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.