Monday, October 21, 2002

HOW SHOULD FEDERAL FUNDS BE ALLOCATED?

MR. SCHMITT: Let me ask you to look at the recommendation that we have listed here, and I know that if I asked you if a program should in fact be developed to address this, you would all say yes, so let me ask it in a slightly different way, and that is if there were a fixed pot of money for DNA analysis, would it be better to allow you all to apply for grants and then decide to what use it should be put or should part of that money be carved off into a separate IT sort of integration pot?

MR. GIALAMAS: My preference would be that you allow agencies to decide how best it is that technology or staff or whatever resource needs are needed be applied. I think it's fair to require and demand that a particular goal be met, and the goal between all of us could be universal. It could be higher productivity or higher throughput, whatever it is that our definition is, but if you set that as a goal and demand it, then allowing the agencies to decide the mechanism in which that's going to take place, whether it's automation, people, space, gives them the flexibility of achieving that goal, not losing sight of the mission, the charge, and that is to get more done at this point in time.

MR. SELAVKA: It may be heresy I know, but maybe a highly automated database for the nation centrally funded. Regardless of your state's laws, those samples that you collect under your state law could be forwarded. We already have a voucher system now for federally funded convicted offender backlog reductions. Maybe we should centralized the entire infrastructure, do something like they've done in South Africa and redeploy those forensic resources in laboratories into states and localities for casework samples. So we have one pot of money that we all do what we need to increase the capacity for casework and centralize the databases for the country.

It may be anathema. You will probably tell me that those are state systems that have been testing. David may lose his job or have to be redeployed or something. My state doesn't test its samples. We don't have a laboratory that could it. We're always going to need to pay for it to outsource or ask the Federal Government to help us. It's a very different idea.

MR. SCHMITT: If the Federal Government were to pay for a program that would allow automation to occur similar to what we're doing with high throughput on the offender sample; in other words, you wouldn't get the money to buy your own South African robot; we would buy ten of them for you through somebody and they would be someplace and you would send your samples there, who would have a lot of heartburn doing your samples in that way? I would assume it would be mostly convicted offender samples, but I suppose maybe there is some easier casework stuff that you could do, if you have blood stains from casework, for example.

MS. CROUSE: Last week the Palm Beach Post came to our laboratory. They had been there previously when they found out that we had applied for the no suspect grant and that it looked like the State of Florida was going to be awarded and that we were going to get some monies, and they wanted to know what it was all about.

I guess two weeks ago - I didn't see the article - there was something in People magazine or something about backlogs. So she asked if she could come out, and she ended up bringing photographers and half their division, and I thought this was a very positive thing, but when she asked why do we need a no suspect grant, I opened two file drawers, and those are 2001 and 2000 cases, and I said because there are victims sitting in this drawer.

What a negative article came out of that. It hasn't hit the press yet, but she was very - my bottom line to her was that if we were a private business, we would be out of business because we are not servicing our clients. Our clients are the victims and the citizens. If that's what it took to get these cases done, I would do it in a heartbeat if there was a centralized location.

I don't know if our detectives would ever let their stuff go. I don't know if the 34 agencies we serve would ever let their individual cases go out the door. They're not keen about the no suspect at this point. They want guarantees that any private outsourcing company is going to be up to snuff, but I just honestly feel - I don't think that is heresy. I think it's an interesting idea.

MR. SCHMITT: Has anyone experienced a chain of custody challenge that was successful based on the fact that it left the government lab's control and went to a private lab's facility?

MS. CROUSE: We actually had a case thrown out because the people in the private lab didn't take a picture of the evidence. All they had was a drawing. It was terrible. It ended up that piece of the evidence didn't matter because there was another piece that we didn't send, and this time they took a picture. It was a real hassle. We've sent out a lot of cases, and that's a rare one.

MR. CLARKE: I think particularly as the public's perception and expectation of DNA has become so much stronger, other than occasional bumps in the road, the chain of custody issues I don't think exist like they used to exist. These were methods used to attack not only the technology, but testing perhaps ten years ago or perhaps more recent, but I think now we've reached a different step in that process and now jurors want to hear this evidence, and unless they can be shown something is wrong with the testing in this case, which is obviously extremely rare, they're going to embrace it. I think we see that in the reactions of criminal defendants as to how they defend these charges. They've changed.

MS. SAMPLES: I don't run a data bank laboratory, so I don't know what the feeling would be of a data bank laboratory to Carl's suggestion, but I certainly have heard that data bank laboratories are used as training grounds for analysts. They can learn the ropes before they move on to the meat of what we do, which is real casework. I would think anything that would free up analysts, properly qualified analysts, to handle evidence and do that part which they would do the best would be a good thing.

MR. SCHMITT: I mentioned to you earlier that I had asked folks who were listening in today to speak to you and give you comments, and at the end they will have time to make comments as well, but I wanted just to share with you that one of the folks in the audience who is from one of the private labs has given me a note to say that his lab had processed 7,000 cases last year with a 60-day turn-around time, which is required by their contract, just to give you an idea of - another data point for this discussion.

More on the thought of how the money ought to be split up if there is a fixed pot of money out there?

MS. NARVESON: I would like to see a dual approach. I would like to have money available to the various agencies to implement these new procedures within their own scope of responsibility and their own state and local limitations, but I might suggest that we do have a number of partners that could be utilized to maybe more fully define and package information that would facilitate the identification of options for laboratories to consider. For instance, the Forensic Research Network might be employed to look into this and come up with recommendations or guidelines as to what needs to be considered, what kinds of things are available, what is going to be the impact, and perhaps even assist laboratory directors in putting together the sales package that they need to take forward to other agencies such that when we make these applications for the large grants, it has all been thought out and there is good information to rely on.

MS. HART: That's one of the reasons when I asked the question earlier about whether the people in South Africa had figured out what the cost was and what money was saved, I just remember coming from the corrections arena when you would have to go to your legislature and say we want $100 million to build a new prison. Everybody just goes to the creek until you say and we will recoup that cost in four years in labor savings by having a new design that's much more efficient.

So to me always on these sorts of questions any time you have information about what you are going to save in labor costs or costs of - you know, I like the fact that you had up there the cost of your collection kits, your X kits. I like that term, by the way. That I think is extremely helpful whenever we can package things in that kind of way where we can talk about the types of saving and why it's worth the investment, and ultimately that's why part of the question on whether you should go with staff or with automation.

What concerns me when you just sit there and do staff and do business the same old way is are you permanently signing on to that kind of investment as opposed to developing capacity building that will save money down the road and ultimately allow state labs to be more self-sufficient?

MR. SCHMITT: Let me ask our South African visitors was the impetus for your automation initiative to free up analysts to do other things or was it so that you could process more samples in the same amount of workdays?

MR. VAN NIEKERK: It was most definitely both.

MR. SCHMITT: Everybody says both. I'm going to ask my questions in a different way.

MR. VAN NIEKERK: It was mostly definitely both. If I say anything else, one of the selling points that I and our automation team, development team had to bring to our management was the fact that one of the benefits of automation is the fact that you can free up people for more intelligent work. If you just take, as an example, a person sitting in a DNA isolation lab running through 60, 70 samples per day, centrifuging all the time, just doing nothing but repetitive work - most definitely one of the biggest strong points for us was the fact that we could free up people for intelligent work. In other words, this made it possible for us to say we don't need as many people as we envisioned because we can take a trained analyst and redeploy him and let him do something else.

One of the first questions people started asking us was am I going to lose my job, and most definitely it was not the case. In fact, we can now start looking towards career development for people instead of having them doing repetitive work.

MR. MORRIS: I think maybe from my side where you see a certain number of cases, our objective is to get those cases completed at a certain time period. As was mentioned, I want to get this information to court. I don't want detectives working on a case where that suspect has already been excluded. The other objective was to increase DNA that was done in all of those cases. As I also said, if I put selective procedures in place in order to do DNA or not, that is the other side. So if I automate, I get the throughput up, and it allows me to increase the number or the percentage of cases on which DNA is performed. So that's why it's both. You actually get both of those benefits from the same decision.