Four New York assemblymen today will introduce legislation aimed at making it easier for convicted criminals to use DNA evidence to prove they are innocent.

The flurry of proposed laws — eight in all — could also help solve crimes by increasing standards for evidence preservation. A request for proposals to update the New York Police Department’s evidence storage system was sent out late last year after the city’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, appointed a working group to review procedures.

The chairman of the Assembly’s Codes Committee, Joseph Lentol, a Democrat of Brooklyn, will use the New York Police Department’s main evidence storage facility in Queens as the backdrop for today’s announcement. The bills that he and his colleagues are introducing would make it easier for prisoners to get DNA tests after they’ve been convicted, as well as set up a state “Innocence Commission” that would investigate exonerations and make recommendations to prevent future wrongful incarcerations.

“DNA can convict the guilty, but it’s for protecting the innocent,” Mr. Lentol said. “By protecting the innocent, we give the public a sense of fairness and justices that exists in the system.”

Early this year, Mr. Lentol was given a tour of the NYPD storage facility on One Pearson Place in the Long Island City section of Queens. He said that he saw there firsthand the difficulty of storing voluminous amounts of evidence with a paper voucher system. The facility has more than 1.6 million vouchers for evidence, and each voucher can represent multiple objects.

The facility has come under scrutiny since the exoneration last summer of Alan Newton, who served 22 years on rape, assault, and robbery convictions before DNA proved he wasn’t the perpetrator. His lawyers at the Innocence Project said he tried to get the DNA evidence from his case three times while in prison, but was told by the police that the evidence was lost or damaged. The evidence was later found with the help of the Bronx district attorney’s office. Police officials said a fire and an asbestos leak in the 1990s destroyed the invoice stored at the facility, making it difficult to determine where the evidence was stored.

“They are operating in the 20th century, not the 21st century,” Mr. Lentol said. “They do a good job, everything is under control, but somebody has to modernize the system.”

He said technicians were working at night to begin the process of computerizing the facility, but they have only a few computers, making progress slow.

One of the bills to be announced today would allow a Commission on Forensic Science to set minimum standards for preservation of evidence across the state. This could mandate that the NYPD change the way it stores biological evidence, said the Innocence Project’s policy director, Stephen Saloom. The project advocates on behalf of inmates it thinks have been wrongly convicted.

A bill sponsored by Michael Gianaris, a Democrat of Queens, calls for the creation of an Innocence Commission, which would include 10 unpaid appointees from across the criminal justice system. The body would start investigations after a court rules that someone has been wrongfully convicted and give recommendations based on the findings. Similar commissions have been set up in North Carolina and Virginia.

A co-director of the Innocence Project, Barry Scheck, said that the goal of the legislation was not only to help innocent people out of prison, but also to put the actual perpetrator behind bars. In some cases, post-conviction DNA tests have led to the arrest of criminals still prowling the streets.

“This is very good for enhancing the capability of law enforcement,” he said.

Mr. Scheck is a professor at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo law school, which housed the Innocence Project until 2003 and supplies law students to work on cases. The project’s board members include Attorney General Reno, the author John Grisham, and Stephen Schulte, a founding partner of the law firm Schulte, Roth & Zabel. Mr. Scheck’s clients have included O.J. Simpson and Abner Louima.

Mr. Lentol and Mr. Gianaris said they will now have to fight for senate and gubernatorial support for the bills. They said the number of exonerations — 23 in the past 16 months in New York State, in a system with roughly 63,500 inmates in the state prison system and 13,500 in the New York City correction system — indicates that something must be done about the issue.