'It can put a lot of lives on hold': Huge backlog at crime lab hinders justice, attorneys say

So many drugs are coming into the GBI crime lab that its staff can’t keep up.

For the past year, the lab has faced a growing backlog that’s slowed down the testing process, and its effects are widespread.

If prosecutors don’t have the evidence they need to pursue a drug-related case in a timely manner, both drug dealers and drug abusers can get out on bond and return to the streets.

And those arrested for narcotics crimes who can’t afford bail can spend months behind bars before they even have the chance to argue their case in court.

Macon Judicial Circuit District Attorney David Cooke said his office often has to wait seven to eight months to get back test results from the crime lab. In some cases, it’s taken over a year.

“That erodes confidence in the system,” Cooke said. “And this is, in many ways, directly attributable to the backlog.”

The crime lab received 33,099 chemistry requests for drug tests in fiscal 2018, according to the GBI. Only 26,283 tests — or 79 percent — were performed during that time. At the end of the fiscal year June 30, the lab’s backlog of drug test requests over 30 days old grew to 17,285, since the lab started the year already behind.

If the crime lab were to focus exclusively on the backlog, it would take the state’s seven crime labs eight months to eliminate, said Nelly Miles, GBI’s director of the office of public affairs.

She said the crime labs receive more requests for drug analysis than the current trained staff can complete, an issue that she said is exacerbated by priority requests from district attorneys that disrupt the normal case flow.

The backlog couldn’t be coming at a worse time.

The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office recently created a new team to support the Special Investigations Unit, which investigates narcotics crimes, and a prosecutor said the extra manpower seems to have increased the number of drug seizures since the beginning of the year.

When local law enforcement seizes drugs, they seal and ship them to GBI’s Central Lab in Dry Branch. The Central Lab performs forensic tests for 23 counties with over 700,000 residents in total.

Local law enforcement agencies receive training to perform their own tests on marijuana seizures. All other drugs must be sent to the GBI crime lab.

The GBI crime lab is state funded, so prosecutors can test their forensic evidence free of charge.

“We could technically hire an outside lab,” Cooke said. “But that’s impractical and expensive.”

The GBI received $40.1 million in fiscal 2018 for forensic scientific services, which include the crime lab’s analysis of drugs, as well as firearms, DNA, trace evidence, autopsies and multiple other types of forensic testing. Of that amount, $38.2 million came from the state, and $1.8 million came from the federal government, according to the Georgia Governor’s Budget Report FY 2019.

For fiscal 2019, the budget report reflects that the GBI requested $40.8 million for forensic testing. The state approved a final budget with $40.6 million for forensic testing, including federal funds, which is still about $200,000 shy of the GBI’s initial ask. The approved budget including funding for one new scientist position for drug testing.

As of July 1, the crime labs employed 163 scientists, 35 of whom are trained specifically to perform drug analysis. The Central Lab, which serves the Macon Judicial Circuit, has a staff of 16, but not all of them are drug analysts.

Cooke said the dearth of resources for the crime labs has been a topic of conversation among district attorneys across the state who are worried about the implications of the backlog.

“This is a serious bottleneck,” he said.

Backlog hurts prosecution, DA says

For the district attorney’s office, the consequences of the backlog are two-fold.

Without test results from the crime lab, prosecutors can’t indict drug dealers or offer treatment options for drug abusers.

April Herbert, chief of the narcotics division for district attorney’s office, said she first started to notice the lag around this time last year.

“Sometimes we’ll go for a week or more, two weeks, without receiving a test result,” Herbert said. “And then we might get two or three at one time. And then a couple weeks go by, and we don’t get any test results.”

Because the crime lab doesn’t have the resources to test all of the evidence that law enforcement sends in, the staff prioritizes drug samples for offenses that are most likely to yield the biggest penalty, such as drug trafficking.

If prosecutors’ cases include multiple drug samples, they might only get results back for one or two at a time, which limits the evidence they can present in court.

“Sometimes I will go back to the GBI, and I will try to explain to them why it’s important that they do additional testing for me on all of the drugs that were submitted, and, I mean, sometimes I’ve gotten in a situation where I’m kind of negotiating with them about, ‘Well, if you’ll test these things it would help me to be able to prosecute my case,’ ” Herbert said.

“There are other cases where I’ve just had to make a judgment call about whether or not I needed to get them to do additional testing or if I felt like I could proceed with the minimal amount of testing that they did.”

Until the results come in from the lab, prosecutors face a choice. They can either pursue a case without all of the evidence, or they can wait it out.

In the meantime, defendants either sit in jail or, after 90 days, they can get out on bond and return to the streets. This means drug dealers who are released on bond can continue to offend while their case slowly plays out.

Cooke said this puts the public at risk.

“I would much rather be able to take gang members off the board using a narcotics case than a murder case because at least no one’s died,” Cooke said. “You know, I would like to handle their cases before they’ve killed someone else. And if the drugs aren’t tested in a timely manner, then that limits my ability to hold them accountable and limit their activities using a different tool. Instead, you know, I have to wait until the GBI’s conducting an autopsy instead of a chemical test.”

But Cooke said the backlog also impacts those with a substance abuse disorder who commit crimes.

The Macon Judicial Circuit Drug Court offers rehabilitative alternatives for low-level offenders suffering from substance abuse, such as residential rehabilitation programs, support group meetings and counseling.

However, to convince offenders in need to opt into the program, prosecutors often use the threat of indictment as an incentive to get help instead.

“We try to funnel them towards treatment programs that are often times, you know, the treatment is the carrot, and the prosecution is the stick,” Cooke said. “And if we can’t prosecute them, we have no stick. You know, that’s one less incentive we have to putting someone on the road to recovery.”

‘It’s the delay that’s harmful’

Defense attorneys feel the ripple effects of the backlog, too.

As a private attorney who specializes in narcotics defenses and defends clients in the drug court, Paula Kapiloff has seen firsthand the toll the backlog takes on defendants who have to essentially press pause on their lives for months on end as they wait for lab results to come back.

A defendant who can’t afford to make bond can spend nine months in county jail before even being indicted for a crime, she said.

“That loss of freedom on a case that, at that point of time, the defendant has a presumption of innocence in his or her favor, could be quite harmful,” Kapiloff said. “Complete loss of liberty on a prospective case as opposed to a proven case.”

Even for those who aren’t incarcerated while awaiting test results, the delay can be paralyzing, Kapiloff said.

“It can put a lot of lives on hold, as well as their families’ — their parents, their children, their siblings, their spouses,” she said. “It’s the delay that’s harmful, especially when you have defendants who are doing all they can to assist counsel with the defense of their case.”

Kapiloff emphasized that the judicial system guarantees every defendant the right to present his or her case in court. Multiple law enforcement agencies play a role in this process, she said, from arrest to grand jury to trial.

“But each step of the way, the crime lab results are a mandatory element,” Kapiloff said.

All of these factors affect both the community and officers who oversee it, Cooke said.

“It affects not only the morale of the neighborhood and the public and their confidence in the system,” he said. “It also affects the morale of the law enforcement officers, because, a lot of times, it doesn’t matter how deeply committed they are, that they can know in the back of their mind, ‘I can do all of this work in putting everything together, but if it’s not tested, then why bother?’”

Samantha Max is a Report for America corps member and reports for The Telegraph with support from the News/CoLab at Arizona State University. Follow her on Facebook at facebook.com/samantha.max.9 and on Twitter @samanthaellimax. Learn more about Report for America at www.reportforamerica.org.

This story was originally published July 20, 2018 at 2:17 PM with the headline "'It can put a lot of lives on hold': Huge backlog at crime lab hinders justice, attorneys say."