A new piece of forensic equipment at the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences lab in Mobile is expected to speed up drug testing and ease overcrowding at Mobile County Metro Jail, local officials said during a recent demonstration of the technology.
The machine, known as a DART Agilent TOF unit, arrived at the Mobile lab in July 2014 and was validated for use in January. Unlike traditional testing methods that require samples to be shipped to a state lab in Montgomery, the DART system can analyze suspected drug evidence on-site in a matter of minutes rather than weeks.
Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said the backlog had become a shared problem for his office, the Mobile County District Attorney’s office and Mobile police, all of which rely on toxicology results to move criminal cases forward. Statewide, officials said, more than 38,000 drug tests were backlogged in 2014, according to figures cited by state Sen. Bill Hightower, leaving both guilty and innocent defendants waiting in jail for results that could determine the outcome of their cases.
Hightower worked with Cochran and District Attorney Ashley Rich to secure funding in the 2015 state general fund budget that allowed the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences to lease the roughly $250,000 machine for the Mobile lab, making it the first crime lab system in the state to use DART technology.
“We all fought for Mobile County, and as a result we got this latest technology and now we can work on the backlog of all of these cases,” Cochran said at the demonstration. Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences Director Michael Sparks called the equipment fundamental to the region’s efforts against drug crime.
Rich said the number of pending drug cases awaiting toxicology results in Mobile County had already dropped from about 2,000 to roughly 1,800 in recent years, and she expects the new machine to accelerate that decline further, helping cases move through the court system more quickly. Two lab technicians have been trained to operate the DART machine so far, with three more currently in training, according to lab officials who oversaw the demonstration.