Unsolved crimes are a burden on victims, their families and the police as they try to apprehend criminals when all leads go cold.
Amid the cold cases, one Pennsylvania Republican lawmaker is aiming to alleviate part of that burden at the federal level.
House Republican Chief Deputy Whip Guy Reschenthaler is introducing the Cold Case Modernization Act this week to expand genealogy testing at the federal level for cold case victims.
Reschenthaler’s bill looks to solve cold cases by expanding Department of Justice (DOJ) criteria for grant funding toward forensic genealogy testing for unidentified human remains.
“Across the United States, investigators lack the critical resources to solve the cases of tens of thousands of unidentified human remains,” Reschenthaler said.
“The Cold Case Modernization Act puts these deceased Americans and their grieving families first, using state-of-the-art DNA technology to uncover answers and find the truth,” he continued.
Specifically, Reschenthaler’s bill says that any DOJ “grant awarded to States and units of local government for forensic genetic [genealogy] may be used to identify unidentified human remains without regard to whether the manner of death is determined to be a homicide.”