November 2009 Archives

Below is an excerpt from a National Institute of Justice funded research project on the status of testing forensic DNA evidence for criminal cases in the United States.  A report published by CBS News last week found thousands of rape kits untested in jurisdictions across the country. Although New Jersey was not listed as a state who participated or responded to the CBS investigation, our neighbors in New York and Pennsylvania stated that every rape kit submitted has been tested while jurisdictions in Florida freely admit "they don't know how many tested or untested kits they have in storage."  Why not ship these out to a private DNA laboratory and get the evidence at least profiled and analyzed.  Even if the victim has rescinded his/her report, the profile may help resolve other "unrelated" crimes by the same perpetrator.   ***Read the DNA Lady's previous entry on unnecessary rapes or crimes that happened in the passed 10 years because of backlogged DNA evidence.*** 

Nationwide, 14 percent of open homicide cases and 18 percent of open rape cases contain forensic evidence that has not been sent to a crime lab for analysis, according to the study conducted by RTI International for the Office of Justice Programs' National Institute of Justice.

The national survey of more than 2,000 state and local police agencies also found that fewer than half of police departments (43 percent) have computerized systems in place for tracking forensic evidence inventory.

Among the reasons cited for not submitting forensic evidence for analysis were:

• 44 percent reported that evidence is not submitted for analysis unless a suspect has been identified  *** majority of offenders are not first time - a state may have a previous DNA profile already in a database - submitting the new evidence for analysis may help to identify the perpetrator ****
  
• 15 percent of law enforcement agencies reported that they may not submit forensic evidence to a lab if the analysis was not requested by a prosecutor
• 11 percent said they did not submit evidence because they felt the lab was not able to produce timely results  *** private & accredited DNA testing labs offer turn around times of as little as 4- 6 weeks on forensic DNA analysis with RUSH options available ***

The survey also revealed that evidence retention policies and practices also varied widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction even with States.  Private laboratories hold certain accreditations which force them to handle all forensic evidence in the same manner - should not state facilities be required to adhere to the same standards?