Women on Death Row Surrender DNA Samples

Women prisoners on California’s death row, who had asked the state Supreme Court to exempt them from giving up DNA samples, submitted to the inevitable Wednesday and voluntarily provided the specimens, officials reported.

All 13 of the condemned at the state prison for women at Chowchilla provided blood and saliva specimens one day after Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that authorizes the use of “reasonable” force on inmates who refuse to provide them voluntarily.

The new law will not take effect until Jan. 1, but the women were offered the opportunity to give their DNA immediately and agreed to do so, said spokesman Stephen Green of the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency.

Green said the women were informed that Davis approved the bill and that it will authorize prison officials to apply force to gain compliance. He said the women recognized that volunteering was preferable to force.

Green said men on San Quentin’s death row will be offered the same opportunity next month, although some of the approximately 600 inmates have already submitted their DNA.

“Death row men is the group we’re most interested in,” said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer.

State law requires every felon held in county jails and state prisons to provide a DNA specimen, which is filed in a vast databank for use in investigating unsolved crimes, some of them decades old. Since 1992, 145 “cold hit” cases have been cracked by DNA evidence, Barankin said.

Corrections officials have estimated that 350 to 400 criminals are refusing to surrender their DNA for fear that they will implicate themselves in other crimes and be prosecuted again.

Davis and others predict that convicts’ DNA evidence will result in cracking many such cases.