Backlog at Baltimore crime lab a concern

Published 23 March 2010

The Baltimore Police Department’s crime lab has a backlog of thousands of analysis requests — roughly 3,100 cases for testing bodily fluids, 3,000 cases for drug analysis, and more than 400 cases for DNA analysis; lab delays caused high-profile trial delays, spike in dropped drug cases

More than a year after an internal audit highlighted widespread deficiencies within the Baltimore Police Department’s crime lab, the division has a backlog of thousands of analysis requests. The problem has forced city prosecutors to drop or postpone cases — including the high-profile trial of serial drunken driver Thomas Meighan Jr., accused of killing a Johns Hopkins University student in a hit-and-run. Baltimore Sun’s Tricia Bishop writes that it could get worse. New regulatory requirements are coming that will place more demands on an already stressed lab.

The holdups mean “justice suffers,” along with victims, the community and defendants, who “deserve to be tried in a speedy fashion,” said Baltimore State’s Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy.

The police lab’s director, Francis A. Chiafari, says the agency is understaffed because of a 2007 hiring freeze and consequently is overworked.

Meighan’s case joins the hate-crime trial of Calvin Lockner, charged in the vicious beating of an elderly black fisherman and the attempted-murder trial of teenager Lamont Davis, accused of mistakenly shooting a 5-year-old girl during a July street fight. Davis’s case has been put off three times because of DNA testing delays, most recently in January.

Bishop writes that all these delays point back to the lab. Chiafari took over in January 2009 after the previous director was fired, inheriting a lab with significant problems, including shoddy recordkeeping, unusable equipment and a history of contaminating evidence with analysts’ DNA. Since then, he said he’s brought the equipment up to standards and is using technology to streamline operations.

He can not do anything about the staffing, however, a problem underlined every time court cases are postponed. Chiafari blames open positions for the backup, along with an increase in detectives’ requests for analysis, which have soared. Submissions to just the 10-employee serology section, which tests for the presence of bodily fluids, were up 42 percent last year, he said. “Everybody works very hard and tries to help everybody [else] as much as they can, but when you’re talking about a caseload [of this size], it can be somewhat problematic,” Chiafari told Bishop. “I could easily make use of a staff that doubles the size we have.”

Chiafari estimates that the Baltimore lab — which also handles fingerprint, firearms and even handwriting analysis — outperforms the national average threefold on the whole, which means analysts and technicians are doing three times the amount of work others usually do.

Bishop writes that the backlogs do not reflect it. Roughly 3,100 cases are now awaiting lab testing for bodily fluids, 3,000 cases are awaiting drug analysis, and more than 400 cases need to have DNA analyzed by one of the six DNA analysts on staff.

Violent crimes top the testing priority list, while small-time drug cases rank at the bottom. This resulted in 758 district court drug cases being dropped in 2009, according to Assistant State Attorney Sharon Holback’s office. This is a 47 percent increase in dropped cases over 2008, even though chemical analysis requests were down about 13 percent, to 27,000.

The governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention recently awarded city police a $375,000 grant to help process DNA evidence. Chiafari said it will be used to outsource about 275 cases, but city lab workers still will have to review the work. A federal law enforcement rule prohibits using grant money to hire DNA analysts, because they must be full-time positions. “It’s not a panacea,” Chiafari said of outsourcing. He has been given permission to fill two vacant management positions, but he worries that new regulatory requirements will increase the lab’s burden. Maryland’s legislature passed a law in 2007 that will require significant changes in crime lab regulation, making them run more like hospital labs by 2012.

A new accreditation process begins in 2014.