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Evidentiary Technology

Advances in evidentiary technology have, in the past ten years, revolutionized the criminal justice system in the United States and, to some extent, the world. The process of integrating DNA technology into the criminal justice system has been laborious and time consuming. Today, law enforcement agencies can compare DNA profiles found at crime scenes with DNA profiles stored in convicted offender databases, allowing them to better identify the perpetrators of heinous crimes. However, traditional setbacks continue to plague the criminal justice system in spite of these advances. Expense, backlogs and other hurdles threaten to undermine the best efforts of law enforcement to use DNA technology in an efficient, timely manner. And, DNA evidence has been used increasingly in the past ten years to exonerate a growing number of convicted felons, causing some to wonder if these breakthroughs in genetic technology do little other than reveal the arbitrary nature of what is at best an imperfectùand at worst a corruptùcriminal justice system.

In the 1980s, DNA testing was not even admissible in American courts. In the following years, DNA samples found at crime scenes were useless unless there was a clear suspect, as there was nothing with which to compare those samples that were recovered. Though it is true that today offender databanks boast thousands of genetic profiles, evidence rooms and forensic labs around the country are stockpiling hundreds of thousands of untested samples. Many of these samples taken from crime scenes belong to criminals that remain at large, and many crimes committed today are perpetrated by those whose DNA remains buried in a lab. Modern forensic technology has overextended the reserves of manpower and exhausted law enforcement budgets (Quindlen 80).

On the upside, while ten years ago a single DNA analysis cost thousands of dollars, required a visible blot of blood for testing and took months to ...

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Evidentiary Technology. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 12:56, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708969.html