Billy's Law

Billy's Law (H.R. 3695), a bill to help find the missing, was introduced by Representative Chris Murphy (D-CT) and will receive a hearing at the end of January 2010 by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

The bill makes a number of findings. As of 2004, an estimated 40,000 dead bodies or remains were at various morgues around the country. Further, each year tens of thousands of Americans go missing, never again to be seen by loved ones; as of December 31, 2008, 102,764 missing persons records were active in the National Crime Information Center of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It finds that state and local governments need assistance to provide information about missing adults and unidentified remains, and the Act would provide incentive grants to them.

Established in July 2007 by the Department of Justice under the President's DNA initiative, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) is designed to be a missing people/unidentified remains database that the public can search. The object is to facilitate the process of matching a missing person to the unidentified dead at the morgues. To accomplish this objective, the statute seeks to improve collection of DNA from unidentified remains, reporting of the missing and the unidentified dead, and provision of resources to perform DNA analysis of the unidentified dead.

The funding provisions of the statute are critical: The Attorney General would receive $2.4 million annually for fiscal years 2010 through 2015 to operate the NamUs system, the database that holds information about the missing and about the unidentified dead. For fiscal years 2011 through 2015, the Attorney General would receive $10 million annually to establish a system of incentive grants for local and state governments. The local office of the coroner would receive the incentive grant upon meeting certain federal requirements.

Those requirements include the reporting of biological and address information for any missing person within 72 hours of the time that person is reported missing. The information would be entered into the National Crime Information Center database and the NamUs system. The reporting requirements are similar for the unidentified dead.

The bill would authorize the sharing of information from the National Crime Information Center database to the NamUs database, which can be searched by the public. Within a year after enactment of the statute, the Attorney General would be required to promulgate rules after notice and comment on what information can be shared between the two databases.