by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

NNSL (Oct 27/97) - DNA testing can put you in jail. It can also get you out, which it did for an Inuvik man earlier this month.

Herman Kaglik, who served more than four years of a 10-year sentence for three sexual assault convictions, had one of his convictions overturned and will get a new trial on the other two after semen on a pair of panties introduced at a 1992 trial was tested at his lawyer's request and proven not to be his.

The panties were not tested prior to being introduced at his 1992 trial, but since then such testing has moved from cutting edge to relatively routine for police.

In the North, police can collect anything left at a crime scene -- blood, hair, skin fragments, saliva -- and send it to their forensic laboratory in Edmonton for testing. A second lab in Regina offers a different form of testing and has the ability to test smaller quantities of found material than the one in Edmonton.

Tests are not linked to the severity of the crime, says Sgt. Harry Hibbs of Yellowknife RCMP's identification division.

"We can use it any time we are trying to connect a person to the scene of a crime," he said.

"The one restriction is that the lab won't do a DNA test unless we send down a sample taken from the person for comparison. We can't do open-ended testing."

Evidence can be sent to the lab even from such minor crime as a burglary where blood or hair was left behind, but Hibbs says those samples would not take priority at the lab and would be bumped by evidence needed to solve more serious crimes.

The turnaround on samples can be as little as two weeks or as long as two months.

The Edmonton laboratory estimates that each DNA test costs about $4,000.

Six regional laboratories in Edmonton, Regina, Vancouver, Halifax, Ottawa and Winnipeg do testing for the RCMP and smaller police agencies. Ontario and Quebec operate their own provincially-funded forensic laboratories.

Besides DNA, the labs also do things like fibre-matching, counterfeit-document-testing and textile-matching.