NEW YORK: Scott Fappiano spent half his life in prison with rapists and murderers before he got a break. New DNA evidence showed his semen did not match that found on the clothing of a woman he was convicted of raping.

After 21 years in jail, he was released last year. He was 44.

“It gave me my life back,” Fappiano said from the same Brooklyn neighbourhood he left for prison in his early 20s.

“Without DNA, I would have done 40 years.”

Fappiano is one of more than 200 people in the United States exonerated through testing of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, which contains the genetic information unique to each individual.

New York state wants to increase DNA analysis to solve crimes, but civil rights groups say without wider criminal justice system reforms and checks on the way DNA is processed, such an expansion could result in more wrongful convictions.

“DNA is promoted as the gold standard in forensic science but it is not infallible and is subject to human error,” said Robert Perry, legislative director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

New York City’s expansion of DNA use includes the recent opening of the largest government-run DNA lab in the United States. And two proposed laws would expand New York state’s DNA database to include criminals convicted of minor offences such as credit card theft.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has backed one bill on database expansion that would help police match DNA evidence from crime scenes with a larger list of names as a way to “bring the guilty to justice and exonerate those who have been wrongly accused.”

The database would be one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the United States. Although a few states such as California collect DNA straight after arrest for serious crimes even before conviction, New York leads the way nationally in terms of expanding its database capabilities.

NOT LIKE ‘CSI’: The city says its new lab will allow investigators to increase DNA analysis from 3,000 cases a year to 20,000 — expanding from murders and sexual assaults to robberies, car thefts and burglaries.

When the city lab opened last month, New York police commissioner Ray Kelly said the public’s knowledge of DNA had grown because of television crime shows, such as the popular “Crime Scene Investigation,” or “CSI,” series.

Real-life DNA analysis is rarely as glamorous.

“Evidence collection and analysis is difficult, painstaking, often tedious work,” Kelly said.

Evidence in Fappiano’s case, including analysis of a cigarette butt and a sexual assault evidence kit, was lost for years before DNA extracts from the victim’s sweatpants was found.

Such poor organisation is typical, rights groups say. They argue that before New York increases the use of DNA, better oversight of laboratories and databases is needed.

“DNA database expansion misses the point of what we can learn from DNA exonerations about how to prevent wrongful convictions in the first place,” said Stephen Saloom, policy director for the Innocence Project.

Saloom said New York trails several US states on criminal justice reform and needs to tackle witness misidentification, record entire police interrogations and find better ways of collecting and preserving evidence.

Perry cited examples of human error with DNA samples, including cross-contamination, mislabelling and misinterpreting results.—Reuters