Welcoming legislation approved by the state General Assembly this week, area law enforcement officers and victim's advocates say that more cases like that of convicted rapist Jerome Coward's could be solved.

Under the bill, all convicted felons would have to submit a DNA sample to the State Law Enforcement Division's convicted offender DNA database -- the means by which Coward was collared for the home invasion and sexual assault of an elderly Darlington woman in January 2003, nearly seven years after the fact.

According to widely accepted scientific theory, certain elements of every individual's DNA are unique to that person, except in the case of identical twins.

Longtime criminal investigator and Darlington County sheriff's Lt. Robin Bryant said that in his viewpoint, a perpetrator would be more apt to leave a DNA trail than fingerprints.

"The DNA gives us an even wider avenue now to work with," Bryant said.

"If all convicted offenders are required to submit those samples, eventually it opens up a world of information to us that any trail left -- blood, saliva, anything that we can extract DNA from -- would give us a suspect.

"Of course, that doesn't make your case. You then go back and look at where this person was and could have been ... there are safeguards in place as we'd eventually re-test him or her."

Bryant alluded to, but declined to go into detail about, a recent but as yet untried case in which DNA evidence is going to be a big factor.

In a statement heralding the passage by the Legislature, the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Douglas Jennings Jr., D-Bennettsville, said, "This legislation will tremendously assist law enforcement with solving major crimes and will exonerate the innocent in certain instances."

Statistics reveal that about half of violent offenders also have non-violent criminal histories, according to the statement.

While jailed in Kershaw on an unrelated incident, Coward, 41, was identified as the chief suspect by Darlington police investigators after SLED linked his DNA with that of evidence found at the Darlington crime scene through its CODIS system. He later pleaded guilty to the crimes and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

With the new law, the state will be able to catch up with other states that have had the rule in place for quite a while, said Millie Hayden of the Pee Dee Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Assault.

"I think it's great," she said. "For instance, had they (SLED) not gotten a hit on the DNA match, that guy (Coward) would have gone free and who knows how many other women would have been assaulted.

"Rape is often a crime of opportunity -- you start out as a burglar breaking into a house and there's a woman there by herself ... it's often a crime of opportunity in some situations like that."

According to research conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, the average rapist commits eight to 12 sexual assaults.

With Gov. Mark Sanford's signing of bill H.3594, South Carolina would join the 31 other states that have mandated collection of DNA from all convicted felons -- all reported to have undergone a significant increase in crimes solved.

Much in the same way Darlington officers did in the Coward case, Florence Police Maj. Carlos Raines said investigators there have benefited from CODIS as charges are now pending against a suspect identified through a database.

"For that new expanded database to be available to law enforcement I think is a very good thing," he said. "Any unresolved case that we may have had involving DNA evidence will certainly be revisited for those purposes."