pciszek: ladyfortuna: That whole thing kind of bewilders me. What possible reason could we have NOT to enter DNA from deceased suspects into the national database? They're already dead, they don't care what we do with it... and it could potentially solve a lot of crimes.

This. I'm all for preserving evidence. I have heard of states refusing permission to DNA test evidence from crimes for which someone has already been executed, and I remember hearing about one DNA exoneration that was possible only because one criminologist kept redundant samples against department regulations. Do any states have a policy, official or otherwise, of destroying evidence in death penalty cases in order to avoid later embarrassment?

I'm sure there's some weirdity to do with either warrants, right to fair trial (since the dead person cannot later "confront the witnesses against him"), presumption of innocence, etc.

There's also the slowness of bureaucracy involved. Remember that until very recently, evidence had to be tangible: That is, a DNA sample had to be obtained from actual blood, and couldn't be (and in some cases still can't) be a profile on file from an old sample. So if you wanted to compare a new or cold case to a suspect, you had to have his actual blood to compare to the new case, not just a sheet of paper with the DNA readout on it. The lab had to take real blood from the suspect and run a whole new test against the new sample.

So the problem became keeping around vials and swatches of blood in various storage facilities all over the place. It takes up space, which is costly; it degrades, which creates reasonable doubt in later cases; and also it gets used up, which means eventually you could have a case where you know your suspect is the killer and you don't have any more of your sample left to test against his blood. So it's reasonable, where the killer has been executed, to just destroy all the evidence, because the only reason to keep samples around would be to clear unsolved cases. It's not like Gacy or Bundy can be tried again and re-executed for any new crimes.