Tests stalled murder case for two years

Payson Roundup Arizona
Gila County sheriff’s investigators decided the evidence and the interviews didn’t match up with the reported suicide of Enessa Hamilton within hours of her May 11, 2007 death, but had to wait three, long, frustrating years to get enough results back from state and private crime labs to arrest her former boyfriend for murder last week.

The City looks to advance rape testing

The San Francisco Examiner
The testing of DNA in rape cases could be sped up and perpetrators more speedily brought to justice after years of a problem-plagued process.

Dept. of Justice working to compile thousands of missing DNA samples

The Badger Herald
The Wisconsin Department of Corrections is missing thousands of DNA samples from convicted sex offenders, used to help identify suspects in crimes around the state.

Czech court allows DNA collection by force

Metro Canada & Associated Press
PRAGUE – The Czech Republic’s constitutional Court has ruled to allow authorities to collect DNA samples from people under investigation without their consent.

Old DNA can affect punishment phase in new cases

AP Texarkana Gazette
DALLAS—DNA evidence links Joseph Houston Jr. to the rape of a woman at knifepoint in 1984. DNA saved in another case connects Dewayne Douglas Willis to the 1983 sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl.

Dallas police solved those cases more than two decades after the assaults were committed, but neither man will be arrested or tried for those crimes because the statute of limitations for sexual assault in the 1980s was only five years.

Attorney wants DNA evidence limited

UPI.com
BELLEVILLE, Ill., Dec. 6 (UPI) — The attorney for a man convicted of murder and sentenced to death says the DNA evidence to clear him in one state shouldn’t convict him in another.

Amanda Knox’s appeal rests on jailhouse letters, challenges to DNA evidence

Seattle PI
…Where Knox’s lawyers may find the most traction on appeal is in their request for a review of forensic evidence …