Good afternoon. Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today on this important issue. My name is David Boyd. I am the Deputy Director of the National Institute of Justice and the Director of its Office of Science and Technology. NIJ is the research and evaluation arm of the Justice Department. My office, the Office of Science and Technology, works to explore technology and other resources that could be used by law enforcement officials to solve and prosecute crimes.

NIJ believes it has made great progress in enhancing the ability of public crime labs to improve their capacities to analyze many types of forensic evidence. We believe that the provisions outlined in the Paul Coverdell National Forensic Sciences Improvement Act of 2000 (P.L. 106-561), if funded, will help us build on that important work.

DNA and other types of forensic evidence are valuable tools that investigators, prosecutors, and other law enforcement officials use in this manner. It is the job of forensic scientists working in the more than 300 public crime laboratories across the nation to reveal as much about the evidence as possible. This job, already a scientifically challenging endeavor, is made more difficult by the restrictions faced by virtually all of the public crime laboratories. A recent RAND report, Challenges and Choices for Crime-Fighting Technology, pointed out that public crime laboratories face huge casework backlogs, forcing them to prioritize work according to upcoming court dates, and making it difficult for them to perform the timely analyses that might aid or shorten investigations. Further, budgetary constraints suppress their ability to modernize or upgrade equipment, yet recent court decisions are forcing forensic scientists to re-evaluate and, in some cases, augment both the science and the implementation upon which their results are based.

The needs faced by the public crime labs have been the subject of several important programs at the National Institute of Justice over the last six years. The first of these programs, the DNA Laboratory Improvement Program, a $40 million initiative meant to improve the capabilities and capacities of our nation’s crime laboratories to implement and conduct forensic DNA analysis, has already shown significant and easily measurable results. When the program began in 1996, under the authority of the 1994 DNA Identification Act, fewer than a dozen states had the capability to perform forensic DNA testing. By the end of FY 2000, more than 130 separate laboratory facilities had DNA capabilities. Many of these laboratories were able to use federal funds to leverage their laboratories’ priorities with their own state legislatures. A number of states responded to NIJ’s encouragement to form consortiums across their state and local laboratories to make more efficient use of funding and services.

An outgrowth of the DNA Laboratory Improvement program has been the Crime Laboratory Improvement Program (CLIP), developed to aid all facets of public crime laboratories, because DNA evidence is applicable in a small portion of crimes. For most crimes, in addition to DNA, other kinds of evidence must also be collected, analyzed, and explained.

Important gains have been made in several areas that will improve the capacity and capability of all public crime labs. One effort that addresses what many believe is the most critical need in the crime laboratory community is the creation of a Technical Working Group (TWG) of forensic practitioners, educators, trainers, and others to formulate a standardized curriculum for undergraduate and graduate forensic science majors to ensure a relevant knowledge base for those entering the forensic work force. Training, education, and human resource issues are those cited as the most critical need by more than 95 percent of the crime laboratory directors responding to the RAND survey.

NIJ is also undertaking the development of a Forensic Resource Network that will be accessible to the forensic community to assist in quality assurance, validation and evaluation, new technologies, and surplus property distribution. We believe our experience with the DNA Laboratory Improvement Program demonstrates that CLIP will have as significant an impact in upgrading non-DNA forensic applications as the DNA Laboratory Improvement Program had on DNA forensics for our nation. NIJ has had great success in working to assist labs to address critical issues and develop meaningful proposals that include measurable long-term goals, and deliverables that will have important consequences for bettering their productivity, capacities, and capabilities beyond the life of the grant. The Coverdell Act’s provision calling for state plans to be developed prior to funds being released to a state should help to continue this important aspect of laboratory improvement.

Finally, there is the Forensic DNA Research and Development Program, which has been providing enhancements to existing methods, techniques, and technologies, as well as creating new tools for the future of DNA evidence. Such technological innovations were identified in a report by a working group of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence as important in enhancing the value of DNA in solving and preventing crime. Some of the program’s $5 million annual budget is used to develop technologies and techniques that will immediately improve the use of DNA in today’s laboratories. One such improvement allows laboratories to predict instrumentation failures before they occur, thus reducing arbitrary laboratory shut-downs and the risk of loss of crucial evidence. Another example is the development of a mitochondrial DNA screening method that allows labs to examine old, degraded, or very small evidence samples without resorting to the expensive and technically demanding DNA sequencing methods needed beyond the screening stage. The program also supports future improvements such as high throughput, low cost mass spectrometry instrumentation and the exploitation of nanotechnology for forensic applications.

We expect the first forensic DNA chip with all 13 of the required genetic markers for data basing to be in the hands of the practitioners for evaluation by October 2001. This chip, under development at MIT’s Whitehead Institute of Technology, uses standard, commercially available reagents with a capillary electrophoresis format, but instead of the several hours currently required to analyze a sample, the chip can perform the same task and produce a reliable result in under 10 minutes. This type of instrumentation can save many thousands of man-years of productivity when it is implemented in our nation’s labs and may eventually offer new ways to use DNA earlier in investigations.

Increases in productivity such as these are a crucial need in forensic laboratories today. The forensic workforce is so severely constrained that it is simply not possible for them to work harder, so we must find ways to help them to work smarter. This is also the goal of NIJ’s current non-DNA general forensics solicitation, which will fund projects that can increase the sensitivity, speed, or reliability of traditional forensic methods in areas such as trace evidence, latent prints, toxicology, controlled substances, and other forensic areas.

But new technologies, methods, and techniques can help to achieve better productivity only when laboratories have the time and ability to thoughtfully evaluate and validate them. As the RAND report notes, the laboratories are so overwhelmed by a lack of human resources that infusion of new technology is incredibly difficult at best. These circumstances make the need to support crime laboratory improvement paramount before these critical gains through technology transfer can be made.

I’ve spent much of my testimony describing our successes in transferring the application of DNA to state and local forensic labs. But it is important to remember that DNA comprises less than 3 percent of the type of evidence needed by the criminal justice system. The attached table shows that, far and away, controlled substances (fully 54 percent of cases) are the most frequently examined evidence, followed by latent prints, blood alcohol, and toxicology. The Coverdell Act’s attention to all types of forensic lab improvement, not just DNA, is one of its most obvious strengths and comports with NIJ’s expansion to include all types of forensic lab improvement.

It is interesting to note that if labs could modernize their equipment and, as just one example, add autosamplers to recent model mass spectrometers (a total investment of approximately $3,000 for the autosamples and about $90,000 for a decent recent model mass spectrometer), they could double the number of controlled substances they examined on each machine, but actually decrease the manpower needed. That manpower could then be devoted to other types of analyses that could actually aid in the ongoing investigation of crimes, rather than just at the prosecution stage.

It is imperative that we work to create an environment where crime laboratories can function beyond case triage and start performing the work that will save the entire criminal justice system time and resources. It is that critical investigative stage where forensic analyses can rule out suspects, direct leads with real data, and help solve crimes more quickly and more accurately than canvassing and eyewitness interviews that requires the use of already overburdened investigators. Supporting the full modernization and upgrading of our nation’s crime laboratories means more than just saving time and money. It means saving lives, stopping crimes, and promoting public safety in a very real, tangible way.

That concludes my remarks. I’d be happy to answer any question you may have.