After her daughter was murdered in New Mexico, Jayann Sepich has lobbied successfully for the passage of "Katie's Law" in 28 states. Now she has come to Hartford to help state Rep. Ernest Hewett, D-New London, promote a bill that would require anyone arrested for a serious felony to submit to DNA testing.

"DNA is the gold standard of science," Sepich said during a phone interview Friday. "It brings justice and healing."

A DNA match identified the man who raped and strangled Sepich's 22-year-old daughter, then took her body to a dump and set it on fire in Las Cruces, N.M., in 2003.

Hewett, sponsor of House Bill 7013, also has support from Hartford resident James C. Tillman, who was exonerated by DNA testing in 2006 after serving 18 years in prison for a sexual assault and kidnapping.

Hewett is holding a news conference on the proposal at 10 a.m. today at the state capitol prior to the Judiciary Committee's public hearing on the bill.

Like every state, Connecticut collects DNA samples from convicted felons and provides them to the FBI's criminal justice database, called the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). In 2011, Hewett shepherded a law that requires police departments to collect DNA from individuals arrested for serious felonies who have been convicted of a previous felony.

Hewett said he had opposed DNA testing of suspects because he had been told it would violate the rights of African-Americans. He said he believed that until he conducted his own research.

"How, if 325 people were exonerated in the USA and 204 of them were African-Americans, how can this be bad for me?" Hewett said. "James Tillman told me that, when he was arrested 18 years ago, he begged the police to take his DNA. They never tested him. They put him in jail based on eyewitness identification."

Tillman was exonerated with help of the Connecticut Innocence Project, and Hartford Police used the DNA in the case to identify another convicted criminal as the rapist.

In the New Mexico case, DNA taken from Katie Sepich's body and under her fingernails matched a sample taken from a man who had been convicted of an aggravated burglary. Confronted with the DNA evidence, he confessed and was eventually sentenced to 69 years in prison.

Hewett said that under his bill, if DNA is taken and the defendant is not convicted, it can be expunged from the system.

"The federal government has been taking DNA from people arrested for federal crimes for the last 20 years," he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union has opposed taking DNA from arrestees as a violation of privacy and constitutional rights. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2013 upheld Maryland's DNA arrestee law.

Sepich said 15 states have passed laws to take DNA from everybody accused of a felony and the remainder take it from the most violent offenders. She said federal grant money is available that would cover all of the state's expenses for the first year of collecting DNA from arrestees. The average cost of collecting the DNA, according to a recent study, is $30, Sepich said, but it saves taxpayers' money by reducing investigative and other costs.

The bill, as drafted, does not include those arrested for burglaries and some assaults, Sepich said. Nationally, 53 percent of DNA matches in the database come from burglary cases, she said.

"The man that killed (Katie) had been convicted of burglary, and that's how we identified him," she said.

k.florin@theday.com

Twitter: @KFLORIN