Supreme Court rules prosecutors must have “CSI” on hand for defense challenges, prosecutors complain

(Virginia Daily Press) Local prosecutors are worried that a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in late June could hamstring the criminal justice system — and cause some defendants to escape prosecution.

In a 5-4 ruling in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, the high court determined that prosecutors are responsible for having crime lab experts on hand for trials so that the defense can challenge their findings. That clashes with Virginia’s court practices, which placed the responsibility on the defense attorney to request the analysts’ presence.

Crime lab workers perform such analysis as DNA and fingerprint tests, gun analysis, Breathalyzer tests in DUI cases and tests of suspected drugs to see if they’re the real thing.

But requiring the analysts, including those working out of a Norfolk lab, to spend more time in court means less time performing lab work.

“If scientists had to appear at all the drug cases and DUI cases, you can imagine the chaos that would result,” said Hampton Commonwealth’s Attorney Linda D. Curtis. “If they’re required to travel all over the Peninsula and the Southside, they won’t be in the lab doing analyses. … So this could potentially create a bottleneck in the courtroom and the labs.”

One way to fix the problem, of course, is for the state to hire more crime lab workers, but that’s seen as a long shot given the state’s budget crisis.

Some lawyers speculate that many of the more minor drug offenses — such as marijuana possession — could fall by the wayside first.

The Virginia Department of Forensic Science, a state agency, has four crime labs — in Richmond, Norfolk, Roanoke and Manassas. With 160 employees, the labs performed tests for 60,000 criminal cases in 2008, or 5,000 a month. They work on tests for drugs, alcohol, fingerprints, DNA, guns, trace evidence and documents.

Gosh, golly, gee, it sure is a pain in the butt to afford citizens their constitutional rights, isn’t it?  It’s just so much easier for a nameless faceless lab to declare you guilty, never mind that silly constitutional guarantee of facing your accusers.

According to the 2007 FBI Uniform Crime Report, there were 32,941 arrests for “drug abuse violations” in the state of Virginia.  Since 47% of all drug arrests nationwide are for cannabis, that works out to over 15,000 marijuana arrests.  I don’t know how many of those went to trial and required the use of one of those 160 “CSI” employee’s time, but if even one case requires Grissom and crew to analyze a bag of weed when they could be matching up a rapist’s DNA to a rape kit sample, a thief’s fingerprints to the FBI database, or a bullet’s ballistics to a murderer’s gun, it’s one too many.