By Jerome Burdi
Sun-Sentinel
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — DNA can be a crook’s worst enemy.
It first was used to solve rape and homicide cases, and in recent years savvy crime investigators realized the scientific evidence could be used to crack property crimes as well.
Crime labs around the country weren’t prepared for that innovation, and scientists were suddenly swamped with DNA swabs.
The backlog has been cause for alarm in several labs and steps are in place to cut the backlog.
In Palm Beach County, Dr. Cecelia Crouse, manager of the Forensic Biology Unit in the Sheriff’s Office crime lab, took action after looking at her lab’s statistics in July. She found a backlog of 1,707 cases, including 54 homicides.
“The goal of the lab is to make sure every case gets done that needs to get done,” Crouse said. “Now that we have more and more crimes, it has become not an ideal business plan.”
On closer inspection, 400 of those backlogged cases already had been resolved in court without the DNA evidence, she said. The sheriff’s crime lab, which is used by every police agency in the county, asked investigators to re-examine their cases and come back with “the evidence that would most likely attach a perpetrator to the crime,” Crouse said.
She got cooperation.
Police investigators still can swab an entire crime scene and keep it in evidence, but now have a limit on the number of samples they can submit to the lab: two for a burglary; four for a robbery and nine for a homicide.
If there are no matches, investigators may submit another selection of swabs.
An estimated 359,000 DNA cases nationwide were backlogged at the end of 2005, a 24 percent increase from the 287,000 cases backlogged in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s latest survey available.
In the past five years, there has been growing interest in using DNA evidence to solve property crimes, according to the department.
Crime investigators go to lectures and presentations where they learn that burglars “put their palms down on the window sill. While you won’t see a clean fingerprint, there may be DNA there,” said David Epstein, chief operating officer of the National Forensic Science Technology Center, a nonprofit group in Largo that provides research and training to the forensic community.
“The education of officers of potential sources of DNA evidence is a double-edged sword,” he said. “The labs have to grow to meet the demand or have a screening process of the samples that come in.”
The backlogs won’t go away, Epstein said, but it’s a matter of how they are managed.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement developed a 10-point plan in 2006 to reduce backlogs, which includes training law enforcement on submitting the best DNA evidence, sending cases to private labs, adding scientists and paying overtime.
DNA evidence helped Boynton Beach police charge a man in February with a 2006 burglary. DNA from blood found on broken glass in the house identified the suspect.
In Colorado, DNA evidence helped get a 20-year prison sentence for a man in string of Denver-area break-ins. The suspect was linked to five burglaries because he drank soda in victims’ refrigerators, leaving his DNA on the cans.
Specimens like that are what Crouse is looking for.
“The most important thing is that we don’t substitute quantity for quality,” she said. “But the question is: At what point do you have so much redundancy in your results that that first couple of results would have been sufficient?”
As of early December, the sheriff’s crime lab whittled its backlog to 451 cases. This includes 29 homicide and sexual assault cases, and 274 property crimes.
Staff Researcher Barbara Hijek contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 Sun-Sentinel