Pete Sessions: “not too long ago our former colleague, Paul Coverdell, introduced the National Forensic Sciences Improvement Act. It was…”

“not too long ago our former colleague, Paul Coverdell, introduced the National Forensic Sciences Improvement Act. It was a bill to further Federal support to State forensic laboratories, those places where DNA evidence is evaluated, where drug evidence is evaluated, where fingerprints, ballistics, and all the other scientific data from carpet fibers, and so forth, are evaluated, and then reported out to the prosecutors around the country so cases can be prosecuted on sound science. Today we have a crisis in our criminal justice system. We clearly have a bottleneck, of major proportions, in the laboratory arena. There is simply an exploding amount of work. More and more tests are available. People are demanding more and more tests on each case that comes down the pike. We are way behind. In my view, as a person who spent 15 years of my life prosecuting criminal cases, swift, fair justice is critical for any effective criminal justice system.”