By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — The state Commission on Forensic Science voted Tuesday to allow authorities to expand their use of DNA taken from crime scenes by letting labs release partial genetic matches, instead of only exact matches.
The decision comes amid a national debate over the extent to which law enforcement officials should be allowed to use DNA to identify people who have no criminal history. New York is now among more than a dozen states that permit so-called “partial matches” in a move to widen the net to help police solve crimes.
Until now, scientists in New York’s eight DNA labs could only notify police if they found an 100 percent exact match between the material provided by investigators and the genetic code of a criminal that had been entered into a national database.
If a lab came across a “partial match” that pointed to a close blood relative of that criminal, they could not pass along that information.
That all changes when the new rule on partial matches goes into effect later this year, according to Sean Byrne, acting commissioner of the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services and the commission's chairman.
“This allows law enforcement to have a lead that heretofore scientists were not allowed to disclose,” Byrne said. “And it’s very reliable.”
New York will also be able to respond to inquiries from other states who have found a partial match in the national database, known as CODIS, which is run by the FBI.
Byrne defended the use of partial matches as a way to not only solve crimes, but also to exonerate innocent people and “breathe life” into old cases.
“The big boogeyman people try to paint is to suggest that we’re going to do this proactively,” Byrne said. “But if we trip on a lead we should be able to disclose the lead.”
But some members of the commission oppose the new rule. They say allowing law enforcement sources to use only partial matches raise the risk of invading innocent people’s privacy.
Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, which works to free people who have been wrongly convicted, argued it should fall to the state Legislature, and not a commission, to make such an important policy decision.
"We can't let this commission and local labs ... make up the rules, no matter how well intentioned everybody is," Scheck said.
