State money dries up for DNA testing of sex offenders

By Joe Schoenmann

Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Elected officials were alarmed enough this week when they learned that each month 100 more sexual predators are registering in Clark County and filing their DNA.

They were even more taken aback, though, when the head of the Metro Police Forensic Lab told them the state is paying for only a very small portion of the testing on that DNA, which the Legislature ordered.

Commissioner Tom Collins, who was an assemblyman for about a decade, called it a classic example of a state mandate that “everyone wants to pass but no one wants to pay for.”

Since Oct. 1, 2007, every convicted sex offender who visits Las Vegas for 48 or more hours must register with police, and registration includes providing a DNA sample for testing.

Those test results are filtered through a computer database known as the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. The nationwide database holds about 7.5 million genetic profiles, said Kim Murga, Metro’s DNA lab manager.

The reason for the testing, of course, is that the DNA of someone who registers in Clark County could match the DNA found at a crime scene somewhere else in the nation.

Since the fall of 2007, Metro has put about 3,000 sex offenders’ DNA into the national database, and eight samples have resulted in “hits,” including two for local homicide cases, Murga said. A sex offender who registered in 2008 wound up being a DNA match for one of Metro’s homicide investigations this year, and another 2008 sex offender registrant was a match for the DNA that had been stored from a 1994 slaying in Metro’s jurisdiction.

“That’s huge,” said Steve Sisolak, the other commissioner on Metro’s Fiscal Affairs Committee. “Are you kidding me? Because of this they solved two homicides and the state doesn’t want to fund this anymore?”

Well-funded, at first

Before Metro’s Fiscal Affairs voted to eat the cost of the tests — which Sisolak said would likely come from Metro’s general fund balance — he asked staff to lobby the Legislature’s Interim Finance Committee for more money.

Metro gets about 60 percent of its money from Clark County and the remainder from Las Vegas.

Linda Krueger, forensic lab director, told the Fiscal Affairs board Monday that in fiscal year 2008, which ended this June 30, the department received state funding of $15,000, enough to pay for about 100 DNA tests at $150 each. But over those 12 months, about 1,250 offenders registered in Clark County, their DNA tests costing Metro about $190,000.

The previous year, when sex offenders first had to comply with the new law, 1,546 registered, resulting in a $231,000 cost for DNA testing. That wasn’t a problem because the state provided $366,450 for that first year.

But, in just the first two months of the current fiscal year (which began July 1) Metro conducted 206 DNA tests at a cost of almost $31,000. The state, however, provided only $15,000 for the program.

Tests have advocate

To increase funding for the DNA tests — which he would like to see expanded to more criminal offenses — Assemblyman Bernie Anderson, D-Sparks, said he has tried for about 10 years to pass a bill tacking additional fees on to the cost of garden-variety offenses such as speeding or running a stop sign. Municipalities successfully fought those attempts, arguing that paperwork costs would increase and revenues could be lost. Anderson said they also feared the extra fees would invite more state scrutiny of their local budgets.

They didn’t like the prospect of “a city doing the paperwork for something that happened in their jurisdiction, but then having to funnel that money to the county to do the DNA testing,” Anderson said.

“They (also) didn’t want to set a precedent ... where the state would see what they are actually doing with those dollars,” he added.

Even if Anderson’s bill were to become law, an equally important matter would be whether or not those additional fines would ever be collected. Currently, the mechanism for collection is unclear, said Steve Grierson, Clark County’s court executive officer. The Advisory Commission on the Administration of Justice, led by Chief Justice James Hardesty, tried to clarify it during the past legislative session, with a bill that would have given courts statutory authority to collect unpaid fines.

Testifying to the Senate Finance Committee, a state court administrator estimated Clark County had about $60 million in uncollected fines and fees; Washoe County had about $26 million. The cost to administer the collection was estimated to be about $500,000 statewide over two years.

“There is an absence of responsibility in the statutes and a coordinated system for collection of the outstanding amounts ordered by the court system,” Hardesty said Wednesday.

That situation remains because the bill died in the state Senate.

Private donors step up

Another attempt to find money to pay for genetic analysis came in a bill allowing county commissions to accept private donations.

That bill resulted from the homicide case of 19-year-old Brianna Denison in Reno. In January 2008, Denison was kidnapped from a home, and her body was found in a field a month later.

At the time, Washoe County authorities had a backlog of some 3,000 biological samples from convicted sex offenders that had not been genetically processed because of a lack of funding. Authorities complained publicly that they wanted to test the samples for a possible connection to the homicide. In response, donors from across the country sent in more than $300,000. But there was no legal mechanism in place for the county to accept the money, so legislators passed the law to allow county commissioners to accept donations for genetic marker testing.

The bill passed, but Metro hasn’t sought donations because its lab actively seeks genetic testing grants from the National Institute of Justice, Murga said. In fact, Metro announced Wednesday winning a $499,695 National Institute of Justice grant to perform DNA analysis on the biological evidence from unsolved homicide and sexual assault cases.

Typically, Murga said, grants do not cover the full amount associated with testing, including infrastructure and overhead, and there are no guarantees Metro will always win the grants.

“But we’d never ask for private donations while we’re seeking grants,” she said. “I don’t think the public would stand for that.”