Thursday, 4:30 PM
State to spend millions to sort through DNA backlog
(Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)
Public safety secretary Kevin M. Burke, shown above in January, told a press conference today he was stunned by the backlog and vowed to wade through the 16,000 cases and test the DNA.
By Jonathan Saltzman and Andrew Ryan, Globe Staff
Top public safety officials said today that an audit of the state's troubled crime lab will serve as a "blueprint for reform" after it found a backlog of untested DNA evidence from 16,000 cases dating to the mid-1980s.
The state will spend million of dollars to sort through the evidence to identify unsolved cases, test the evidence, and prosecute defendants for whom the statue of limitations has not expired. While DNA backlogs exist across the country, the problem in Massachusetts was much larger than in other states, the audit found.
Kevin Burke, the state secretary of public safety, said at a press conference today that he was stunned to learn about the amount of untested DNA, but tried to assure the public that dangerous criminals had not escaped prison because of the backlog.
"We think that in these cases that there are only the remotest ... of possibilities that murders or rapists are walking free," Burke said at the press conference as he stood next to Colonel Mark Delaney at State Police headquarters in Framingham.
While the evidence needed to be analyzed, Burke said he found it hard to believe that any prosecutor would allow crucial DNA evidence to go untested. He said he assumed that much of the backlog involved cases in which other evidence was used to prosecute defendants.
The $267,000 study was ordered by the state Executive Office of Public Safety in March after problems surfaced with the handling of evidence in the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, the FBI-funded computer network that serves as a national registry for DNA samples collected from convicted criminals and arrested individuals.
The civilian head of the crime lab resigned in March after a series of high-profile problems. The administrator of the lab's DNA database was fired in April, three months after he was suspended for allegedly mishandling CODIS test results, including 13 cases in which he did not tell law enforcement officials about positive DNA matches in unsolved sexual assault cases until after the statute of limitations had expired.
Vance, an international risk management consulting firm with an office in Braintree, conducted the audit. The 57-page report, which was released today, concluded that the crime lab's problems, when "allowed to fester, led to a crisis which unnecessarily undermined public confidence in a critical law enforcement function."
Moving forward, the crime lab will have to double its number of DNA specialists to 75 or 80 to keep up with demand, Burke said. Since 1999, the lab has tested DNA in fewer than 1,200 cases, while the backlog is 16,000.
The process of sorting through the backlog will take several months and could cost up to $2 million, Burke said.
