Evidence Preservation in Arkansas
State statute requires the automatic preservation of any physical evidence upon a person’s conviction for a sex offense, violent offense, or a felony where the defendant’s DNA is taken for the state’s database. Law enforcement will preserve this evidence permanently following any conviction for a violent offense, 25 years following a conviction for a sex offense, or 7 years following a conviction for any other felony for which the defendant’s genetic profile may be taken by a law enforcement agency and submitted for a comparison to the state DNA database for unsolved offenses (whichever is longer). Effective 2001; Amended most recently 2011.
Arkansas’s statute meets the best practices standards outlined by the NIST Technical Working Group on Biological Evidence Preservation.