Transcripts of the Attorney General's Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs (AGID-LAB) Working Group

Monday, October 21, 2002

DISCUSSION OF AUTOMATED FORENSIC DNA ANALYSIS

IT AND INFORMATION SHARING

MR. SCHMITT: We will begin with the state of the art in automatic forensic DNA analysis. We're now going to make you earn your keep this afternoon by providing recommendations to us as to what to do in this area. As you see from your schedule, the first item of discussion for us this afternoon is IT information and information sharing, and appropriately enough we're actually going to start off with automated systems as our first area of discussion.

I would like to start our discussion if we could by calling your attention to the last sentence in Paragraph No. 1 on your discussion topics and draft recommendations where we say the average turn-around time for nonpriority cases at the state and local level is approximately one year and that this could be reduced to less than two months if laboratories were empowered with high technology automated systems.

I'm curious as to the direction of everyone here on that statement. Is it accurate? Is it not ambitious enough? What do people think?