State Lab: State Police Forensic Crime Lab Loses Accreditation - Hartford Courant

State Lab: State Police Forensic Crime Lab Loses Accreditation - Hartford Courant

"— Critical federal audits have cost the state police forensic crime lab its accreditation from a nationally recognized society, at least temporarily.

The audits led the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors' laboratory acceditation board to allow the state lab's accreditation to expire Wednesday, the Malloy administration said. On its website, the board says it accredits most of the local, state and federal laboratories in the U.S.

Early this year, the board gave Connecticut's state lab in Meriden a six-month extension of its accreditation, but that extension ended Wednesday.

Michael P. Lawlor, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning, said the lab will be reinspected — the date is tentatively set for Sept. 12 — and he was confident that improvements would result in the lab's reaccreditation. Lawlor said that the accreditation is voluntary, and that "there is no indication that this will affect pending cases between now and Sept. 12."

"The issues raised in the audits do not directly affect testing in criminal prosecutions," Lawlor said in a statement.

Last week, Malloy said that the federal audits raised legitimate concerns about the administration of the lab, but that the integrity of DNA testing on crime-scene evidence had not been compromised by the huge case backlogs and chronic understaffing."