Forensic science labs in crisis — DA
Business Day
South Africa Newspaper
October 2, 2006
THE Democratic Alliance (DA) said yesterday that forensic science laboratories around SA, which were not adequately staffed or funded and faced massive backlogs, were in crisis.
DA safety and security spokeswoman Dianne Kohler Barnard was reacting to Sunday newspaper reports that 427319 police cases remained unsolved, many because work on crucial evidence such as DNA testing, ballistics, blood tests and other forensic material linking criminals to crimes, was not being done.
Kohler Barnard said that senior officials in the safety and security department had recently intervened and refused the DA permission to visit the country’s three main forensic science laboratories.
The DA had already submitted a number of questions to the safety and security minister about the conditions in the laboratories and this week Kohler Barnard would submit more.
The Sunday Times reported that unsolved cases included 183,988 murder, attempted murder, rape and assault cases dating from April last year to March this year. The forensic work on a further 780,000 cases that made it to court took up to a year, causing these cases to be postponed, or even struck off the roll.
The newspaper was told by several forensic specialists at the Pretoria and Cape Town laboratories that the main reason for the backlog was that two state-of-the-art DNA testing machines, worth almost R100m, were gathering dust.