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‘Some evidence should be destroyed’
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Posted on Jan 16 2006
Some evidence that are not needed anymore should be destroyed to avoid overloading the state-of-the-art evidence storage facility at the Department of Public Safety, a ranking DPS official said.
Maj. Edward Manalili, chief of the DPS Criminal Investigation Bureau, told the Saipan Tribune that a lot of seized evidence are not significant anymore because the statute of limitations in the cases had already ran out.
Any destruction of evidence, however, should be approved by the Attorney General’s Office, stressed Manalili, who, along with Sgt. James Guerrero, was instrumental in turning the former law clerk’s library into a state-of-the-art evidence storage facility.
The CIB chief also said that they are going to consult with the AGO if investigators could just take photographs of bulky evidences and release these materials to save space in the storage room.
“ [We will check with the AGO] if we can just present to the court the pictures instead of the actual [bulky items]. We’ve done that before. But again, there should be approval for that from the AGO,” Manalili emphasized.
He said he also plans to erect a fence around the building to make it a highly restricted or secured area in the department.
According to Chief Prosecutor Jeffrey Moots, the new facility is expected to make prosecution of criminal cases more efficient.
Moots said one of the things that defense lawyers immediately do is challenge the chain custody of the evidence.
“So the better the system in DPS for controlling the evidence is, the better for us [prosecutors]. It looks like we are going to have a wonderful system to take care of that,” Moots told the Saipan Tribune during the opening of the facility last week.
CIB investigators are now slowly transferring the evidences, which they have temporarily placed in container vans, to the renovated facility.
