Jackson Hole News

Secrecy Watch: 6 month Delays Plague State Crime Lab

Wyo. Cops Combat the ‘CSI Effect’

By Gil Brady, 9-30-07

JACKSON, Wyo.—In the sun-drenched, aesthetically cool world of “CSI: Miami” and other popular cop shows, it all looks so easy.

Invariably, each episode begins with the mysterious disappearance of a solid citizen, or the accidental discovery of a nude body, violently murdered and unearthed by a county worker surveying a backwoods road in the leafy, forested swamp.

Clues such as hair, blood, gunshot wounds, a watch and a ring on the dead man’s stiff hand offer vague hints linking the victim to his murderer. After a search of the nearby woods, an eagle-eyed gumshoe plucks a strand of black electrical tape off a weed dangling over a muddy boot print.

By the next commercial break, a ready, waiting and well-coiffured lab technician lifts a latent print off the sticky tape to the riffs of techno-music. Upon running it through a database, he develops slam-dunk proof either identifying a suspect, or eliminating one already under suspicion, spinning the hot pursuit in a new direction.

Voila! The rest of the show follows the chase, inevitable arrest and successful prosecution of the bad guys.

Without failure in TV land, crime lab results are definitive and instantaneous. Villains are caught, and their prosecutions are unerring and swift, a mere formality.

By contrast, Wyoming’s top cops are still awaiting the results of clues submitted to the state’s crime lab six months ago.

Backlogs

In a state with one of the lowest violent crime rates in the country—Wyoming averages about half as many murders, robberies, rapes and aggravated assaults per capita as the rest of the nation—it’s one of those badly kept secrets that might still only shock civilians.

But more than 10 interviews with veteran lawmen over the last four months show that growing demands on government and private crime labs for DNA, ballistics, trace evidence and other forms of forensic analysis are stretching the state’s ability to deliver timely results.

Also, because of backlogs and other factors, justice may have in some cases been delayed, compromised and even denied.

For peace officers in Wyoming, long waits on lab tests are as common as methamphetamine—both interrelated problems they’ve been dealing with for as long as anyone can remember.

“Yeah, it’s pretty much universal. Been that way forever,” Lt. Bob Mizel of the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office said earlier this summer about reports of six-month delays at the state’s only forensics facility in Cheyenne.

“The crime lab has always been understaffed and underfunded,” the 25-year lawman added.

But as he and other officials explained: Fighting violent crime in Wyoming is trickier than pinning difficulties on hitches at the crime lab.

“If you really need something done, you can cajole them,” the supervising investigator said of his rapport with the state crime lab. “We’re really fortunate to have Marc Furman (in our office), one of the best evidence technicians in Wyoming.”

Mizel said the value of having a seasoned evidence-tech on staff—in an energy-rich region undergoing a crime and economic boom with rates of violence rivaling those of New Orleans—is as much a reputational benefit as a practical one.

“With Marc, he can find what’s viable evidence before we send it in (to the lab). So, that gives us credibility,” Mizel said.

While some local police agencies are obtaining dollars to hire their own evidence technicians, or budgeting to outsource essential forensic tests, many investigators have only one free and sure-fire bet when it comes to analyzing key clues to make or break a big case: the state crime lab.

Among detectives and justice officials interviewed for this story, praise for the crime lab meeting court-imposed deadlines was universal. But more than one officer indicated that they often found themselves needing lab results to even make it into court.

“Where the frustration comes in is when we have a suspect but we can’t charge him until we make him on prints,” said Detective-Sgt. Scott Terry, head of Jackson’s investigative unit.

This spring, Terry’s team cracked a bizarre spree of car and condo arsons. After waiting on fingerprint results, the lead detective recently learned the prints failed to tie an arson suspect arrested in May to a charred SUV.

“Without a court date, it goes to the bottom of the pile,” he said.

Increasing demand

Gauging demand for services on the lab by the number of requests for analysis from statewide agencies is complicated by the fact that each case submitted varies in the number of tests requested. But the lab said as of mid-August, its current staff of 21 analysts had handled 1,098 cases since January.

Presuming crime does not spike before December, the state lab is on pace to handle between 1,640 and 1,900 cases this year—or around five new cases a day, every day.

In 2006, the lab reported handling 1,651 cases. But an annual state report also showed that between 2003 and 2005, the lab’s caseload jumped by 32 percent—from 1,941 submitted in 2003 to 2,561 cases in 2005—with no appreciable decline in its turnaround time on certain forensic requests.

Forrest Bright, director of Wyoming’s Division of Criminal Investigation, explained in a recent phone interview that staffing issues were the primary reason generating backlogs at the state lab, which his agency oversees. Requests for services he added can go back six months on DNA tests.

Bright said competition for labor and better pay from other states and private labs were luring away qualified technicians.

“When we train someone, it takes two years before they’re totally on their own,” he said. “You get them trained, and they seem to move on.”

“This year, Wyoming did a market survey,” Bright added. “Previous to July 1, you could go next door to Colorado and make a much higher wage.”

Wyoming recently implemented recommendations from a survey on salaries and benefits. Starting in July, pay grades for lab techs and other state employees may be increased to competitive market averages upon two years of continuous employment.

DCI’s new hired gun

Ironically, Bright reached over the state line for DCI’s new lab director, plucking Steve Holloway, a decorated 27-year officer from Colorado, this June from a pool of 17 applicants.

Holloway said recently by phone that he was honored to be working for an agency he came to know as top flight while collaborating on interstate cases over his career.

Between managing the lab’s operations and budget, Holloway said he’s studying for a master’s degree in business administration to complement his background in criminal justice and engineering.

On such problems at the lab as long-standing delays, Holloway said he expected local agencies to soon see quicker turnaround times on certain laboratory procedures. That’s in part because of the addition of a ballistics and biological analyst this month.

“We just got our (ballistics) examiner certified. He’s finished the two years of training,” Holloway said. “Right now, ballistics is running 6-8 weeks (for results). But that’s coming down. We’ll have that under a month by fall, including technical reviews.”

Despite the newly hired hands, without a court date such complex tests as DNA were still “meaningless,” he said, unless it was “relevant to a violent crime in need of identifying a suspect or eliminating suspects.”

Regarding DNA profiling, Bright said the lab’s recent upgrade to a new platform should make testing go faster, but certain tests would still be outsourced and paid with federal dollars.

Since revolutionizing crime fighting two decades ago, DNA profiling—a scientific technique that electrically charges samples from such substances found at crime scenes as blood and saliva to generate biological markers revealing unique patterns of genetic inheritance—has made solving crimes quicker, easier and more accurate.

But has DNA testing also become a victim of its own success?

(For more on this issue, click here & read “It’s not like TV,” the second in this three-part investigative series only in Monday’s Casper Star-Tribune)

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.