
The New York Times today writes on a report to be released today on the establishment of a national DNA data bank to parallel the national fingerprint system. The DNA system was authorized in a little-noted provision of the 1994 Crime Control Act. The article states that one of the DNA system's main advantage over fingerprinting will be in identifying sexual and other bodily assault criminals who leave tell-tales, as well as in correcting victims' sometimes faulty identification of innocents. Some civil libertarians are critical of the project as invasive of privacy. Law enforcement officials and others applaud it, two of whom are OJ's former attorneys, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who run the Innocence Project, a program which uses DNA testing to help free those falsely convicted.