A Virginia budget amendment lifting some of the secrecy surrounding the state's post-conviction DNA project was prompted by the tale of a cancer victim who was recently cleared of a 34-year-old rape.

Articles in the Richmond Times-Dispatch this year outlined the case of Bennett S. Barbour, convicted of a 1978 assault in Williamsburg. Testing failed to find his DNA in old evidence and instead implicated a convicted rapist in the crime.

Police and prosecutors had the test results since June 2010, but Barbour, 56, who lives in James City County near Williamsburg, did not find out until this January, when a volunteer lawyer contacted him. That delay prompted concern among some legislators.

"I asked for the budget amendment totally based on (The Times-Dispatch's) article about Barbour and what happened," said state Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax, vice chairman of the Virginia State Crime Commission.

State Sen. Thomas K. Norment Jr., R-James City, also read about Barbour's case. "If there was any reasonable way to either eliminate or at least minimize miscarriages of justice, then I was prepared to be an advocate for it," he said.

"I appreciate the balancing and the concerns of forensic scientists and prosecutors about certain identifying information," he said. But Norment, who helped craft the amendment, said the scales tipped heavily toward more disclosure.

It isn't the first time legislators, concerned with the now-7-year-old effort to clear people wrongly convicted decades ago with DNA testing, have used a budget amendment to order changes in the Department of Forensic Science post-conviction project.

The project began in 2005 after DNA testing of old biological evidence in 31 sample cases cleared two men of rapes. The evidence, primarily blood and semen, was taped inside the case files of forensic serologists from 1973 to 1988.

Since then, testing in hundreds of cases resulted in 78 in which the convicted person's DNA was not found. In the cases of Barbour and at least four others whose DNA was excluded, the results demonstrated innocence.

Initially, the state Board of Forensic Science, which oversees the department, said only prosecutors and police were to learn the test results and that it would be up to authorities to decide the significance of the testing and to take any action.

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Convict's story prompted Virginia budget amendment on DNA