Overload in Drug Testing Lets Many Escape Trial

At least 132 drug suspects have been allowed to go free since Jan. 1 because the Los Angeles Police Department’s evidence laboratory was unable to get its findings to court on time, prosecutors said Tuesday.

“It’s putting a lot of people back out on the street who shouldn’t be there--people who sell and use drugs,” said Stephen Kay, who heads the Central Operations Complaints Division of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. “It’s a tremendous problem.”

Kay said charges must be filed against suspects within 48 hours of their arrest. “If the lab doesn’t have the drugs analyzed by then, we don’t know what they are and we can’t file a case,” he said. “We’ve lost 132 cases since the beginning of the year that I can document, and my feeling is that there are closer to 200 of them.”

All the cases, however, involved possession or sale of small amounts of narcotics. No major suppliers were involved, he said.

Kay said there’s nothing his office can do about the problem, “and it’s not the fault of the Police Department. . . .

“The crime lab is tremendously overworked--with chemists putting in 10 hours a day, six days a week.” he said. “They haven’t had any new chemists since 1981. The City Council has got to give them money to hire more chemists.”

The Police Department has six chemists and has submitted an emergency request to the city for two more, according to Police Capt. Joe DeLadurantey, who heads the lab operations.

“The volume has just caught up with us,” he said. “It’s left us in a situation that complicates unnecessarily the criminal justice system. . . .

“Every day, there’s new and different drugs out there. I’d like to be able to spend some of our time on research, so we can keep up with the state of the art. Right now, we’re not able to do that.”

DeLadurantey said that if he does not get help, each chemist in his lab will be asked to handle an average of 5,700 cases this year, an increase of 59% in three years.

Kay said the increase reflects the growing drug problem in Southern California.

“In 1984, we filed 4,803 felony narcotics cases,” he said. “In 1986, we filed 9,325.” Capt. Bob Blanchard of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Narcotics Division said the situation is “terribly frustrating. . . .

“We have guys who spend hours and hours making an arrest, only to see the suspect back out on the street,” he said. “If the lab analysis comes through later showing (that the confiscated materials were) a controlled substance, a warrant is issued. The problem is, the suspects normally don’t wait around for us to show up.”