Blog Post #4-What Makes It News?

Already under fire, crime labs cut to the bone

Budget cuts, lack of training, standards raise doubts about tests’ reliability

Written by Alex Johnson

Msnbc.com

Tues., Feb 23, 2010

Crime labs all over the country are suffering from backlogs that already reach back years in many cities and states. Budget cuts due to the recession are threatening credible crime scene analysis as a lost art, forensic specialist and law enforcement officials say. They are also suffering from what specialist call the CSI Effect, American see television lab technicians solve crazy cases with barely any evidence, and think that’s how it works in the real world. This is not the case. There are serious questions about the credibility of nearly every kind of lab analysis, and with the lack of funding these numbers are increasing. There are thousands of cases all over the country where people have been falsely incarcerated due to mistakes in lab test, and even technicians sabotaging evidence. With budget cuts and inadequately trained lab technicians, these mistakes will just continue to increase and cause cases to be thrown out of court.

This article is newsworthy because it can affect anyone across the country; innocent people are going to jail because of mistakes made in labs. Also, if you are sexually assaulted or someone you know is injured by a drunk driver, or even murdered, and there are mistakes made, the case could be thrown out and the guilty party could go free. I think the news values involved in this story are:

Impact: information has impact if it affects a lot of people

Conflict: information has conflict if it involves some kind of disagreement between two or more people.

Timeliness: information has timeliness if it happened recently.

This story could be localized by doing an article on a local crime lab or a case where someone local was accused of a crime they didn’t commit. Another way to localize this article could be to do a report on how in January of 2009, California (along with 11 other states) widened the scope of its DNA collection, drawing samples not just from anyone who is convicted of a felony, as the state does now, but also from anyone arrested for a felony. The genetic profiles will be dropped into the state’s criminal offender database and eventually the FBI’s much larger CODIS database, which at last count held more than five million profiles. Unquestionably, these databases are powerful crime-fighting tools. Now that it’s 2010 you could do a follow up on if this has helped with solving crimes and getting convictions.