IAPE Evidence Blog

Hart­ford Courant (Con­necti­cut)
BYLINE: DAVE ALTIMARI and MATTHEW KAUFFMAN, daltimari@courant.com

New Haven, CT

AS CRIME LAB STRUGGLES WITH BACKLOG, STATE USES
FEDERAL FUNDS IN EFFORT TO CATCH UP

For nearly two years, the DNA sam­ples con­nect­ing Ronald Brown to the rape of a teenage girl sat in the state police foren­sic lab­o­ra­tory while the con­victed mur­derer roamed the streets of New Haven.

Brown had been released from prison in Novem­ber 2006 — but not before giv­ing author­i­ties a DNA sam­ple that was sup­posed to be ana­lyzed by the state lab and logged into a national DNA databank.

Six months later, Brown’s DNA sam­ple was still on the shelf, with thou­sands of other untested sam­ples, when a 15-year-old girl was dragged behind a house on Chapel Street in New Haven and sex­u­ally assaulted. A rape kit, includ­ing DNA evi­dence from the girl’s attacker, was taken the day after the May 4, 2007, assault and sent by New Haven police detec­tives to the state police lab in August 2007.

But two more years would pass before sci­en­tists in the lab ana­lyzed Brown’s DNA sam­ple — and found that it matched the DNA in the New Haven rape. Brown was arrested last week, 32 months after the crime, and charged with first-degree sex­ual assault and kidnapping.

DNA analy­sis has rev­o­lu­tion­ized crime-solving. But heavy back­logs have become the norm at Connecticut’s once-renowned foren­sic lab­o­ra­tory, lead­ing to long delays that crit­ics say put the pub­lic at risk.

The lab­o­ra­tory now has a back­log of 10,600 DNA sam­ples from con­victed offend­ers that haven’t been processed and entered into the databank.

On Fri­day, two days after The Courant sub­mit­ted ques­tions to the state police about prob­lems at the lab­o­ra­tory, Gov. M. Jodi Rell announced that the lab has made “sig­nif­i­cant progress” in elim­i­nat­ing that DNA back­log by hir­ing per­son­nel using fed­eral stim­u­lus money.The gov­er­nor said the lab was able to enter 1,900 sam­ples into the data­bank in Jan­u­ary, result­ing in six “hits” on unsolved sex­ual assault cases going back as long as 22 years. Rell announced a goal to elim­i­nate the back­log by the end of the year so that “vic­tims can get the jus­tice they deserve.”

But an inter­nal mem­o­ran­dum from the lab direc­tor obtained by The Courant details how evi­dence from recent vio­lent crimes, includ­ing homi­cides, sits untouched in the state lab­o­ra­tory for up to a year.

The Novem­ber 2009 memo, writ­ten to State Police Com­mis­sioner John A. Dana­her III, says:

*Police depart­ments sub­mit­ting DNA evi­dence from a homi­cide scene can expect to wait as long as nine months for pro­cess­ing, unless it is a high-profile case such as the killing of Yale stu­dent Annie Le. Evi­dence from 35 homi­cides has not yet been processed.

*Latent fin­ger­prints found at a crime scene can take a year for the lab­o­ra­tory to ana­lyze against a national database.

*Rape kits with poten­tial DNA evi­dence may be shelved for up to a year. The state has 110 rape kits that have not been analyzed.

*Firearms sub­mit­ted for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion can take from nine months to a year to review.

In the memo, Direc­tor Ken­neth Zer­cie blames the back­log on staff cuts. He wrote that in July 2009, for exam­ple, the lab had five exam­in­ers who han­dled fin­ger­prints and doc­u­ments; now it has one.

And with lim­ited staff, Zer­cie says, the delays cited in the memo are actu­ally opti­mistic projections.

“These time esti­mates are best-case sce­nar­ios,” Zer­cie wrote. “With inter­rup­tions of emer­gency case exam­i­na­tions, high pro­file inves­ti­ga­tions, cold case resub­mis­sions and court tes­ti­mony require­ments, the entire staff of the Divi­sion of Sci­en­tific Ser­vices is stretched in many directions.”

State Rep. Michael Lawlor, a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor, said he was shocked to see how long evi­dence in pend­ing cases sits in the laboratory.

“The end result is if you are a police chief or cop you could wait for as much as a year for DNA results. That’s a pretty seri­ous prob­lem that under­mines what law enforce­ment does,” Lawlor said.

Lawlor said work­ing on elim­i­nat­ing the DNA back­log is dif­fer­ent from solv­ing active cases.

“They are not say­ing we are throw­ing peo­ple at solv­ing crimes but just that we are throw­ing peo­ple at elim­i­nat­ing a back­log,” Lawlor said. “Why hasn’t any­body been told there is a long delay in cases? Why does it take the leak of a memo for peo­ple to find out there’s a seri­ous problem?”

Many law enforce­ment per­son­nel, whether police detec­tives or pros­e­cu­tors, are reluc­tant to speak on the record about the lab’s prob­lems for fear of alien­at­ing lab employees.

“We have a homi­cide case with DNA evi­dence that we’ve been wait­ing almost a year for them to process and they always tell us: ‘Bring us a sus­pect and we’ll do it right away.’ But how do we know our sus­pect isn’t just sit­ting in the data­bank wait­ing to be found if we could just get the DNA done?” said a detec­tive from a mid-size depart­ment who didn’t want to be identified.

The lab’s rep­u­ta­tion took a hit in Novem­ber when The Courant reported that a DNA sam­ple believed for years to belong to the killer of Yale stu­dent Suzanne Jovin was actu­ally the DNA of a now-retired lab technician.

Even before that rev­e­la­tion, Thomas and Donna Jovin took the unusual step of pub­licly crit­i­ciz­ing the lab in a let­ter to Rell, say­ing that “short­com­ings” at the foren­sic lab­o­ra­tory are pro­hibit­ing detec­tives inves­ti­gat­ing their daughter’s slay­ing from apply­ing cut­ting edge tech­niques to the case. “This facil­ity, once regarded as a lead­ing foren­sic unit in the coun­try, is suf­fer­ing from under­staffing and inad­e­quate fund­ing. As a con­se­quence, the unit is strug­gling to sat­isfy the needs of ongo­ing and emerg­ing inves­ti­ga­tions, not to speak of ‘cold cases’ such as the mur­der of our daugh­ter,” the Jovins wrote.

Lawlor said the state bud­get cri­sis and early retire­ments have taken a toll on the lab’s effec­tive­ness. Many for­mer lab work­ers have joined their for­mer boss, Henry Lee, at the Uni­ver­sity of New Haven.

Dana­her said state police offi­cials are aware of the DNA back­log, which was as high as 35,000 sam­ples in recent years. He said the state has set a goal to process 1,000 sam­ples a month from the back­log until it is elim­i­nated. To do that, the state is using fed­eral funds, includ­ing about $2 mil­lion in stim­u­lus money, to pay for 11 lab tech­ni­cians. He said the recent matches illus­trate the value of the lab’s work.

“The new hits just show why it is so impor­tant to clear the con­victed offender DNA back­log,” Dana­her said. “Once we elim­i­nate that, we can go after the pend­ing cases with more people.”

Dana­her acknowl­edged there is some frus­tra­tion among law enforce­ment in the state with the delays in get­ting foren­sic evi­dence processed.

“Every­body wants their case done right away but when you are get­ting 150 new cases a month plus about a 1,000 con­victed offender sam­ples a month it is hard to get to every­thing,” Dana­her said.

He said the lab has to pri­or­i­tize cases. In the Annie Le killing, for exam­ple, author­i­ties col­lected hun­dreds of pieces of evi­dence and the lab worked around the clock to do the DNA tests that allowed police to charge Ray­mond Clark with murder.

“There were a lot of bod­ies from the lab that worked a lot of hours on the Annie Le case and they are still work­ing a lot of hours on that case right now,” Dana­her said. “Every time a pri­or­ity case comes in, other cases get pushed back.”

In Ronald Brown’s case, Dana­her acknowl­edged that the back­log of sam­ples from con­victed felons led to a long delay in ana­lyz­ing his DNA. He said the state had used a fed­eral gov­ern­ment con­trac­tor to keep up with inmate sam­ples, but fell behind after the con­tract was can­celed when the com­pany ran into quality-control problems.

It took the lab about six months to process the rape kit. But Brown’s DNA sam­ple was not processed until Jan. 29, 2009 — more than two years after it was received. Lab offi­cials real­ized they had a match in April 2009.

Advo­cates say it is impor­tant to reduce back­logs in ana­lyz­ing offender DNA sam­ples. But long delays in pro­cess­ing crime-scene evi­dence, par­tic­u­larly from sex­ual assaults, are even more dis­tress­ing, said Scott Berkowitz, founder of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Net­work, a Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based group that has pressed for faster analy­sis of crime-scene evidence.

“It’s hard to explain to a vic­tim: The crime’s hap­pened, we have the evi­dence, but we’re not going to look at the evi­dence,” Berkowitz said.

“It’s a very dif­fi­cult thing for the vic­tim to go through. It can take hours to have all the evi­dence col­lected, to have body parts pho­tographed, to have hair and fibers and blood drawn,” he said. “So those who put them­selves up to it and go through this long process, we owe them better.”

Back­logs have plagued state foren­sic labs for decades. But with a boost from fed­eral Depart­ment of Jus­tice funds, sev­eral have worked to whit­tle away at those buildups.

In Mary­land, Gov. Mar­tin O’Malley inher­ited a back­log of 24,000 DNA sam­ples when he took office in 2007.

Within a year, he said, the back­log was gone, result­ing in a six­fold increase in the rate at which author­i­ties found matches between crime-scene evi­dence and the DNA database.

More than 20 years ago, Vir­ginia had 160,000 blood sam­ples await­ing analy­sis. Since then, that state’s DNA data­base has grown from about 26,000 sam­ples to more than 300,000, and the state now aver­ages about 700 hits a year against the data­base, accord­ing to state records.

Arkansas offi­cials raised court fees in 2005, pump­ing mil­lions of new dol­lars into state labs and nearly elim­i­nat­ing a 16,000-case back­log. And sev­eral other states with pop­u­la­tions larger than Connecticut’s have back­logs no larger than a few thou­sand cases.

Berkowitz said fail­ing to ana­lyze DNA sam­ples, par­tic­u­larly in sexual-assault cases, puts the pub­lic at risk.

“Rapists tend to be ser­ial crim­i­nals. They tend to com­mit a lot of attacks before they’re found. And because most cases never get reported to the police, the odds of catch­ing them are even lower,” he said. “But in a case that actu­ally is reported to police and the evi­dence is col­lected, it’s crazy to leave them on the streets.”

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment“
www.IAPE.org

The Boston Globe, http://www.boston.com/globe

Boston, MA

The Mass­a­chu­setts State Police crime lab­o­ra­tory still lags in test­ing DNA sam­ples con­nected to crimes, despite a crit­i­cal report two years ago that led to the fir­ing of some high-ranking lab employees.

The lab came under fire when it was revealed that more than 16,000 DNA sam­ples had not been ana­lyzed. But The Boston Globe reports that since 2007, only 500 of that num­ber have been ana­lyzed, mostly at the request of dis­trict attorneys.

John Gross­man, the Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safety’s under­sec­re­tary of foren­sic sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy, says the lab some­times tests sam­ples if the statute of lim­i­ta­tions on a case is about to expire.

In one case, author­i­ties did not get a blood sam­ple from a sus­pect in a Brook­line rape 13 years ago until 2005. That per­son was indicted this month.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment“
www.IAPE.org

The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
BYLINE: GLENN SMITH, The Post and Courier

Colum­bia, SC

SLED crime lab unable to keep up with demand

The rob­ber moved through York County like a one-man crime wave, shoot­ing four peo­ple in a string of busi­ness holdups. Inves­ti­ga­tors were stumped. All they had to go on was a pen the ban­dit had fin­gered dur­ing one heist.

Hop­ing for a lead, sheriff’s deputies rushed the pen to the State Law Enforce­ment Division’s crime lab in Colum­bia. Ana­lysts worked through the night extract­ing DNA the rob­ber had left behind with his touch.

That genetic evi­dence revealed the robber’s iden­tity as a young con­vict recently released from prison.

The rob­ber, arrested last year, is now serv­ing a life sen­tence for his crimes. But York County Sher­iff Bruce Bryant can’t help but won­der how many more rob­beries the crook would have com­mit­ted if not for SLED’s micro­scopic find.

“DNA test­ing has come so far,” Bryant said. “It’s really the wave of the future in law enforcement.”

The prob­lem is only a few cases get the instant atten­tion reserved for the most vio­lent crimes.

SLED’s crime lab, like many such facil­i­ties across the coun­try, can’t keep up with the demand for its ser­vices. With about 290 new DNA cases arriv­ing each month, the lab is strug­gling to whit­tle away at a back­log of some 3,000 older cases that still await test­ing. DNA cases account for about 70 per­cent of the crime lab’s over­all back­log, said Maj. Todd Hughey, direc­tor of SLED’s Foren­sic Ser­vices lab.

That back­log means police agen­cies and pros­e­cu­tors often must wait months for the results they need to solve or solid­ify cases. In the mean­time, crim­i­nals respon­si­ble for these offenses can remain on the street, unpun­ished, free to cause more trouble.

SLED offi­cials said they are doing the best they can given state bud­get woes that have left them unable to fill key lab posi­tions.
The num­ber of cases requir­ing DNA analy­sis has nearly dou­bled over the past two years while staffing has gone down. Each of the agency’s 14 ana­lysts is now han­dling upward of 120 cases per year, Hughey said.

A national challenge

The prob­lem is hardly lim­ited to South Carolina.

Los Ange­les had a back­log of more than 7,000 cases last year. The nation’s over­all DNA evi­dence back­log stood at 542,000 cases when the fed­eral gov­ern­ment last put a num­ber to the prob­lem in 2003.

Sarah Tofte, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who tracks DNA back­logs, esti­mated the num­ber of cases await­ing atten­tion hov­ers around 400,000 today despite the more than $1 bil­lion the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has com­mit­ted to reduc­ing backlogs.

SLED has received about $1 mil­lion each year in fed­eral funds since 2003 to catch up on its DNA back­log, Hughey said. Among other things, that money pays for ana­lysts to devote extra hours on nights and week­ends to these cases. That has helped, but a healthy back­log remains. In total, the foren­sic lab oper­ates on about $8 mil­lion per year.

“Crime labs all over the coun­try are over­whelmed by the amount of DNA test­ing being requested,” Tofte said. “Fed­eral grants can help, but ulti­mately there has to be a com­mit­ment to expand the capa­bil­i­ties of state crime labs or they are never going to catch up.”

Pete Marone, direc­tor of Virginia’s crime lab and chair­man of the Con­sor­tium of Foren­sic Sci­ence Orga­ni­za­tions, said remark­able strides have been made in DNA analy­sis. In the early 1990s, ana­lysts would have needed a blood sam­ple the size of a half-dollar to get a usable DNA sam­ple. Now, DNA can be mined from a sam­ple invis­i­ble to the naked eye. That has increased expec­ta­tions and demand that has far out­paced staffing and resources, he said.

“They are send­ing in cases they would have never sent us before,” Marone said. “The capac­ity of crime labs nation­wide has prob­a­bly increased 300 per­cent, but the num­ber of cases has increased 310 percent.”

Juries also have come to expect DNA evi­dence in tri­als, fueled by tele­vi­sion pro­grams such as “CSI: Crime Scene Inves­ti­ga­tion,” where sci­ence solves all in a tidy one-hour time frame.

“Peo­ple watch a lot of ‘CSI’ and they want to have DNA for any­thing and every­thing,” Hughey said. “But that is not real-world foren­sic science.”

Wait­ing for answers

Tech­no­log­i­cal improve­ments enable SLED ana­lysts to process DNA evi­dence much more quickly these days.

In high-priority cases such as the York County rob­ber or the Gaffney spree killer who gunned down five peo­ple this past sum­mer, SLED can get results into the hands of inves­ti­ga­tors in 24 hours if needed, Hughey said.

Last year, SLED’s lab helped Charleston police tie a 30-year-old man to a string of Low­coun­try rapes by get­ting DNA results back to inves­ti­ga­tors just a cou­ple of weeks after the last attack occurred.

That sort of turn­around, how­ever, hap­pens in only a hand­ful of cases. SLED gives pri­or­ity to vio­lent crimes such as homi­cide, rape and assaults on chil­dren, but it can still take nearly three months for a typ­i­cal DNA case to be processed. Some cases take even longer, as much as eight months at times.

Prop­erty crimes such as bur­glar­ies account for about four out of every 10 cases processed, Hughey said.

Law enforce­ment offi­cials and pros­e­cu­tors give SLED’s lab high marks for the qual­ity of its work, and few ques­tion the ded­i­ca­tion of its sci­en­tists. But con­cerns remain over the lengthy wait for results.

Some police agen­cies, includ­ing the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, want to start their own DNA labs to get test­ing done more quickly. Money, how­ever, has been hard to come by for such ven­tures. Rich­land County has the only work­ing DNA crime lab out­side of SLED, though Greenville County is in the process of start­ing one as well. For most agen­cies, SLED remains the only game in town.

A sharper focus

Hughey said the lab’s goal is to reduce the wait­ing period for DNA results to about 30 days. That would be about the same as the turn­around period in the lab’s tox­i­col­ogy, fin­ger­print analy­sis and drug iden­ti­fi­ca­tion units. They hope to get there with the aid of new lab equip­ment that speeds up evi­dence pro­cess­ing. They’ve also adopted effi­ciency mea­sures such as new guide­lines ask­ing police agen­cies to limit their ini­tial sub­mis­sions for DNA analy­sis to five items per case, he said.

Some homi­cide cases arrive with 40 sam­ples or more to be tested. That takes time and keeps ana­lysts from work­ing on other cases, Hughey said.

Some law enforce­ment agen­cies are con­cerned about the new rules.

North Charleston police Sgt. Al Hall­man, who over­sees his department’s crime scene unit, said the change has left sev­eral cases with 30 to 40 sam­ples sit­ting in limbo at SLED, includ­ing the unsolved homi­cide of a woman who was shot to death last year.

“When deal­ing with homi­cides, it is dif­fi­cult to deter­mine which sam­ples are cru­cial and which can be delayed for what­ever rea­son,” he said.

Hughey said police always sub­mit more sam­ples if the first batch doesn’t yield results.

But that can add even more time to the process, 9th Cir­cuit Solic­i­tor Scar­lett Wil­son said. “We can’t always test every­thing we want, and then if we get results that beg more ques­tions, we get in a vicious cycle of wait­ing and hav­ing law enforce­ment ferry items to and from Columbia.”

SLED Lt. Robin Tay­lor, who super­vises the DNA unit, said she fully under­stands how impor­tant it is for police and pros­e­cu­tors to get the evi­dence they need to make cases.

“I really am pas­sion­ate about us always doing the best we can,” she said. “It’s just incred­i­ble how the case­load has gone up. But I promise you, we really are trying.”

BY THE NUMBERS

The break­down of cases in SLED’s DNA back­log:
* Bur­glar­ies 38 per­cent
* Homi­cides 6 per­cent
* Sex­ual Assaults 14 per­cent
* Mis­cel­la­neous* 42 percent

*NOTE: This includes vehi­cle crimes, rob­beries, lar­ce­nies, assaults, sui­cides and other death inves­ti­ga­tions.
Source: SLED

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment“
www.IAPE.org