Editorial: Unnecessary failure

Thursday, March 24, 2005 | 9:02 a.m.

In 2001 the Nevada Legislature passed a law to make it easier for the police to catch or clear ex-convicts suspected of having committed violent crimes. The law applies to felons who have been convicted of at least one of nearly 200 crimes identified by the state. They must submit DNA samples upon their release from prison.

But the law hasn't been as effective as it should be. That's because Metro Police lacks funding to hire enough lab technicians to quickly analyze the ex-convicts' collected samples, so they can be compared to DNA collected at crime scenes. This forces the crime lab to devote most of its time to a higher priority -- analyzing DNA samples from suspects already in police custody.

The Legislature never provided any money to pay for the program. And the city of Las Vegas and the Clark County Commission, which jointly fund Metro, never provided enough money. This failure has resulted in some disturbing instances of ex-convicts not being apprehended sooner as suspects in criminal cases. For example, a man arrested by Metro Police on Saturday, for allegedly killing one woman and sexually assaulting another, was free for nearly two years. All the while, evidence linking him to the crimes was in police possession, awaiting analysis.

A federal grant has allowed Metro Police to send some of the DNA samples for outside analysis. So the backlog, which once reached as high as 6,000 samples, has been reduced for now to about 500. But that's still not good enough. The fact remains that this is a local responsibility, one that Las Vegas officials should be meeting rather than passing the buck to the federal government. It's unconscionable that we aren't fully using such a powerful tool at our disposal to catch suspects charged with violent crimes.