An announcement by Maryland officials that nearly 300 dangerous criminals have been arrested thanks to DNA evidence has some hopeful that the capital region is finally joining the modern era of crime fighting.
Gov. Martin O’Malley announced last week that officials had arrested some 267 suspects in cold case homicides and rapes since he took office. The arrests came after forensic scientists tested nearly 24,000 samples from old crime scenes.
“That’s 24,000 opportunities to solve crimes that we just had failed to analyze, that we had failed to put through scientific rigor that would enable it to be matched within the larger database,” the governor said in a statement Friday.
Despite its many high-tech businesses and professionals, the D.C. region has been late to embrace DNA and other top-flight forensic sciences for fighting crime. Until last year, Maryland was taking samples only from convicts and not from suspects, leaving massive gaps for investigators.
The District also still lacks its own DNA lab. District officials hired William Vosburgh to head up its foundering efforts in 2007, but as The Washington Examiner has reported, police department officials resisted giving him autonomy and he was detailed to the mayor’s office to continue his work.
Despite the infighting, Vosburgh’s team has made some progress. A top law enforcement source told The Examiner that D.C. has issued four warrants for suspected serial rapists thanks to DNA “hits” obtained by Vosburgh’s staff.
Comparatively, Virginia was an early adopter of DNA forensics, becoming in 2003 the first state to begin taking samples from suspects — not just convicts. While Maryland and District officials have struggled to close monstrous backlogs of homicides and rapes, authorities in Northern Virginia are already using DNA to catch burglars and other low-level criminals.
DNA can be effective in finding offenders, but it’s arduous and expensive to test. And sloppy DNA work can set police departments back for decades.
The FBI, for instance, is still reeling from two-decades-old revelations that one of its examiners was manipulating samples. The Houston laboratory all but went into receivership earlier this decade when it emerged that a string of innocent men had been imprisoned thanks to chaos in the lab.
