Battling the Backlog Crime Labs Juggle Priorities, Add New Technology To Address Growing Need For DNA Analysis.
By Kelly M. Pyrek
As legislation addressing the DNA backlog continues to circulate through Congress at the time of writing, continued emphasis is being placed on the expedition of the analysis of biological material connected with rapes and other violent crimes.
The numbers, however, are daunting. In , state forensic crime laboratories that perform DNA analyses reported handling almost 25,000 cases that involved DNA evidence, and more than 148,000 DNA samples collected from individuals convicted of a crime, according to the "Survey of DNA Crime Laboratories, ," a publication of the U.S. Department of Justice. These figures represent a 79 percent increase from the 14,000 cases and 45,000 convicted offender samples analyzed in . The report found that as of January , 81 percent of DNA crime labs reported DNA analysis backlogs of 16,081 subject cases and 265,329 convicted offender samples. To help cope with the backlog, 45 percent of state crime labs contracted with private labs, which also had a reported backlog of 918 subject cases and 100,706 convicted offender samples. The survey was sent to 135 forensic labs, and 124 responses were received, including responses from 110 publicly funded forensic labs performing DNA testing in 47 states. The news isn't all gloomy, however; while the report indicates casework backlogs have increased by 135 percent, while reported convicted offender backlogs decreased by 7 percent.
"It's getting better, but we have a long way to go," says Paul Ferrara, PhD, director of the Virginia Division of Forensic Science which serves all law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and medical examiners in the commonwealth of Virginia. Ferrara has been active in forensic legislation and has crafted the country's most comprehensive DNA databank laws and laws defining the admissability of forensic evidence in Virginia courts.
Ferrara has testified before the Crime Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee regarding various pieces of legislation that would ease the DNA backlog. He says he was pleased about the first federal appropriation of $15 million to help reduce this growing workload.
"In the last several years, the National Institute of Justice has received federal funding to continue administering grants aimed at reducing the rape-kit processing backlog," he says. "I think we are on the right track but it's going to take than just throwing money at the problem. You need funding but you also need trained law enforcement and forensic nurses. We foresee an explosion in potential evidence being submitted to forensic laboratories. In rape cases, we would like to think they will be reported at a higher frequency and evidence will be collected properly and promptly and analyzed expeditiously. We anticipate that in other types of crimes like homicides, the police are recognizing, collecting and preserving more pieces of evidence. It's a good and a bad place to be. We already have backlog problems; if we train even more first responders and law enforcement, it means more evidence coming in. So the answer to the capacity problem is training more forensic scientists who are capable of DNA analysis. It's a cradle-to-grave kind of need; the cradle begins at the crime scene or with the victim and if that first step fails us, our grandiose science becomes useless."
A Question of Capacity
"The capacity issue is not going to be solved easily," Ferrara predicts, although he says legislation like the Debbie Smith Act will provide short-term relief in the form of increased funds for specialized training of forensic professionals such as nurses and crime lab scientists. He acknowledges that the DOJ's crime lab survey is formidable, but says the numbers are not at all surprising.
"We did 37 DNA cases in ; last year we did more than 1,800 cases," Ferrara says. As more labs do more cases, you get better statistical data. I've seen the number of DNA laboratories go from single digits to 120; I think that number will need to double in coming years. In we passed the first DNA database bill in the country and in we started collecting DNA samples from all felons. To date, there are less than 30 states that do so. Are we making progress as fast as I'd like? No.
But I also know how much time, effort, personnel and training it takes."
At the end of July , Ferrara says his lab had about 1,288 cases awaiting analysis, with a "significant portion" of them being rape cases. Ferrara says he struggles with the dilemma of assigning priority to such a large number of cases both existing and new.
"Which case do we do next?" Ferrara ponders. "Do you do first in or first out? If I have a capacity of doing 100 cases a month -- and that's pretty damn good -- and I have 200 cases a month coming in, you can see the need for prioritization. Most labs will consider a priority the cases where the police have a suspect and a known DNA sample, or they have the guy under arrest and need to analyze DNA samples expeditiously. Obviously, those cases take priority, but the reality for many labs with limited capacity is cases with no known suspect are at the bottom of the priority list -- even though that is exactly the kind of case the DNA databanks are designed for. Those are the kinds of cases that encourage rape victims who don't know who the perpetrator is, to report them. They at least have a reasonable expectation their sample will get analyzed and a good chance of getting a match."
Ferrara says he is sometimes haunted by the memories of cases that fell through the prioritization cracks. In his testimony before the Subcommittee on Crime in , Ferrara related the case of Jemma Saunders: "Police suspected a man named Christopher Banks in the rape and stabbing of a woman in Virginia Beach, Va. Until they could get DNA test results from us, they could only hold Banks on a shoplifting charge. They considered Banks a serious threat and asked us for an expedited analysis before his hearing on the shoplifting charge. At the time some 1,000 other DNA cases were already in the queue. We don't get the case done before Banks was released on the shoplifting charge. Eleven days later, Banks raped and killed 22-year old Jemma Saunders in Norfolk. When we finally got to the Virginia Beach evidence, our DNA analysis established that Banks had committed the Virginia Beach rape and stabbing. Had we done that analysis in even two months, Jemma Saunders would be alive today."
Ferrara says because property crimes often are precursors to violent crimes, his lab will work property crimes as quickly as they can.
"We prioritize those cases because we know that today's burglar is often tomorrow's rapist," Ferrara emphasizes. "A lot of breaking-and-entering cases may be some kind of stalking or souvenir-hunting activity by an offender. The Banks case exemplifies why backlogs are unconscionable. I don't know if there will ever be a time when cases are turned around in 30 days or in 10 days, but I think we need to reach a point when as a case comes in, work is started immediately."
Ferrara reports his lab analyzed 258 cases in July and those completed had been in the lab an average of 150 days. "To me, that's too long; to others, that would be great. We have 38 DNA examiners, and they can only do about six to eight cases a month on average. But if 38 examiners do an average of seven cases, that's 266 cases per month. We received 334 cases in July. You see the problem with trying to keep up. Fortunately, I don't have 10,000 unworked rape kits going back 5 or 10 years, and luckily Virginia doesn't have a statute of limitations. If that sample is properly collected and preserved, which our samples are, even if it takes us a number of years, and it has, we will eventually get our guy. In January we will begin taking DNA samples upon arrest. That's going to be another major milestone. The beauty of it is, a sample goes to the databank upon arrest, so instead of waiting months or years before the case is adjudicated, he's convicted and you find out he's the guy that committed several other rapes."
That's good news for rape victims whose lives come to a grinding halt while they await the processing of their rape kit and wait for the day when their attacker is identified through DNA sampling.
"Studies suggest the average rapists commits 8 to 12 rapes," Ferrara says. "I've seen a figure from the Bureau of Justice that the societal cost of a rape is as high as $86,000. If you get a good sample after the first rape and are able to catch him after the second, you have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. But most importantly, you have prevented as many as 10 more women from being victimized. That's what makes it all worthwhile."
Labs Partner With Forensic Nurses
"Thoroughness starts with the forensic nurse," Ferrara says. "We have our DNA people spend a lot of time with forensic nurses, teaching and working with these people because we realize, garbage in, garbage out. They are the first responders to victims, and they are the ones who can help crime lab personnel get the most accurate, untainted samples possible."
Recognizing that a crime lab can't work in a vacuum and must depend upon the frontline of professionals who have the closest contact with victims, the Virginia lab has a reputation for its extensive outreach to forensic professionals desiring training. "We have worked with medical examiners on refining DNA sample collection, trained forensic nurses, and worked with personnel from numerous law enforcement agencies," Ferrara confirms. "The payoff is palpable."
"There's nothing I can tell forensic nurses about evidence collection and preservation they don't already know," Ferrara continues. "It's important for forensic labs to make the efforts of forensic nurses worthwhile by analyzing them promptly. If you are going to take the sample, damn it, run them. If forensic nurses are doing their jobs well, and yet they think, 'Here I am taking samples and it will be years before we see results,' it's pretty disheartening, not only for the victim, but for that forensic nurse."
Ferrara says his lab has worked closely with forensic nurses and acknowledges their help many years ago in developing the rape kit the lab currently uses. Ferrara says forensic nurses' input has shaped the contents of the extensive rape kit upon which other states have modeled theirs.
"While we can address the technical side of what DNA samples we want and need, we are not in the best position to know how to make this as painless as possible to the victim; the forensic nurses do," Ferrara emphasizes. "Our nurses do a wonderful job of getting samples." This knowledge, coupled with evolving technology and new procedures, ensures that rape kits are supplying the kinds of evidence needed to make DNA matches.
The challenge for forensic scientists is looking for new sources of DNA when offenders try to cover their tracks.
"Once an unknown rapist's DNA sample is in the databank and they know a match could be made, they try to protect themselves from leaving any biological material," Ferrara says. "I don't see how they can do that. The principle of exchange says that in any crime, the victim and the perpetrator exchange DNA material. In the case of a rape, there can be no more intimate exchange of trace evidence than this. It works to our advantage. The perpetrator can force his victim to douche or bathe, but there are still many possibilities for the collection of trace evidence, such as skin fragments under fingernails or traces of saliva."
While some forensic nurses are calling for the standardization of rape kits, Ferrara believes a cookie-cutter approach isn't necessary. "I don't understand standardization. Certainly we don't have to all use the same rape kit. Fundamentally, I'd like standardization in terms of the completeness of the kit, but each state has its own laws, analytical techniques and procedures that would make standardization difficult."
Ferrara says he has not heard of any problems associated with the quality or the completeness of the sampling performed in Virginia, but believes aiming for complete and thorough collection and preservation of trace evidence is a given. A complete narrative from the victim, documented by the forensic nurse, is another critical element of the information and evidence collection process.
"Was the victim sodomized, are we looking at vaginal rape? Was there oral sodomy? What was the nature of the act? The answers to these kinds of questions helps scientists know what sample offers the most promise, especially since our lab faces a large volume of samples and our rape kit contains 20-plus types of samples that can be taken. For example, we start with a vaginal swab, find a foreign DNA profile and go from there. There's certain information we like to have, and our rape kit is designed to get that."
Another challenge to the standardization of rape kits, Ferrara says, is the variation between how the samples in the kits are actually analyzed.
"What the proponents of standardization of kits are thinking is that if all the samples, such as a cotton swab, are standardized, it makes it easy for a high-volume lab to treat a large number of samples by doing one simple motion of cutting off the end of a swab tip and analyzing that," Ferrara comments. "But this leaves no room for labs to explore new efficiencies. Our lab is going to automate our analyses; we are developing a unique buccal swab that consists of a piece of blotter paper that goes inside the cheek and gum and then we'll punch a little hole out of that and use that as our sample. If someone suddenly said everyone is only going to use traditional buccal swab samples, that shoots down our new process, so what is the point? The important thing is that rape kits contain all the fundamental elements of sampling as well as directions and forms to elicit important details about the crime from the victim."
No matter the strategy to eliminate or mitigate the DNA backlog, Ferrara says the major obstacle is the very nature of forensic science: exacting, precise, laborious.
"Short-term solutions like outsourcing DNA samples for analysis to private labs are good," he says. "It's a valuable use of commercial labs to run convicted-felon samples and it has been shown that these private labs can be very effective in running large numbers of rape kits. I don't know how we are ever going to automate the laborious process of searching things like clothing, carpeting or car seats for traces of blood, seminal fluid, perspiration or saliva; finding it, isolating it, then making sense of the data when it comes back for analysis. The forensic examiner must often elucidate mixtures of samples, and in rape cases, mixtures are a fact of life. It takes a lot of time and a lot of skill. We have all the technology we need, but we need increased manpower to put this technology to work."
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