DA Conley: Time to Modernize Massachusetts Crime-Fighting
"A DNA profile can be obtained from a person’s inner cheek quickly, easily, and inexpensively with just a cotton swab. But our laws on this important evidence demand that a licensed phlebotomist take the sample in a blood drawing."
The following article was written by Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley, a West Roxbury resident. More than 125 years ago, the great American author Mark Twain wrote of a killer identified by his own thumbprint. “There was one thing about a person which never changed, from the cradle to the grave,” Twain wrote of the loops and whorls unique to every individual fingerprint. Here as in so other ways, Twain was a man ahead of his time. When he published Life on the Mississippi, criminalists were still using photographs and body measurements as a means of singularly identifying individuals. It would be almost a decade before fingerprinting was successfully used in a criminal investigation and eventually surpassed every other means …
