FORENSIC FAMINE

If Only State Lab Had Resources Of TV Show

If investigators for the hit TV show "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" had
to rely on Alabama state government to fund their lab, viewers might lose
interest between the time of the crime and the analyzing of evidence.

That's because it might take months, or even years.

CSI would be just like the Alabama Department of Forensics, facing crushing
workloads with scant resources. Taylor Noggle, the new director of the
state's crime lab system, has inherited a whopping backlog of 9,000 drug
cases, 2,000 DNA cases, 900 toxicology cases and 500 firearms cases that
must be processed for trials to proceed. He is also at least three forensic
pathologists short, and must make do on a budget of about $2.5 million less
than last year's.

"I've been here 32 years," said Noggle, appointed Dec. 18 by Attorney
General Bill Pryor. "We've never had what we felt like we needed. ... We've
been having to make do for years."

Noggle's predecessor, James Upshaw Downs, couldn't make peace with making
do. He resigned after four years to become a medical examiner in Georgia,
saying the state of Alabama hadn't given him the resources to do the job.

Noggle has the right attitude about his new job, saying the agency will do
the best it can until more resources are found. But the right attitude by
itself won't get case backlogs down to manageable levels. It's going to
take more money.

For now, his agency performs the equivalent of medical triage (treating the
most severely injured first) on many cases, trying to meet deadlines for
the most urgent cases.

Noggle says one way to solve his agency's budget shortage is to raise the
current $2 fee on each criminal case in Alabama to $5 or $10 per case to
pay for DNA analysis. He says he'll work with Pryor, district attorneys and
lawmakers to get the resources the system needs.

It's a two-way street. Lawmakers, in particular, must take seriously the
agency's funding woes something they haven't done in years, if ever.

Huge backlogs in processing evidence that delay crime cases for months and
sometimes years don't lend themselves to a riveting TV drama about crime
fighting. They don't make for good state government, either.