Call to amend DNA Act

EXPERT: MOVE WILL ALLOW COLLECTION OF SAMPLES FROM CONVICTS

‘We already have a backlog of over 200 000 cases of criminal offenders.’

While nearly 100 000 prisoners have already been released from jail without their “buccal swap samples” taken, DNA Africa’s Vanessa Lynch is calling for the amendment of the DNA Act to be urgently approved.

The amendment will allow authorities to collect DNA samples from convicted offenders.

According to Lynch, denying the introduction of the Correctional Offenders Bill (CO Bill) would potentially leave offenders unlinked to previous and future crimes as the failure to capture this data undermined an essential element of the National Forensic DNA Database (NFDD).

“The Bill is important to check if they linked to any cold cases as there was no greater weapon in DNA being able to identify convicted offenders. It has a deterrence and identification effect,” Lynch said.

“It should be prioritised as it would help ease with capacity burden and we cannot ignore this population as it was one of the most important population to have on the DNA database.”

While representations were made by Correctional Services to the parliamentary portfolio committee on police at the time, it was deemed possible to collect samples of convicted people within a two-year period from date of promulgation of the DNA Act.

However, Police Minister Bheki Cele said he wanted a database of all South Africans then he would be able to find all the criminals.

Lynch said, however, this was unconstitutional, and the capacity was in question as there were many crime scene samples which contributed to backlogs.

“It is difficult to establish a DNA profile because crime scene samples may contain mixed profiles, more often in crimes including sexual assault. It could have more than one profile on a sample which was where the differential extraction reflected a manual intensive process,” she said.

“We already have a backlog of over 200 000 cases of criminal offenders and it was not feasible nor was it constitutional. It is impossible to get rid of a backlog before we get the Bill [passed] because it might take 10 years before the backlog returns to zero.”

The Bill would result in suspects arrested and charged with Schedule 8 offences which include rape, murder, robbery and culpable homicide where a DNA sample is taken and would be logged in the NFDD.

Lynch said this needed to be done simultaneously because when convicts are released, they aren’t linked to cold cases.

“We have witnessed a link to over 60 cases. We would be letting them back into the society and they are going to violate again, then we would have more backlog.”

In regards to the effect it would have within the justice system, Lynch said this would address a lot of challenges as the administrative burden was encrypted in the criminal justice system.

“A crime scene sample is unknown and a reference profile sample is known. The more known a profile the greater the chance of not making it into an unknown crime scene profile,” she said. – lungas@citizen.co.za