Chief Judge Backs Broader DNA Testing
By AP,
Associated Press
| 02. 15. 2012
ALBANY — New York’s chief judge urged lawmakers Tuesday to require DNA testing for every felony and criminal misdemeanor conviction and to give defendants who plead guilty to serious felonies greater access to genetic evidence from crime scenes.
Currently, the state limits DNA testing to certain felony and misdemeanor convictions and a person who pleads guilty isn’t entitled to DNA testing if the test results are not part of the prosecution evidence.
But in his annual address on the state of the judiciary, Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman said experience has shown wrongful convictions even in cases where a defendant pleaded guilty. He outlined and endorsed legislative proposals meant to address the potential for wrongful convictions, recommendations that came from a task force including defense attorneys, judges, prosecutors, police, academics and others.
“It’s a stain on the justice system,” Lippman said later of any conviction of someone who didn’t commit the crime. “Our recommendations have no agenda politically.”
Gov. Andrew Cuomo is pushing to expand the state DNA databank beyond samples from those convicted of penal felonies and 36 misdemeanors. The...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni and Anil Oza, STAT | 10.07.2025
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Deni Ellis Béchard, The Washington Post | 10.07.2025
In 1949, when John Gurdon was a 16-year-old boarding school student at Eton College in England, his teacher described his biology studies as “disastrous” and his scientific ambitions as “ridiculous.”
“If he can’t learn simple biological facts,” his term report...