Despite improvements to the state crime lab’s turnaround time for testing DNA samples in recent years, Wake County prosecutors still wait up to nine months to get results. One prosecutor in the office of Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman who was just starting to work on a rape case recently told her boss the state lab in Raleigh would take six to nine months to return DNA results. The prosecutor referred to that turnaround time as “quick,” Freeman said at a press conference Friday, “because quite frankly, those of us in the state who for years have depended on the state crime lab have been used to having to wait a long time to get those results.” The several months it currently takes to test DNA samples could be drastically shortened to days, potentially even hours, officials said Friday, when construction of a new DNA lab that will exclusively serve Wake County is finished and the facility is up and running.
Once completed, the 950-square-foot lab, which will be housed in the Raleigh/Wake City County Bureau of Identification, will become the first local government DNA lab in the Triangle, and the second lab of its kind in the state, according to the county. Currently, DNA evidence collected in Wake County is sent to the North Carolina State Crime Lab, which serves 99 counties across the state (the one exception being Mecklenburg, where the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department operates its own crime lab). “We’ve got to stand in line and wait for these other 98 counties, we’ve got to compete for those resources,” said Sam Pennica, director of the identification bureau. “With this laboratory, we will no longer be competing for those state resources, we will be doing the work ourselves. Our employees will be totally dedicated to Wake County cases every day.”
In addition to faster turnaround times in Wake, the county’s lab will free up resources at the state crime lab, allowing it to focus on DNA evidence collected throughout the rest of North Carolina, Pennica said.
County officials have wanted to build a DNA lab to serve Wake for many years, Pennica said, but they didn’t have any space for a new facility. The transition to working virtually for CCBI investigators at the start of the pandemic freed up enough space in the agency’s building on Hammond Road to build the new lab, Pennica said. Working remotely also allowed investigators to respond to crime scenes faster, which has sped up the time it takes to process tests, he said.
The lab, which began construction last week, is expected to be completed by April, and will need to meet international accreditation and FBI quality assurance standards for DNA lab testing before it can start processing evidence. Pennica said officials expect the lab to begin testing samples by the end of 2022.
Funding for building the lab came from the county, which approved $360,000 in court-ordered lab fees to be spent on the project. Costs to taxpayers will be confined to the salaries of the three technicians who will work in the lab, according to the county.
U.S. Reps. Deborah Ross and David Price, both Democrats who represent parts of the Triangle including Wake, requested an additional $500,000 in federal funding to purchase scientific equipment for the lab, which Pennica said will likely be available by January, if the appropriations bill passes Congress and is signed into law by President Joe Biden. Ross said resources freed up by the new lab would help the state make progress in eliminating its backlog of thousands of untested sexual assault kits. A statewide audit conducted by the NC Department of Justice in 2017 found more than 15,000 untested kits at the time. In May, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein announced the state had cleared more than half of its backlog, but that still left thousands of kits that hadn’t been tested.
“These unacceptable delays have kept victims in limbo, sometimes waiting years to see their assailants prosecuted,” Ross said. “Here’s the bottom line: justice delayed is justice denied.”