Lab Fees Are a Cost, Not Restitution

Laboratory expenses for analysis of controlled substances used to be ordered as restitution. Since 2002, they have been a court cost. There is a difference. Years ago, when a defendant was convicted of a controlled substance offense and the State’s investigation of the crime involved a lab analysis, G.S. 90-95.3(b) allowed the court to order $100 in restitution to the State of North Carolina for the expense of the analysis. That was a somewhat dubious type of restitution. The State Crime Lab was not the “victim” of the defendant’s drug crime. It was, to the contrary, doing exactly what the government had funded it to do: analyzing drugs. But that’s how the statute was set up back in 1989. And the court of appeals upheld it against a constitutional challenge. State v. Johnson, 124 N.C. App. 462 (1996). Nevertheless, the General Assembly repealed the restitution provision in 2002, effective October 1 of that year. In its place the legislature enacted G.S. 7A-304(a)(7), a $300 court cost for cases where State Bureau of Investigation laboratory facilities were used to perform DNA analysis, tests of bodily fluid, or analysis of a controlled substance possessed by the defendant as part of the investigation leading to his or her conviction. That $300 cost has since evolved into the $600 costs in G.S. 7A-304(a)(7) (State Crime Laboratory, with the money remitted to the Department of Justice), (a)(8) (local government crime labs, with the money remitted to the general fund of the local government that operates the [...]