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Local DNA lab comes with hefty price tag

Published Sunday, November 1, 2009
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Beaufort County Sheriff P.J. Tanner's push to open his own DNA lab is understandable.

Tanner calls DNA testing the best law enforcement tool available and expects the lab to help his deputies solve cases more quickly and help keep down the county jail population.

The State Law Enforcement Division, which charges local law enforcement agencies nothing for the testing it does, now limits agencies to five samples for a case. Results can take months to get; Tanner says up to a year.

The Sheriff's Office would control when and how many DNA samples are tested.

But that control comes at a price. The Sheriff's Office budget to open the DNA lab totals $894,611. That includes $321,463 for building and outfitting the lab; $217,152 to pay a DNA technical leader and analyst; $302,927 for DNA equipment and county vehicles; and $53,069 for supplies. About $628,000 has been spent to date on the building, equipment and furniture, according to the Sheriff's Office financial officer.

The cost to operate the lab going forward is a question mark, but two years ago, Sheriff's Office officials estimated it would be about $350,000 a year.

In the $22.5 million operating budget for the Sheriff's Office, that might be relatively small, but it's an estimate, and over the years, the cost to local taxpayers adds up.

It would make more sense fiscally to get the SLED lab operating efficiently, spreading out the costs over the entire state. In fact, it's the same reasoning behind using deputies to provide law enforcement on Hilton Head Island instead of setting up a town police department.

Right now, only Richland County operates its own DNA lab. But Greenville County is in the process of starting a lab, and Charleston, Lexington and York counties would like to do so.

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.

"Generally, there are still corrective steps to be taken," Keaton said.

Tanner plans to house the DNA lab and the existing drug lab in the same building. That means the drug lab, too, must be accredited, Keaton said.

Before the DNA lab is accredited, testing can be done, he said, but it can't be entered in the federal database. After the lab is accredited, the testing done before that must be reanalyzed before it can be entered into the database.

SLED officials told The (Charleston) Post & Courier in October that they are working to reduce their backlog of about 3,000 cases. DNA cases account for about 70 percent of the backlog.

Budget cuts have left open key lab positions. Each of the agency's 14 analysts now handles more than 120 cases a year. SLED officials hope new equipment will help them reach their turnaround goal of 30 days, the same turnaround period for the lab's toxicology, fingerprint analysis and drug identification units. The limit of five items per case is aimed at helping reach that goal.

As state taxpayers, we'll help pay for any efforts to get the SLED lab operating more efficiently. We're helping pay the $8 million annual cost to operate it.

Tanner's goal of more DNA testing and greater control of the process comes at a price, and we should fully understand what it is.

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