The Forensic Toxicology Section serves the law enforcement, medical examiner, coroner, and court systems of the state of Arkansas in three major ways:
Cause/Manner Investigations
We analyze biological samples for the presence of drugs and toxins that can help elucidate the cause and manner of death in cases where these substances play a role. The cause of death is the disease or injury that results in a person's death. An example of a cause of death is a loss of blood. The manner of death explains how the cause of death came about, for example, homicide versus accident.
Criminal Investigations
We analyze biological samples for the presence of drugs and toxins that may be important in criminal cases such as DUI, DWI, drug-facilitated sexual assault, and many other types of criminal offenses.
Court Testimony
We testify in municipal, circuit, and federal court as needed regarding the results and implications of our findings.
Because of the importance of the work we do, we use current and standardized methodologies and instrumentation to maintain the highest level of quality and trustworthiness.
The testing we perform can range from performing a blood alcohol analysis to detecting and measuring the level of multiple drugs and/or toxins using a variety of techniques. The tests that are performed depend upon the needs of the case and the samples we receive.
Among the instrumental techniques we commonly use are: gas chromatography (GC), headspace gas chromatography, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), UV-visible spectroscopy, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), and fluorescence polarization immunoassay (FPIA).
The Forensic Toxicology Section currently employs eight toxicologists and services the entire state of Arkansas, which contains over 2.8 million people.