Obama signs Katie Sepich bill

Measure is named after NMSU grad student who was murdered

 

UPDATED

President Obama on Thursday signed into law the Katie Sepich Act, named for a graduate student at New Mexico State University who was murdered by a stranger.

It will expand DNA collection from defendants arrested on suspicion of serious crimes.

U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., introduced the legislation with then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman in March 2011 to create incentives for states to implement DNA collection programs.

New Mexico already has a Katie's Law.

State legislators in 2011 approved a bill mandating that everybody arrested on suspicion of a felony provide police with a DNA sample. It expanded a state law that required DNA samples upon arrest in a subset of serious crimes.

The concept is that checking DNA upon arrest will pinpoint people who have committed other crimes.

Gov. Susana Martinez, who personally prosecuted Sepich's killer as a district attorney, signed that bill into law.

When 22-year-old Sepich was murdered in 2003, New Mexico did not collect DNA until a defendant was convicted. Her killer was arrested on unrelated charges that same year, but was not connected to Sepich's rape and murder until his conviction for other crimes in 2006.

"Katie's Law is a sensible approach that would give law enforcement the tools they need to help solve crimes and prevent heartbreaking tragedies like Katie's from happening in the future," Udall said.

The goal of the federal legislation, first introduced in 2010 by then-U.S. Rep. Harry Teague, D-Hobbs, is to offer an incentive to states that do not have DNA collection processes for arrests. It would authorize the Department of Justice to award grants to cover up to 100 percent of a state’s first-year cost of implementing a collection program.

Sepich was from Carlsbad, but was a graduate student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces when she died.

 

A DNA CASE TO WATCH -- 'IN COLD BLOOD' REVISITED

In Kansas, state authorities this month exhumed the bodies of the two murderers that Truman Capote wrote about in his best-seller "In Cold Blood."

The killers, Richard Hickock, near right,  and Perry Smith, were hanged in 1965 for the murders of Herb and Bonnie Clutter and two of their children in rural Kansas. The killings occurred on Nov. 15, 1959.

Hickock and Smith traveled to Florida after the Kansas murders. They long have been suspected in the Florida murders of Cliff and Christine Walker and their two children on Dec. 19, 1959.

Sarasota County investigators in 1960 ruled out Hickock and Smith based on lack of fingerprints and their passing polygraph tests.

But DNA from their bone fragments may provide a more definitive answer as to whether they committed the Florida murders. A rape was part of that crime spree. Science could solve the crimes after 53 years.

The findings of the DNA comparisons could be made public in as little as three weeks.