Defrosting Cold Cases

For nearly two years, the DNA samples connecting Ronald Brown to the rape of a teenage girl sat in the state police forensic laboratory while the convicted murderer roamed the streets of New Haven, CT, USA. Brown had been released from prison in November 2006 — but not before giving authorities a DNA sample that was supposed to be analyzed by the state lab and logged into a national DNA databank. Six months later, Brown’s DNA sample was still on the shelf, with thousands of other untested samples, when a 15-year-old girl was dragged behind a house on Chapel Street in New Haven and sexually assaulted. A rape kit, including DNA evidence from the girl’s attacker, was taken the day after the May 4, 2007, assault and sent by New Haven police detectives to the state police lab in August 2007. But two more years would pass before scientists in the lab analyzed Brown’s DNA sample — and found that it matched the DNA in the New Haven rape. Brown was arrested last week, 32 months after the crime, and charged with first-degree sexual assault and kidnapping.

Connecticut’s forensic lab has a backlog of 10,600 DNA samples from convicted offenders that haven’t been processed and entered into the databank. An internal memorandum from the lab director obtained by The Courant details how evidence from recent violent crimes, including homicides, sits untouched in the state laboratory for up to a year. The November 2009 memo says:

“Police departments submitting DNA evidence from a homicide scene can expect to wait as long as nine months for processing, unless it is a high-profile case such as the killing of Yale student Annie Le. Evidence from 35 homicides has not yet been processed. –Latent fingerprints found at a crime scene can take a year for the laboratory to analyze against a national database. –Rape kits with potential DNA evidence may be shelved for up to a year. The state has 110 rape kits that have not been analyzed. –Firearms submitted for identification can take from nine months to a year to review. In the memo, Director Kenneth Zercie blames the backlog on staff cuts. He wrote that in July 2009, for example, the lab had five examiners who handled fingerprints and documents; now it has one.”

Backlogs have plagued state forensic labs for decades. But with a boost from federal Department of Justice funds, several have worked to whittle away at those buildups.

In Maryland, Gov. O’Malley inherited a backlog of 24,000 DNA samples when he took office in 2007. Within a year, he said, the backlog was gone, resulting in a sixfold increase in the rate at which authorities found matches between crime-scene evidence and the DNA database.

More than 20 years ago, Virginia had 160,000 blood samples awaiting analysis. Since then, that state’s DNA database has grown from about 26,000 samples to more than 300,000, and the state now averages about 700 hits a year against the database, according to state records.

Arkansas officials raised court fees in 2005, pumping millions of new dollars into state labs and nearly eliminating a 16,000-case backlog. And several other states with populations larger than Connecticut’s have backlogs no larger than a few thousand cases.

Read the full article here.

Categories: Forensics

Tags: Actual Innocence, Arkansas, Connecticut, Crime Labs, Crime Scene, DNA, DNA Database, Evidence, Finger Printing, Forensics, Maryland, Miscarriage of Justice, Victim, Virginia, Witnesses