Quality Improvements and Service Expansion for Union County Prosecutor's Office Forensic Laboratory.

The Union County Prosecutor’s Office Forensic Laboratory is requesting funding under the FY23 Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement grant program to improve the quality and timeliness of service in the two forensic disciplines that the laboratory provides testing services. The laboratory’s Controlled Dangerous Substances section currently has three GC/MSDs that are between 15 and 25 years old. All require frequent maintenance and suffer from a loss of sensitivity that cause delays in the timeliness of service for testing of seized drugs. This means that there is significant instrument downtime and rerunning of samples with an increased injection volume that lead to increased turnaround time of cases. The laboratory is requesting funding to replace two of these instruments. New instruments would have increased sensitivity, ensuring that substances present in the sample are not missed on analysis, and will require less re-runs of samples and downtime for maintenance.