HOUSTON -- Houston taxpayers have spent millions of dollars in the last seven years trying to fix the Houston Police Crime Lab.
It has had parts of it closed down twice due to shoddy work and City Council has been assured that things were getting better.
That's now in question again.
For the accused, crime lab analysis can literally mean the difference between life and death, guilty or innocent.
The Texas Forensic Science Commission was formed after a series of 11 News investigations into the evidence of errors at the HPD Lab. Its role is to be the watchdog to the forensic science performed in Texas.
One item on the Friday agenda of the commission’s first meeting of the year is lab backlogs.
We've seen plenty of that here for years. Thousands of rape kits are untested, and other areas are backed up too.
Now, according to the testimony from Laurie Wilson, the Quality Control Manager for the HPD Lab, the case backlog there is still out of control.
In 2009, the lab received 27,000 requests for testing. It finished 23,000, leaving 4,000 tests incomplete.
HPD has said for years that one of the difficulties in the crime lab is finding and holding on to analysts.
Its reputation as a lab in turmoil hasn't helped.
As a result, according to the testimony Friday, more than half of the employees at the lab have less than three years experience and were hired right out of college with no professional experience.
The testimony did shed some light on why cases may be backed up, there are only three analysts in the toxicology section of the lab, and six vacancies that have not been filled due to a hiring freeze.
