New York State Domestic Incident Report Revised

The Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) has redesigned the Domestic Incident Report (DIR) form "to improve its format and enhance its effectiveness and usability by law enforcement professionals.

These improvements make it easier to complete the form accurately and allow law enforcement to capture additional information, making the form more useful to law enforcement and enhancing the data included in the state's Domestic Incident Report Repository."

The DIR instructions also include "a list of some frequently seen offenses in domestic violence incidents." DCJS has produced an online training program about using the new DIR, which takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Additional documents provided with the training include an overview of the DIR Repository, a community action toolkit for addressing intimate partner violence against transgender people, and information about strangulation, including symptoms, visible signs, and interview questions

Report: Thousands of sex offenders to disappear from New York registry

Fox News:

The names of thousands of New York State sex offenders are due to come off a public registry, prompting demands for a change in the law.

State law requiring Level 1 offenders to report their whereabouts to the registry for a 20-year period was up Jan. 1….

The Level 1 designation can include child molestation, rape in the first degree and sodomy, according to the station.

Level 2 and Level 3 sex offenders are required to register for life.

More information on the New York State registry can be found here.

New move to avoid ID errors in criminal cases

Rochester (NY) Democrat & Chronicle:

A spate of exonerations in recent years has revealed the weaknesses of memory and witness identification. Of the 289 people exonerated nationally by DNA evidence over the past quarter-century, about 75 percent were wrongly identified by witnesses....

Local police agencies say they have embraced change. They've revised policies within the past two years to match improved identification guidelines from the state District Attorneys Association and the Division of Criminal Justice Services, or DCJS. They've also trained officers to ensure that communications with witnesses are not leading, and encouraged police to actually position themselves out of sight of a witness viewing a photo array so there are no unintended signals....

Still, some say more can be done to eliminate human error or intentional or unintentional directions from police to eyewitnesses....

A New York task force, created by Court of Appeals Chief Justice Jonathan Lippman, has studied the core causes of wrongful convictions and plans to push legislation to tackle the common issues, such as misidentification and false confessions....