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DNA bill now goes to Senate |
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Friday, 20 March 2009 |
Juli’s Law, legislation introduced by state Rep. Dawn Creekmore of East End, received overwhelming approval Wednesday in the Arkansas House of Representatives.
The House voted 87-7 in favor of the DNA bill that Creekmore, a Democrat, says could help solve cold cases and exonerate innocent prisoners.
The bill, which now goes to the Senate, calls for DNA samples to be collected from people arrested on suspicion of capital murder, first-degree murder, kidnapping and first- or second-degree sexual assault.
Under current state law, a DNA sample is collected only after a person is convicted of a crime.
The bill is named for Juli Busken of Benton, who was abducted, raped and murdered in December 1996 in Okla-homa. Busken’s parents, Bud and Mary Jean Busken, have offered support to Creekmore and Mary Jean Busken testified Tuesday in behalf of the bill in a House Judiciary Committee session.
The man convicted in Juli Busken’s death was arrested eight years after the crime based on a DNA match. The 21-year-old woman was abducted during the early morning hours from her apartment complex parking lot in Norman, Okla., and shot to death in nearby Oklahoma City. The tragedy occurred shortly after she had completed requirements for her fine arts degree in dance performance at University of Oklahoma and occurred on the day she was planning to return to Benton.
Her parents had driven to Norman to help her move home and were forced to identify her body a few hours after arriving on the OU campus.
Also testifying in the Judiciary Committee session was former Colorado resident John B. Ramsey, father of JonBenet Ramsey, whose slaying received widespread attention. Ramsey now lives in Little Rock. The arrest of the killer, identified many years later, was made through a DNA match.
Creekmore’s proposed bill initially had included burglary charges, but the proposal was modified to gain support.
“The reason burglary was included is that law enforcement officials have indicated that most rapists most often start with burglary,” Creek-more said. “This way, their DNA would already be in the database.”
The man convicted in Busken’s death, Anthony Castillo Sanchez, had en-tered the Oklahoma prison system following conviction of burglary.
Authorities said semen stains on Busken’s underwear and a pink leotard yielded a DNA profile that eventually was entered into a state DNA database. In 2004, state investigators found a match between the profile and a newer profile taken from Sanchez when he entered the prison system on the burglary conviction.
Castillo had been questioned in conjunction with a sexual assault/burglary case, but was convicted through a negotiated guilty plea to the burglary charge.
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