![]() ![]() ( City Council last week voted to give APD an additional $180,000 this year to hire three forensic chemists to help reduce the lab's general backlog see "Budget Games.")ĭespite that growing lag time, that delay isn't ultimately what has slowed the rocket docket. Lehmberg said the average turnaround time for a final lab report had been roughly 14 days by last summer, that had stretched to nearly two months. But as the general backlog at the crime lab has increased, so too has the amount of time taken to return to prosecutors the final lab reports in these otherwise expedited cases. ![]() The rocket docket used to move as swiftly as its name implies – in 2009, cases on that docket took an average of just 11 days to close. In fact, the APD lab hasn't been keeping up with the county's criminal justice system, as that system's reliance on scientific evidence – including chemical drug analysis – has grown. And because the lab is short-staffed and backlogged, that means the docket's speediness will, for now, be reduced to a crawl. Since then, she's conferred with the courts and with Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo before ultimately deciding to slow the docket and not accept any pleas until after a final drug test has been reported back from the APD's lab. At least that's how it was until January, said District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, when prosecutors realized that since August 2012 there had been an unprecedented string of 12 false-positive field tests in rocket-docket cases. The docket was designed in 2002 to ease jail overcrowding by expediting lower-level drug possession cases – which account for roughly a third of the criminal case docket – by allowing defendants to waive indictment and plead guilty based in part on the results of police-administered field testing of suspected drugs.Īnd so it went, and well, for more than a decade, with very few cases overturned or dismissed based on false-positive field drug tests. Rosemary Lehmberg (Photo by John Anderson)įor the time being at least, Travis County's " rocket docket" has been grounded. ![]()
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