Follow-up on Beaufort County DNA Lab

Follow-up arti­cle on the local sheriff’s depart­ment dead-set on open­ing their own DNA lab, instead of using a pri­vate lab until SLED can expand to meet demands. It’s inter­est­ing to point out that even after the lab is opened, has been staffed, equip­ment is deliv­ered, it could still be years before case sam­ples are actu­ally ana­lyzed. By then mil­lions of dol­lars have been spent, and thou­sands of cases could have been sent to a pri­vate lab to be ana­lyzed. Which plan actu­ally ben­e­fits the cit­i­zens of Beaufort County?

Pete Marone, direc­tor of Virginia’s crime lab and chair­man of the Consortium of Forensic Science Organizations, says local law enforce­ment agen­cies often don’t real­ize what it takes to get a lab up and run­ning. Accreditation can take up to two years. And a local lab faces the same kinds of bud­getary and staffing issues that a statewide lab does.

Analysts can han­dle eight to 10 cases a month per per­son, Marone said. They must review each other’s work, tak­ing time away from testing.

“They are not going to be able to do unlim­ited test­ing,” he said. “They’re going to have an imme­di­ate back­log. … The headaches are the same whether you have one ana­lyst or 10 analysts.”

Analysts also will be called to tes­tify about their work, tak­ing them away from the lab, he says. A recent U.S. Supreme Court rul­ing estab­lished that sub­mit­ting lab reports into evi­dence with­out the oppor­tu­nity to cross-examine the per­son who did the test­ing is unconstitutional.

A lab also must be accred­ited before sam­ples can be entered into the fed­eral DNA data­base, a crit­i­cal law enforce­ment tool.

Ralph Keaton, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/ Laboratory Accreditation Board, says the length of time to get accred­ited depends on how much doc­u­men­ta­tion of lab pro­to­col has been com­pleted. But if the local lab were ready to apply today, it would still take six to seven months before an assess­ment was com­pleted, assum­ing all the doc­u­men­ta­tion was in order.

Read the whole story in The Beaufort Gazette.