Grants to help inmates clear their names unspent

1-24-2008 National

WASHINGTON -- Marvin Anderson and other men exonerated by DNA evidence said Wednesday that they want Attorney General Michael Mukasey to start doling out federal money to help states analyze evidence that led to convictions.

"It's fear," Anderson of Hanover, Va., said of the bureaucratic resistance to clearing the way for such analyses. DNA evidence exonerated Anderson in 2001 of a rape conviction, after he was sentenced to 210 years in prison and served 15. "No one wants to admit a mistake has been made."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said at a hearing that he'll grill the new attorney general next week on why $14 million Congress has set aside for those analyses hasn't been spent.

Congress made the money available nearly four years ago as part of legislation named for Kirk Bloodsworth, the first person in the United States exonerated from a death-row crime through DNA analysis as evidence. He was released in 1993 after DNA evidence cleared his conviction in the murder of a 9-year-old girl.

"The bottom line: DOJ is denying people with claims of innocence the chance to prove it," Bloodsworth said of the Department of Justice in a statement given to the committee.

More than 120 people have been freed from death row, Leahy said -- a number that points to the need to tighten forensics practices and give innocent people the resources to prove their innocence.

Other witnesses told of being turned down by the Justice Department for the grants, sometimes without explanation.

"I expect to hear that the department now intends to implement the law and to solicit and award the millions of dollars of Bloodsworth grants that have been delayed these past years," Leahy said.

John Morgan, deputy director of the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice, said the agency wants the grant money to reach the states, but the law had constrained states from applying properly for the grants. Leahy and the others scoffed at that explanation, saying the department chose not to help the applicants. ..more.. by LAURIE KELLMAN, ASSOCIATED PRESS