Former FBI Director William Sessions recently called on prosecutors and law enforcement officials to support broader access to DNA testing to address growing concerns about innocence. Sessions’ comments in an op-ed in The Washington Post came just weeks after Kirk Bloodsworth, the nation’s first death row inmate to be freed based on DNA testing, was informed that Baltimore County authorities had genetically linked another suspect to the crime using DNA evidence. Sessions stated:

[W]ith 137 post-conviction DNA exonerations now on the books in the United States, I am increasingly concerned about recent news stories that suggest a growing resistance on the part of prosecutors across the country to allow post-conviction DNA testing, even in cases where there is strong evidence of innocence.

The Bloodsworth case vividly demonstrates the need for law enforcement officials to join advocates for the innocent in seeking DNA testing where it previously was unavailable. The phenomenal scientific potential of this evidence should be championed by law enforcement officials, whose principal interest has always been to protect the innocent as they try to apprehend the guilty.

(Washington Post, September 21, 2003) See Innocence.