Forensics lab ‘vital’

Not having a fully functioning forensics lab could be stifling and prolonging criminal investigations, says clinical forensic and emergency medicine expert Dr La-Tonia Arthur.

She also wants the country to improve its forensic photography.

“Having a forensics lab that is functioning to full capacity in any jurisdiction is going to be vital to processing cases. Unlike [the television series] CSI Miami, a case doesn’t take an hour to solve. So having a fully functioning forensics lab is going to be vital to processing evidence.

“One crime scene alone can give different forms of evidence. You get fingerprints, DNA, trace evidence, and having a lab that is not functioning to full capacity prolongs the time taken to get any sort of confirmatory result for anything that you’re processing. Therefore, having a lab in Barbados that’s not functioning means that the Barbados Government then has to look elsewhere to get some samples processed. And it’s been quite some time that it’s not been working to full capacity,” Arthur said.

She was speaking to the DAILY NATION recently at the Hastings/Worthing Police Station in Christ Church during a break on the first day of the Conference On Forensic Photography.

During the Estimates debate in Parliament last month, Attorney General Dale Marshall said an upgraded forensics lab should be functioning by June.

Director of the Forensic Science Centre Cheryl Corbin also shared some insight into how the RapidHIT ID system they sourced will be useful.

“The ten years or however long it has been that we were off, we have now been able to catch up with technology. This new piece of equipment that we are getting is an exceptionally rapid DNA platform and it generates all of the lab-quality forensic DNA profiles that we need.

“It can do an analysis for single source DNA – meaning a sample coming from one person as opposed to a mixed sample and it can generate a result in as little as 90 minutes,” Corbin said.

She acknowledged the challenges they were experiencing with sending samples overseas.

“The majority of forensic labs in this region do not do post-mortem toxicology, which is one of the challenges we had in trying to get some of those samples overseas. However, we have already purchased and paid for the piece of equipment that is going to allow us to do post-mortem toxicology and that should be landing any time in April.

“We can safely say that service which would be support to scientific pathology to be performed, we’ll be able to provide that service fairly quickly,” Corbin added.

Arthur is hopeful of the plans for the lab’s revitalisation.

“The Attorney General spoke to it, I think, in his Estimates this year. Most years we will find that that is one of the things tabled for discussion – the forensics lab and functioning to full capacity,” she added.

Last Sunday, Barbados Police Service officers, lawyers, nurses and emergency physicians attended the workshop and Arthur highlighted the importance of the training.

“Working with both the police and in emergency medicine, I’ve recognised that there is a need to have proper photo documentation when dealing with potential cases of crime. Oftentimes in the emergency department, you would always hear, ‘This person was shot or stabbed and taken to the emergency room’, but then nothing.

“We are intimately involved in a lot of cases that end up being in court and it’s important to know how to document those injuries accurately so that when persons end up in court having to give evidence, it is not an instance where you’re caught unaware,” she said.

Trained sexual assault examiner and consultant emergency physician Dr Rhonda Hutson said physicians also played an important role in investigations.

“It has been reported in many studies that not just the presence of injuries, but the extent of the injuries can affect the legal outcome of the case. Therefore, part of our duty as a physician if you are evaluating a patient with a forensic potential, your job is to ensure that you do it well and use all available tools to help with that and photography is one of those tools,” she said.

Hutson, however, underscored the importance of ethics, especially securing written consent before capturing the images.

Expert photographer Ronnie Carrington was one of the educators at the workshop.

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