It’s not every day that a bill passes the Oregon House and Senate without a single ‘no’ vote. However, that’s what happened with HB 3206, which Governor Kate Brown signed into law last week. The legislation makes it somewhat easier for people who say they’ve been wrongfully convicted of aggravated murder and other serious crimes to access DNA testing.
The measure is actually a re-write of Oregon’s 2001 law governing post-conviction DNA testing. The Oregon Innocence Project helped write the new legislation. Steve Wax, the project’s legal director, told OPB’s All Things Considered host Kate Davidson that the old law was too restrictive.
“As far as we have been able to determine, only two motions for testing were ever granted. One of those was then rescinded,” he said.
Wax said the new law allows prisoners, who often don't have detailed knowledge of police investigations, to be more general in describing the evidence they want tested. It also allows a greater range of people to seek DNA testing, even if they’ve already served their sentence and want to clear their name.
This conversation is edited for clarity.
Kate Davidson: What does the new law do differently?
Steve Wax: Well, it does a number of very significant things.
The old law required a person to specify the evidence that he wanted tested. The reality for a person in prison is that it's almost impossible to do that; you can't know just what the police seized. So for example, under the old law, you'd have to say 'I want a test done on slide 23-A that was taken from the right index finger of the victim.' In prison you can't know that.
What the new law requires is that you have to be as specific as is reasonable, as is possible. So you might say, for example, 'I want testing done of the swabs taken from the victim.' Less specific.
Another one of the important changes is the old law required a person to be able to say 'Here's my theory of innocence, and this DNA evidence is in and of itself going to exonerate me.' That's just not how this works in most situations. The DNA will, on rare occasions, in and of itself prove a person's innocence. More often than not it's going to lead to other investigation that, in combination, will establish innocence. That's one of the biggest changes that we made, so that the new law now says that the evidence will lead to exoneration.
Kate Davidson: Why would a court deny someone's request for DNA testing? There must be legitimate reasons at play.
Steve Wax: Good question, and it might be a question better put to a judge. The reality as I see it is there is an overemphasis on finality in our system.
There's no question that looking into cases years after the fact can be upsetting to victims and we need to be conscious of that. On the other hand, there is a very important societal interest in seeing if the right guy is in prison. Because if the right guy is not in prison then that means that the wrong guy is out and perhaps committing new crimes, and we've experienced that.
So why? There's an overemphasis on finality. People don't want to disturb a result that's been achieved, and sometimes I think that has gone too far.
Copyright 2015 Oregon Public Broadcasting
