THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL
BOOST IN EMPLOYEES, BUDGET HELPS ARK. STATE CRIME LAB CUT BACKLOG
Date: Monday, May 10, 1993
Section: News
Page: A1
Source: By Joan I. Duffy The Commercial Appeal
Little Rock Bureau
Dateline:
Edition: Final
Bolstered by seven new employees and a half-million-dollar boost to its budget, Arkansas's State Crime Lab is working to put a grisly past behind it.
Jim Clark, director of the embattled lab that performs all forensic and pathological services for Arkansas law enforcement agencies, said his office will finish up 1992 cases by the end of June. Not bad, he said, since lab pathologists didn't finish up 1991 cases until January 1993.
"We're getting there. We've already completed 300 to 320 autopsies since January," Clark said.
The lab is clearing out its backlog while keeping up with current cases and being able to clear its decks for emergencies - such as the murder of three West Memphis second-grade boys last week.
The bodies of 8-year-old Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Steve Branch were found in a shallow drainage canal at 1:30 p.m. Thursday and sent to the crime lab in Little Rock. By 1 p.m. Friday, autopsies were completed and law enforcement officials informed of a cause of death.
Lower-priority cases take more time - sometimes, lots more time.
One of the backlogged bodies remaining on a crime lab slab is "Jane Doe," a young black female whose badly decomposed body was found in the St. Francis River on June 1, 1992.
Police believe it is the body of Geneva Smith, a 13-year-old Wynne girl who disappeared from her Cross County home nearly a year ago.
The condition of the body made an autopsy impossible and the lack of dental records for the missing girl kept pathologists from making a connection. FBI officials refused to do DNA tests because of the lack of fresh tissue samples. Wynne officials agreed to pay for a private lab to test samples, but the poor condition of body parts made those tests inconclusive. Wynne police plan to send the skull to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for forensic anthropologists to reconstruct a facial image.
The backlog of cases that have jammed crime lab files and morgue slabs and generate two or three calls a day from distraught family members has been blamed on the resignation on Sept. 10, 1991, of the state's longtime medical examiner, Dr. Fahmy Malak.
The root of the problem was the amount of work Malak did, and the workload he left to his successors. He worked 16 to 18 hours a day and took no vacations, working virtually alone to complete nearly 500 autopsies a year. National standards say medical examiners should do no more than 225 a year.
Malak was praised by prosecutors and county coroners who got relatively speedy service with autopsy reports, slides and the examiner's court testimony to bolster their criminal cases.
But Malak was blasted by family members who said his rulings of accidental deaths or suicides clouded evidence of murder.
In the 12 years he has supervised the autopsies on victims of all unnatural deaths, Malak's results have been contradicted in court 17 times by other medical examiners - a rate the examiners said would be unacceptable in their offices. He has been accused by defense attorneys of coloring his testimony to favor the prosecution and his conclusions have been rejected by grand juries in three cases.
The most notorious was the August 1987 case of two teenage boys run over by a train in Saline County. The train's engineer said the boys were lying next to each other across the tracks and failed to move despite repeated soundings of the train's whistle and the vibration of the track from the oncoming locomotive.
Malak said they were in a marijuana-induced stupor and were unaware of the oncoming train. Private detectives hired by the families led to a Saline grand jury investigation in which an outside examiner testified one victim had been beaten and the other stabbed before the train hit.
Linda Ives, mother of one of the dead boys, helped hound Malak out of office with demands for resignation, investigations and petition drives for his ouster.
In the last year of his term, not even he could keep up with the workload and when he resigned, he left a backlog of work to an office that was suddenly understaffed.
But "since Dr. Malak left, we've hired a new chief medical examiner, employed two additional associate medical examiners, added two autopsy technicians, one field investigator and one secretary," Clark said.
In addition to the extra personnel, Clark lobbied through the legislature a clarification in a law that he said allows medical examiners to do less than a thorough autopsy in cases where the cause of death is obvious.
"Some of the obvious cases that come in, if we've got medical records, a police report and a coroner's report, there is no need to completely autopsy a body. It saves us on time, supplies, materials and allow us to be able to release reports in a more timely manner," Clark said.
The change drew opposition from one coroner - Dr. William R. Mashburn - who said the change will allow the lab to miss evidence critical to making cases. He objected to post-mortem exams the lab did on three babies whose deaths were obviously caused by a Hot Springs house fire. He suspected the fire was set to cover up evidence of child sexual abuse, but the failure of the lab to perform a complete autopsy cost the corner crucial evidence.
The legislature also approved Clark's proposal to require counties to pay for the return of bodies shipped to the lab for study when the cause of death turns out to be suicide or natural causes.
"If they are going to be required to pay the cost of transportation back, they might look at the cases closer."
BOOST IN EMPLOYEES, BUDGET HELPS ARK. STATE CRIME LAB CUT BACKLOG
Date: Monday, May 10, 1993
Section: News
Page: A1
Source: By Joan I. Duffy The Commercial Appeal
Little Rock Bureau
Dateline:
Edition: Final
Bolstered by seven new employees and a half-million-dollar boost to its budget, Arkansas's State Crime Lab is working to put a grisly past behind it.
Jim Clark, director of the embattled lab that performs all forensic and pathological services for Arkansas law enforcement agencies, said his office will finish up 1992 cases by the end of June. Not bad, he said, since lab pathologists didn't finish up 1991 cases until January 1993.
"We're getting there. We've already completed 300 to 320 autopsies since January," Clark said.
The lab is clearing out its backlog while keeping up with current cases and being able to clear its decks for emergencies - such as the murder of three West Memphis second-grade boys last week.
The bodies of 8-year-old Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Steve Branch were found in a shallow drainage canal at 1:30 p.m. Thursday and sent to the crime lab in Little Rock. By 1 p.m. Friday, autopsies were completed and law enforcement officials informed of a cause of death.
Lower-priority cases take more time - sometimes, lots more time.
One of the backlogged bodies remaining on a crime lab slab is "Jane Doe," a young black female whose badly decomposed body was found in the St. Francis River on June 1, 1992.
Police believe it is the body of Geneva Smith, a 13-year-old Wynne girl who disappeared from her Cross County home nearly a year ago.
The condition of the body made an autopsy impossible and the lack of dental records for the missing girl kept pathologists from making a connection. FBI officials refused to do DNA tests because of the lack of fresh tissue samples. Wynne officials agreed to pay for a private lab to test samples, but the poor condition of body parts made those tests inconclusive. Wynne police plan to send the skull to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for forensic anthropologists to reconstruct a facial image.
The backlog of cases that have jammed crime lab files and morgue slabs and generate two or three calls a day from distraught family members has been blamed on the resignation on Sept. 10, 1991, of the state's longtime medical examiner, Dr. Fahmy Malak.
The root of the problem was the amount of work Malak did, and the workload he left to his successors. He worked 16 to 18 hours a day and took no vacations, working virtually alone to complete nearly 500 autopsies a year. National standards say medical examiners should do no more than 225 a year.
Malak was praised by prosecutors and county coroners who got relatively speedy service with autopsy reports, slides and the examiner's court testimony to bolster their criminal cases.
But Malak was blasted by family members who said his rulings of accidental deaths or suicides clouded evidence of murder.
In the 12 years he has supervised the autopsies on victims of all unnatural deaths, Malak's results have been contradicted in court 17 times by other medical examiners - a rate the examiners said would be unacceptable in their offices. He has been accused by defense attorneys of coloring his testimony to favor the prosecution and his conclusions have been rejected by grand juries in three cases.
The most notorious was the August 1987 case of two teenage boys run over by a train in Saline County. The train's engineer said the boys were lying next to each other across the tracks and failed to move despite repeated soundings of the train's whistle and the vibration of the track from the oncoming locomotive.
Malak said they were in a marijuana-induced stupor and were unaware of the oncoming train. Private detectives hired by the families led to a Saline grand jury investigation in which an outside examiner testified one victim had been beaten and the other stabbed before the train hit.
Linda Ives, mother of one of the dead boys, helped hound Malak out of office with demands for resignation, investigations and petition drives for his ouster.
In the last year of his term, not even he could keep up with the workload and when he resigned, he left a backlog of work to an office that was suddenly understaffed.
But "since Dr. Malak left, we've hired a new chief medical examiner, employed two additional associate medical examiners, added two autopsy technicians, one field investigator and one secretary," Clark said.
In addition to the extra personnel, Clark lobbied through the legislature a clarification in a law that he said allows medical examiners to do less than a thorough autopsy in cases where the cause of death is obvious.
"Some of the obvious cases that come in, if we've got medical records, a police report and a coroner's report, there is no need to completely autopsy a body. It saves us on time, supplies, materials and allow us to be able to release reports in a more timely manner," Clark said.
The change drew opposition from one coroner - Dr. William R. Mashburn - who said the change will allow the lab to miss evidence critical to making cases. He objected to post-mortem exams the lab did on three babies whose deaths were obviously caused by a Hot Springs house fire. He suspected the fire was set to cover up evidence of child sexual abuse, but the failure of the lab to perform a complete autopsy cost the corner crucial evidence.
The legislature also approved Clark's proposal to require counties to pay for the return of bodies shipped to the lab for study when the cause of death turns out to be suicide or natural causes.
"If they are going to be required to pay the cost of transportation back, they might look at the cases closer."
