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DNA Testing In Law Enforcement

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The next topic to show why DNA testing is important to law enforcement is the unanalyzed evidence stored away hoping one day to be tested. There was a study done showing over a time frame of five years that there was about 40% of unanalyzed rape and homicide cases that had DNA evidence waiting to be tested. They suspect that there maybe a few causes for this kind of problem. These unanalyzed cases are a part of backlogs and they are terming as cases of justice denied. Some speculate that the investigating officer can be a cause of why evidence is not tested. It would be in situations where there suspect confesses to the crime so they feel there is no need to waste money and time waiting for the DNA tests to come back. Which is a little …show more content…

Without the forensic evidence tested to confirm these confessions, who is to say they really are the suspect the officers are looking for. Another suggestion is that officers are so aware of the backlogs already that if cases are lacking a suspects or lacking in other areas they feel like submitting it will not help either since it will just be added to the backlogs. They actual are correct in a way because evidence is tested in order of importance. Normally the case that get tested first are those where there is a court date set for the suspect because that evidence needs to be done before then. Cases without a suspect is normally put last because there is no specific time frame besides the statute of limitation on the types of crime committed. Sadly the cases without a suspect are the ones that truly need forensics to help obtain justice. Those cases are in a stalled state and with the DNA tested then it can move forward in some type of way, even just adding the unknown sample to CODIS would be a big step …show more content…

This survey found that there was 22,013,113 unsolved property crimes from 2003 to 2007, there was 5,126,719 of those cases that had untested forensic evidence, and it showed that municipal police agencies accounted for 3,986,278 of those cases. There was a total of 150,070 unsolved rape cases and out of those there was 27,595 rapes reported as unsolved containing unanalyzed forensic evidence, and municipal police account for 20,016 of those cases. Lastly there was a total 28,319 unsolved homicide cases and out of those there was 3,975 cases having unanalyzed forensic evidence, and the municipal police account for 3,153 of those unanalyzed cases. It seems by these statistics that the municipal police might want to rethink their policies on evidence testing. With all these types of unsolved cases there is about 12,548 rape and homicide cases that have DNA evidence that has not been submitted for analysis. That means in that five year period there is possible 12,548 murders and rapist out there on the streets. Is that supposed to make people feel safe?
The population of the United States is large but with how many unsolved cases in a five year period just to goes to show you that forensics can help our justice system if only the crime laboratories had the funding to test all cases better. With how

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