Forensic Services

Looking back at 2025 and forward to 2026 | December 2025

ISPFS continues to lead the country in productivity and efficiency.  ISPFS was informed this year of our #8 ranking in the country for efficiency in FY24 as evaluated by the West Virginia University John Chambers School of Business and Economics for operating within 93.45% of peak efficiency.  ISPFS constantly evaluates costs, productivity, efficiency, and other metrics to ensure that Idaho citizens get the best value and highest quality forensic services for their tax dollars.

In 2025, ISPFS again showed our commitment to quality operations by fully accrediting our digital forensics lab to the ISO 17025:2017 standard by our accrediting organization A2LA.  This accreditation was achieved with no findings due to the diligent preparation of our analysts and managers. 

ISPFS is an international leader in forensic science and works tens of thousands of cases each year.  Sometimes those cases reach national or international audiences and Idaho has been in the media spotlight in the last few years.  This year the lab spent a significant amount of time preparing for the trial of Bryan Kohberger, and then providing public records after a plea deal was agreed to by the court.  ISPFS had 22 employees work on the case and two managers testify in pre-trial motions.  ISPFS responded to over 23 requests for public records, provided over 2,356 pages of public records on our public website, and ultimately completed over 46 case and crime scene reports for the case.  ISPFS highlights the importance of the work of our forensic laboratory and employees in our annual “Impact Report” that is available on our public website.  Media reports of the work we do are collated by county so that Idaho citizens can see the impact of forensic science on cases in Idaho.  https://isp.idaho.gov/forensics/news/ 

In addition to the impact report, this website has all the general notifications we send to our customers, information about sexual assault kit testing, annual toxicology and DUI trends, and this year we added real-time dashboards about drug trends in Idaho https://isp.idaho.gov/forensics/services/  These dashboards can be used to identify month over month and year over year drug trends and to identify what new drugs we are seeing in the laboratory.  We also provide this data to our partners at the Oregon-Idaho HIDTA, the Office of Drug Policy,  and the Department of Health and Welfare. 

Construction meetings began in earnest this year for the new forensic science facility in Meridian that will host the DNA, Latent Print, NIBIN, and Digital Forensics units.  Construction will officially kick off in the summer of 2026.  All of our facilities have seen upgrades this year to accommodate our growth and program needs.  ISPFS seeks to maintain facilities, instrumentation, and equipment that will keep us at the forefront of forensic science in the world.  We are thrilled to start construction in Meridian of this exceptional new laboratory. 

The ISPFS SAKI team continues to be a nation leader in cold case investigation.  The team resolved or helped solve 3 cold cases in Idaho last year and triaged over 50 new cases with agencies throughout Idaho.  39 CODIS hits were generated by this team working to bring “partially tested” sexual assault kits back into our laboratory for additional testing.  In addition, our team has assisted with the collection of DNA from 1,338 Idaho convicted offenders that did not provide their DNA upon their conviction.  This work led to 14 CODIS hits (roughly a rate of 1% of the owed offender samples lead to a hit in the CODIS database.  The work of this team will expand and accelerate in 2026. 

The ISPFS Sexual Assault Nursing Examiner program continued to grow in 2025 with us training 21 nurses in Idaho and bringing our total to 283 nurses trained in Idaho.  We currently have 20 SANE-A (adult) and 4 SANE-P (pediatric) certified providers in Idaho.  There is sexual assault kit collection now being done at more than 32 locations in Idaho.  More and more of these locations are in rural Idaho towns and cities.  In addition, we launched our web-based tool for victims of sexual assault to know where they can go to have a sexual assault kit collected https://isp.idaho.gov/forensics/saktrak/  We facilitated community Sexual Assault Response Teams in Blaine County, Minidoka/Cassia Counties, Jerome/Twin Falls Counties, and Benewah County to encourage dialog in communities about sexual assault response.  This work will also accelerate in 2026. 

In September 2025, ISPFS celebrated the completion of our fourth year of participation as an early adopter of the NIST Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) standards registry implementation program. Our commitment to compliance with all applicable forensic science standards on the national registry reflects our dedication to advancing forensic science in the United States, particularly in Idaho. ISPFS staff have been integral to OSAC since its inception in 2014, showcasing our ongoing commitment to excellence and collaboration in the field of forensic science.

Join us in serving the community!

Our commitment to education and collaboration remains steadfast through the continuation of our popular “Forensic Science Forum.” This monthly webinar series offers valuable insights into new disciplines, techniques, and state-of-the-art practices implemented at the state lab. We invite our customers and stakeholders to engage with us monthly by registering your email. Events are recorded for law enforcement audiences to replay on-demand.