by a preponderance of the evidence that the application for testing was made to unreasonably delay the execution of sentence or administration of justice, rather than to support a claim" that "the proposed DNA testing has the scientific potential to produce new, noncumulative evidence material to the claim of the applicant that the applicant did not commit" the "crime of which the applicant was convicted". The bill says 80 innocents have been saved (10 from death) by the type testing proposed. But at what cost will the government now be mandated to try to save those poor souls being maliciously or misguidedly prosecuted by the U.S. Attorneys and mistaken witnesses? "Scientific potentialities" seem to be shifting sand to me and no one knows how many applications will be filed. If this bill becomes law, how long will it take for the federal government to apply its standards to state prosecutions for other than capital offenses? Is it any less a violation of due process to incarcerate someone (who is innocent) than to execute them? The bill itself points out "it shocks the conscience and offends social standards of fairness and decency to deny [any] inmates the opportunity to present persuasive evidence of their innocence." Yes, I feel bad when an innocent person is wrongly convicted, but that is why the system has lots of other safeguards. "The most reliable forensic technique for identifying criminals" will still not very often produce conclusive evidence of innocence because of gathering/contamination/storage and other issues. If there's enough money in the budget for this, I can think of a lot of other things we ought to buy first. Plus, there seems to be little doubt the powers assumed in Sec. 103 of this bill are not among those delegated to the United States. Cf. Amend. 10. I guess Vermont contributes so little to the federal tax base that its representatives can afford to propose this kind of stuff with reckless abandon.