Pubdate: Sat, 20 Sep 2003 Source: Winston-Salem Journal (NC) Copyright: 2003 Piedmont Publishing Co. Inc. Contact: http://www.journalnow.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/504 Author: Patrick Wilson Note: The Journal does not publish letters from writers outside its daily home delivery circulation area. SBI LAB IS FACING CRISIS DAs To Lighten Load As A Short-Term Fix North Carolina's district attorneys will send less evidence from misdemeanor marijuana and property-crime cases to the state's overburdened crime laboratory to help reduce the lab's backlog. Prosecutors said they hope that sending less evidence from lower-level cases to the State Bureau of Investigation lab in Raleigh will help the lab catch up. But the head of the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys warned that the idea is a temporary way to help the lab in the short term. He said that the lab needs more money and employees to keep up with the demand to process forensic evidence. 'I just don't throw around the word critical or crisis, but we are really getting to that stage, if we haven't already gotten there,' said Jeff Hunt, the conference president and the district attorney for five Western North Carolina counties near Hendersonville. 'Unfortunately the allocation of resources from the state did not match the speed with which the technological advances were occurring, so we now have a situation where they're playing catch-up at the SBI lab,' Hunt said. SBI Director Robin Pendergraft met with the district-attorney conference's executive committee last month and asked that prosecutors help reduce the evidence the lab gets from misdemeanor marijuana and property-crime cases. Lab employees test DNA evidence, drugs and guns. Hunt sent a letter last month to Pendergraft saying that the association agreed, and would encourage the state's 39 district attorneys to restrict some evidence they send to the lab, even though it might impair some prosecutions. There is no need for forensic evidence in many marijuana cases, Hunt said yesterday. 'In the run-of-the-mill marijuana case, we can substitute the law-enforcement officer's testimony that he's familiar with marijuana and that this is marijuana,' he said. 'That's sufficient evidence in a criminal case.' Some agencies, especially in smaller and more rural counties, automatically send marijuana to the lab when they don't need to, said Hunt, whose district includes Henderson, McDowell, Polk, Rutherford, and Transylvania counties. Jerry Richardson, the director of the crime lab, said that the SBI will continue to test any drug that the state's 700 law-enforcement agencies need tested. He said that agents test a lot of marijuana, but rarely testify in court because the cases aren't prosecuted, or a plea agreement is reached. 'We don't want to stop taking any case from anybody,' he said. 'We just want to make sure that we're going to be taking the cases that are going to be tried in court.' Marijuana accounts for about 25 percent of drug cases the lab receives. There are 22 drug chemists at the lab in Raleigh and two at a smaller lab in Asheville, but seven of the 22 positions in Raleigh are open, Richardson said. That, combined with a dramatic rise in clandestine methamphetamine labs in North Carolina, has taxed the lab's drug-chemistry section, he said. SBI agents will test evidence from more than 250 meth labs this year, and expect more next year. There are 9,000 total drug cases pending at the lab, and chemists will work on more than 30,000 cases this year, Richardson said. Forsyth County officials rarely send marijuana to the SBI lab. Rather, they try to negotiate plea agreements in most lower-level felony and misdemeanor drug cases, District Attorney Tom Keith said. The lab backlog has affected prosecutors such as Keith, who waited months for a report on forensic evidence in the Nov. 15 beating death of Nathaniel Jones, 61, at his home in Winston-Salem. Keith's office just received the lab report two weeks ago and is reviewing it to determine what charges to bring against five teen-age boys who are being held in connection with the killing. 'Each of the five people have different levels of evidence, and you wait to get your trace evidence back so you can charge and get the highest conviction you can based on the evidence,' Keith said. State officials said in December that they would add seven employees at the lab after the Raleigh News & -- Observer reported that about 20,000 untested rape kits were sitting in police evidence rooms because the lab could generally accept evidence only in rape cases linked to a suspect. Attorney General Roy Cooper oversees the SBI. Last year, he called the lab's backlog a threat to public safety, and asked for the extra workers, who are now in training. Cooper will lobby the General Assembly for more money to hire new employees at the lab, Richardson said. - --- MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk