500th DNA violent-crime hit recorded

By: Frank Green | Richmond Times Dispatch
Published: April 21, 2009

Enforcement of a Virginia law requiring DNA samples from people arrested for violent crimes reached a milestone earlier this year with its 500th "hit."

A hit occurs when a DNA profile taken from a crime scene matches a profile of a known or unknown person in the Virginia Department of Forensic Science's DNA databank, one of the oldest in the country.

Virginia has been collecting DNA from felons since the early 1990s, and in 2003, it became the second state to require DNA samples from arrestees, thus far collecting more than 40,500.

"There is little doubt that this statute has improved the commonwealth's ability not only to identify suspects and prosecute crimes but also to prevent certain individuals from committing new crimes," said Peter Marone, the department director.

Marone said, "When this law was passed, the legislature and the governor expected it to be valuable and effective as a tool to solve and even prevent crimes, and they were right." More than a dozen states now have similar laws.

Department spokesman Tom Gasparoli said that in Virginia if an arrestee is not convicted, the DNA profile is removed from the databank. If convicted, the DNA profile becomes part of the databank's convicted felon index.

According to the department's Web site, as of Jan. 31, there were almost 300,000 profiles in the databank and there had been more than 5,400 hits.

The department does not keep track of how many cold hits lead to convictions but said it is known that Virginia had the first interstate hit of an arrestee's profile.

A 2005 story in The New York Times about that case reported that a Long Island, N.Y., man, identified as Gregory Stovall, was charged in an unsolved 1997 rape of a Queens Village, N.Y., woman, based on a match between the his DNA and evidence from the crime scene.

The department said Stovall's DNA was obtained when he was arrested for burglary in Portsmouth in June 2003.

In a Virginia case in March 2008, the DNA profile of a man arrested in 2007 in Manassas "hit" on a DNA profile in the state databank collected from the scene of a 2007 sexual assault in Prince William County.

In another Virginia case also in 2007, the DNA profile of a person arrested for robbery in Norfolk hit on DNA evidence from an unsolved 2005 Norfolk rape.

Contact Frank Green at (804) 649-6340 or fgreen@timesdispatch.com.