Governor unveils new system for wider sex offender tracking
Staying in line with her credo of "keeping families safe," Governor Gregoire recently signed a bill that will allow police to collect DNA samples from a broader range of sex offenders. The bill, heavily influenced by the rape and murder of Zina Linnik (a Tacoma girl raped and murdered on July 4th of last year by a convicted sex offender), increases the number of sex-related crimes that can warrant forced DNA submission.
House Bill 2713 will add several misdemeanor and gross misdemeanor sex crimes to the list of offenses that require offenders to submit a sample of their DNA to the Washington State Patrol’s crime lab so it can be kept on file and compared to evidence found at other crime scenes. They include soliciting a prostitute and fourth-degree sexual assault.
Currently, only felony crimes require a DNA sample from criminals. The crime lab had 161,000 such samples on file as of last month and had analyzed and entered profiles of 97,000 of them into the state database.
The bill also plans to allow law enforcement to post the names of Level 1 sex offenders, the least likely to re-offend, on the statewide offender website if they fail to report their addresses to police. Sex offenders may have the lowest re-offense rate of any almost criminal. but when one does fall off the wagon, the result is almost always shattered lives. Just look at the fact that the creep who did this to Linnik was connected to so many other unsolved crimes.
These are all ideas that, in my opinion, took way too long to get developed...but at least they're finally rearing their heads. My only concern with this is how well the government will be able to maintain the systems they are proposing: the back-ups at state crime labs, who would be processing the DNA, have a notorious history of being extremely bogged down with excess work. How quickly can they get this database up and how well can they maintain it?
Guess we'll have to (gulp) put our faith in the state of Washington to handles this one right.
