• Enacts the Debbie Smith Backlog Grant Program, providing $755 million to test the backlog of over 300,000 rape kits and other crime scene evidence awaiting analysis in our nation's crime labs;

• Enacts the DNA Sexual Assault Justice Act and the Rape Kits and DNA Evidence Backlog Elimination Act, authorizing more than $500 million for programs to improve the capacity of crime labs to conduct DNA analysis, reduce non-DNA backlogs, train examiners, support sexual assault forensic examiner programs, and promote the use of DNA to identify missing persons;

• Creates the Kirk Bloodsworth Post-Conviction DNA Testing Program and authorizes $25 million over five years to help states pay the costs of post-conviction DNA testing

If you add up the numbers, $755 million goes to test old rape kits looking for a perpetrator while $25 million is allotted to inmates with innocence claims for dna testing. Add to that another $500 million for crime labs, and you have over $1 billion for crime-fighting and victims and $25 million for inmates with innocence claims.

Here's a timeline showing how the bill went from a model one in 2000 to a Republican, watered down version that finally became law in 2004.

As we have said before, there's the official spin and the reality. But, we're not ungrateful.

While this bill is far from what was hoped for and what is needed from an innocence perspective, it's better than no bill at all. I have nothing but praise for Senator Leahy and Congressmen Bill Delahunt and Ray La Hood who fought the Administration long and hard to get as much as they could for those who wrongfully languish in our nations' prisons and on death row. But for their tenacity and dedication, there would be no relief in sight.

I'll address the proposed capital defense lawyer training program in another post, after I've seen President Bush's proposed plan. The provision in the Justice for All Act on the funding calls for equal funding for training prosecutors and defense counsel. [Scroll to Sections 421, 422 and 426.] I wonder why in his speech he made it sound like only defense lawyers would get funding for training?