LITTLE ROCK — Analysts from the state Crime Laboratory logged more than 1,000 hours and 31,000 miles for scheduled court appearances last year at which they never testified.
Lab analysts such as DNA specialists, drug chemists and medical examiners traveled to county courthouses around the state but ended up not testifying 238 times in 2011. That represented 42 percent of the lab’s 573 scheduled court appearances last year, Crime Lab figures calculated at the request of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette show.
“That’s man-hours spent that analysts are not on the bench working and ... of course, the gas mileage,” Crime Lab Director Kermit Channell said of numbers he called “troubling.”
Last year, the lab spent $47,307.72 on court appearances that didn’t result in testimony. That figure made up about 35 percent of the $136,095.36 total spent on court appearances, according to figures calculated by the Crime Lab.
“Some of the prosecutors and even the defense might look at that as, ‘Well, it’s not really a waste because [the analyst] got here and that was enough to negotiate a plea.’ ... But, in my eyes, I’m sending someone out and they don’t render testimony;as a manager, it’s wasted,” Channell said.
In many cases, the “wasted” trips could have been avoided by better communication between prosecutors and the lab, he said.
Improving that communication is the aim of a subpoena-tracking website scheduled to be ready for testing in late February, he added.
The website, which the lab is paying an outside contractor about $2,000 to develop, is the newest idea lab officials have come up with to help solve a problem that’s been increasing for years. The secure website will be open only to the state’s prosecuting attorneys and will work like a master calendar, showing each analyst’s court schedule.
Carlton Jones, prosecuting attorney for the 8th Judicial District South in Texarkana and a member of the Crime Lab’s board, said the hope is that the new website will allow prosecutors to work together to schedule analysts so they won’t have to travel to the same part of the state over and over in a short time.
For instance, if the “same chemist is on a case in 8th South, 8th North and 9 West ...they can hit Texarkana, Nashville, Ashdown and Hope all in the same day,” Jones said, referring to towns in those three southwest Arkansas judicial districts.
“You can try to eliminate duplicate trips.” he said.
That will become more important, Channell said, after a year in which analysts logged the most hours in court since1999 and a significant portion of those hours resulted in no testimony.
Trips o n which analysts didn’t testify made up a third of all hours and 39 percent of all miles logged for court appearances, lab figures show.
“You’re never going to solve a hundred percent of it ... but any reduction in those statistics I would be happy with,” he said.
Better scheduling can go a long way, Jones said, but making sure prosecutors alert analysts as soon as possible that they’re no longer needed to testify is another way to cut down on waste.
That comes into play most commonly in drug and drunken-driving cases, in which defendants often won’t enter a guilty plea until the day of their trial, he said.
Larry Jegley, prosecuting attorney for the 6th Judicial District of Perry and Pulaski counties, said there will always be some unavoidable cases when an analyst’s testimony is delayed or the lab employee winds up not getting called.
In Pulaski County, that just means the analyst drives a few miles back to the lab, Jegley said.
But in other parts of the state, “if you’ve got professional witnesses waiting in the wings say in Bentonville, Jonesboro, El Dorado or Texarkana, all you can do when the deal goes down is say, ‘Thanks. Sorry.’ And send them back,” he said.
John Threet, prosecuting attorney for the 4th Judicial District that covers Washington and Madison counties, said he couldn’t think of a time when he’s had to send a lab analyst back without putting him on the stand.
Threet, who is the president of the Arkansas Prosecuting Attorneys Association, attributed much of that success to the Crime Lab’s installation of video-conferencing equipment in the courts in his district. His office uses the two-way technology for testimony in nearly every type of case except homicides.
The video equipment saves the most time for analysts who testify in drug cases, he said.
“When they come up here live, their testimony with drug cases is going to be less than five minutes. ... I think for a lot of defense attorneys they know that and they know there’s no advantage to be gained by them being here. There’s no point to make someone drive six hours just for that,” he said.
While using live-video testimony has cut down on trips to Threet’s jurisdiction, Channell said, that’s the exception. The lab is pulling its videoconferencing equipment in the three other counties in which the program is currently available.
The counties - Garland, Jefferson and Benton - have used the technology only a “handful of times,” he said, which makes paying $600 to $1,000 per month to keep a broadband line open to those courts unreasonable.
“We really haven’t gotten very much bang for the buck out of that,” he said.
But the lab isn’t abandoning the idea of testifying by some type of video feed to help cut down on court trips, he said. Lab staff members will study using cheaper Internet videoconferencing tools such as Skype.
In the meantime, Channell said, his staff will monitor what effect the subpoena-tracking website will have on reducing costs on court appearances.
“It’s the first thing that we can throw on the wall and see if it sticks,” he said. “We just need to continually work on it.”
Arkansas, Pages 13 on 01/22/2012