The Sun's Tricia Bishop reports this morning that the Baltimore Police crime lab is amassing a troubling backlog of cases due to short staffing and a notable uptick in requests from detectives. Submissions to just the 10-employee serology section, which tests for the presence of bodily fluids, were up 42 percent last year. 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.
Administrative Judge Pamela White said in court that she saw a stream of DNA delays in one week - roughly 10 cases.
"Whether it's because of manpower or whether it's because of bureaucracy, I am concerned about timely trials," White said in an interview last week.
Lab director Francis Chiafari acknowledges that staffing woes and the backlog are troubling. But anyone who has tracked a court case in the city knows that at least two postponements - and sometimes three, four, five and six - is the norm, whether it is a lack of available courtrooms, trouble with witnesses, or attorneys who are not ready for court. If not delays by the crime lab, its a near certainty that something else would have caused these cases to be postponed. Still, anything that contributes to the "gaming of the system," as Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III calls it, is problematic.
The backlog is also not unique to the city crime lab. By the end of 2006, the Maryland State Police crime lab had amassed a backlog of 24,000 untested and uncollected DNA samples from convicted felons. In January 2008, Governor Martin O'Malley announced that the backlog had been eliminated due to additional funding.