By Nick Buglione
The county Division of Forensic Genetics will run the lab, on the fourth floor of the county medical examiner's office on the Nassau University Medical Center's campus. It's hoped that the facility will be open by January 2004, when it receives the necessary state and federal certifications.
Up until now, the Nassau County district attorney and police department had been relying on private DNA testing facilities to process evidence, costing the county some $500,000 a year. Running its own DNA laboratory, in comparison, will only cost the county around $165,000 a year.
"The county has a history of giving work to outside contractors that cost us a lot of money," Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi said. "This is another example of where the county will actually improve services, provide a better service to the people of Nassau County, while at the same time saving money to the taxpayers by doing the work in-house."
The lab cost between $400,000 and $500,000 to establish, half of which was provided through state and federal grants, according to Dr. Pasquale Buffolino, director of the Division of Forensic Genetics.
"It will handle any kind of case that contains DNA evidence that is needed in obtaining a suspect or anything that's required for a conviction or prosection," Buffolino said. Though DNA tests at the lab will stem mostly from sexual assault and homicide investigations, select assault and robbery cases will also be included, he said.
"I can't stress how important this is going to be for the criminal justice system of Nassau County and the community of Nassau County," Buffolino said. "I hope everybody is as anxious as we are to get this under way."
Seven employees, six scientific technicians and one clerical worker will staff the lab, which early estimates indicate could process DNA for up to 400 cases a year.
Police Commissioner James Lawrence said, though, that the number of cases could be "limitless." "Every scene has some DNA," he said. "It's just a matter of how much you're going to process. Naturally, when we were paying several hundred dollars for each test, we had to take that into consideration when considering evidence."
Aside from the savings, the county's new lab will provide test results far quicker to law enforcement officials than a private facility. It will also allow investigators to cross-reference any unknown DNA found at local crime scenes with that of convicted offender samples taken state- and nationwide via the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).
"The majority of the sexual assault cases that occur do not contain suspects, and what we can do with CODIS is place these unknown profiles into CODIS and compare them to convicted offender samples that have been taken at the state [and federal] level," Buffolino said.
The practice of using DNA technology in crime investigations started in the late 1980s and increased dramatically in the early 1990s.
If the proper protocol is followed, DNA results are 100 percent accurate, Buffolino said. "It is an exact science."
