By Derrick Nunnally
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA — A paroled inmate walked free from state prison last June when authorities had in hand DNA evidence they now say links him to a 2007 homicide.
The state prisons policy governing when felons are required to give DNA samples, along with a state police laboratory backlog, might have helped Joseph Eli Moss go free for more than two months.
The Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office yesterday announced murder charges against Moss, 37, in connection with the fatal stabbing and beating of Edward Lee Sides on Feb. 7, 2007, in Pottstown.
Sides was killed just days before Moss was arrested in an unrelated theft case.
While that case moved through the courts and Moss sat in jail, authorities began testing DNA evidence from the Sides slaying.
Police had found Sides’ blood on a Timberland jacket pulled from a trash can about 100 yards from where Sides was found in a King Street rear yard with nine stab wounds, says an affidavit filed by prosecutors.
Also on the jacket was someone else’s DNA. But when authorities first checked it against a federal DNA database of felons and others, they found no match.
Then, last August - 21/2 years after Sides’ slaying - the database turned up a hit. The DNA on the Timberland jacket matched Moss’ DNA profile, the affidavit said.
Moss had been paroled from his theft sentence June 7.
A 2005 state law requires a sample of each felon’s DNA to be collected and processed for the federal database.
The state Corrections Department’s policy is to collect those samples only after an inmate’s release is scheduled, said department press secretary Susan McNaughton and Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman.
Pennsylvania is one of 47 states that now require DNA samples - typically, by swabbing the inside of the cheek - from all convicted felons.
Many states take the samples around the time of conviction, though how quickly they are entered into the federal database depends on a state’s backlog, said Chris Asplen of Chalfont, a former federal prosecutor and executive director of the U.S. Attorney General’s National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence.
“If the policy is to test felons on the way out [of prison], that’s atrocious. That puts people’s lives at risk,” said Asplen, who ran for Bucks County district attorney in 2009 and works with a company that lobbies federally for expanded DNA testing.
State police analysts alerted Montgomery County investigators about Moss’ link to the Sides DNA evidence on Aug. 21, the affidavit says.
By then, Moss was back in prison. After about 10 weeks on parole, he was jailed anew for several parole violations, including possession of a weapon and drugs, according to the state Board of Probation and Parole.
Ferman would not criticize the Department of Corrections’ testing policy. “I’m not even getting into the middle of that,” she said.
Neither Ferman nor Pottstown Police Chief Mark Flanders would discuss why Moss was not arrested in the 2006 theft case - in which he was convicted of stealing his then-girlfriend’s credit card - until after Sides’ killing. The slaying happened almost two months after the girlfriend reported the theft to police, on Dec. 14, 2006.
“The fact that it took two months to find him [in 2007] is not that unusual,” Ferman said.
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