Every state has legislation that can that allows for the collection of DNA, whether it's sex offenders, which started in the 90s, to all arrests and all felons, which came about recently every state has that. The most important thing that state can do though is to look at the laws they have to make sure they're effective. You see legislation is not the silver bullet. In order for legislation to be effective it has to be implemented effectively. The gaps in the system are a perfect example. All the states have great legislation to collect this, yet there are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of individuals not in the database.
Offender collection statutes are in place in every state in the nation and what we have found over the last several years in Illinois is that there are gaps. There are gaps both in the collection of DNA from offenders in our state and that's because there are there's a piecemeal approach to collecting DNA. There's a number of collecting agencies in every state, whether that be probation parole the court system, and there's no overall auditing that gets done to ensure that all offenders that are required to give DNA pursuant to state statute actually have DNA in the system.
There are gaps in your system and one area that everyone should focus in is the sex offenders sex offenders move to your state and come to your state a variety of ways. They may come under interstate transfer; they may just move they may move from one registry to another, or they may not be on a registry and then be required to be on your registry. The most important thing you can do is identify those people on your registry that don't have DNA in the database. You need to look at your statute and see how your statute allows you to collect that DNA. One example I can provide that may illustrate that is this is a sex offender who moved from one state to Illinois last year. The individual wasn't collected in their home state came to Illinois where we collected them and they hit on a cold case rape out of their home state where it was extradited last year.
