State and local gov't funding level for forensic labs. It costs money to do it correctly, and nobody wants to spend that kind of money, even though we wind up paying more, and imprisoning people wrongly.
Pathetic they can get millions to militarize the police, or a super high tech bomb squad vehicle/robots/xrays to investigate a bunch of abandoned suitcases, but they are suddenly poor when it comes to financing something that could actually save lives.
in the case where, say, a serial rapist/killer hasn't been caught, there can be a backlog of untested DNA from other crime scenes that may identify the suspect, but haven't been tested because of the backlog.
http://www.texastribune.org/2013/04/05/commission-looks-misc...
Harris county, Texas just recently got a new one because of similarly disturbing corruption and incompetence.
http://www.harriscountytx.gov/ifs/