Monday, October 21, 2002

TIME ISSUES

MR. COFFMAN: I just wanted to make a comment on the turn-around time. I think you need to be careful just looking at other lab systems and saying their turn-around time is this or that. There are a couple more questions you need to ask: Are they limiting the kind of cases they accept? Are they only taking rapes and homicides, sexual assaults and homicides?

If they're only taking that, they may have a wonderful turn-around time. If they're taking everything from doing DNA on baggies that drug dealers leave or burglaries, their turn-around time may look unusually high, but they're accepting more.

The other issue is there are laboratories out there - we're all trying to find innovative ways of dealing with our backlog, but there are laboratory systems out there who also limit what they do on a case. They may only work one unknown from a case, whereas another lab sets the limit we'll only work 15 unknowns from a case.

So I just think looking at turn-around times, you have to ask three or four other questions to make sure you're dealing with apples and apples.

MR. CLARKE: Just building on that same thought also, much of the work on, for example, unsolved cases is dictated by what work is necessary in charge cases dictated largely by trial dates. So they all interplay very much with one another. I know, for instance, in laboratories that I'm familiar with all work may stop on assault cases because there are two or three cases that have to be finished for purposes of trial that might be three weeks from now.

So they very much are in a - I don't know if the term is symbiotic or symbolic or some word like that.