Prosecutors, lawmakers, law enforcement officers and the state public defender haggled Wednesday over how to implement a sweeping new law that requires DNA evidence be preserved to guard against wrongful convictions.
The law requires evidence in serious cases, such as murder or a sex crime carrying a life sentence, to be preserved for the life of the defendant, but it also casts a broad net over “any evidence that may contain DNA” in all other cases. Cops and prosecutors say they are unclear on the rules for identifying and eventually disposing of that evidence, leaving them fearing evidence overflow.
“Everyone is having a challenging time implementing this statute,” Adams County District Attorney Don Quick said Wednesday at a meeting of several state officials trying to come to an agreement on how to implement the law.
Tensions over its implementation came to a boil this week. State public defender Doug Wilson said prosecutors in many jurisdictions have been including evidence-preservation waivers in their plea agreements, meaning defendants looking to plead guilty to a lesser charge must also consent to having evidence that might later prove their innocence destroyed.
The vast majority of criminal cases are settled by plea deal.
“My catch,” Wilson said at Wednesday’s meeting, where he was the only defense attorney, “is you guys conditioning pleas on us signing the waiver.”
Scott Storey, the Jefferson County district attorney, said the plea deals were not meant to extort preservation waivers but to get ahead of a possible tide of evidence swamping storage rooms. Storey said Wednesday that his office will no longer include such waivers in its plea deals.
Storey, Quick and others will also work on creating a form to be filled out at the beginning of a case detailing all the evidence that may have to be preserved under the law. Using that form, Wilson said, prosecutors and defense attorneys could then come to an agreement after a plea deal on what to destroy and what to preserve.
“I’m very optimistic we can get this resolved,” Wilson said. “But let’s see the form.”
Quick, who said his office hasn’t included preservation waivers in its plea deals, agreed.
“This is one of those bills where if people want it to work, it can,” he said. “We all have the same goal. That’s to keep the DNA that matters.”
John Ingold: 303-954-1068 or jingold@denverpost.com
