Retention of DNA samples/evidence

A Columbus Dispatch article this past weekend projects state lawmakers being scheduled to introduce a bill in the Ohio General Assembly soon, “fundamentally changing how crime is investigated & prosecuted in the State, and making post-conviction DNA testing available to more convicts.”

House Bill 218, which had been introduced in May 2007, would’ve “provided that an inmate who pleaded guilty or no contest to a felony, was sentenced to a prison term or death, and was eligible to apply for post-conviction DNA testing could have applied for such DNA testing under the same procedures as the application of an inmate convicted of a felony…”

But “Ohio doesn’t have statewide standards for cataloguing & preserving evidence, and it routinely ends up going missing,” the article says, and a USAToday article earlier this month related that “half of the states in the country lack requirements preserving DNA evidence, despite a series of dramatic exonerations based on the critical biological material.”

§ 2953.81 of the Ohio Revised Code provides that, in the case of inmates, that DNA “samples shall be preserved during the entire period of time for which the inmate is imprisoned relative to the prison term or sentence of death, and, if that prison term expires or the inmate is executed, for a reasonable period of time of not less than twenty-four months after the term expires or the inmate is executed.” Kentucky law includes not only statutes relating to the disposal of DNA evidence, but for a centralized database and the maintenance of samples collected before July 2008. Indiana’s statutes relating to post-conviction DNA tests are contained in IC §35-38-7-14.

An Ohio Attorney General’s opinion in March 2005 examined the Ohio statutes on DNA sample retention.

The article indicated, as well, that the Ohio Supreme Court is considering changes that would require judges to regularly report the statuses of all post-conviction cases—such as DNA testing requests—so as to prevent them from “falling through the cracks.”


Additional information on DNA Database & Post-conviction Testing statutes