DNA preservation and testing bill signed into law
Hayley Barbour has signed into law a statute that requires the preservation of biological or DNA evidence in all felony investigations and sets up a protocol for preservation of that evidence and a right to access for testing.
These measure represent an enormous achievement by the Mississippi Innocence Project’s director, Tucker Carrington. I’m on the board of the project, which is at the Ole Miss law school.
While Mississippi has been behind on these sorts of laws, and the groundwork for this project was well-started by Emily Maw at the Innocence Project in New Orleans along with the work on the Kennedy Brooks and Levon Brewer cases from the Innocence Project in New York that sensitized the entire state to these issues, to have two important bills pass the Mississippi legislature (last year’s DNA task force and this one) with another important one in the works (see below) is an extraordinary achievement for a project that has not existed two full years.
NMC
3/20/9
