[Peace-discuss] FW: [police oversight] Director of city police crime lab fired

[Laurie]

Thought this might be of interest.  Could this be true in your community
too.

 
Director of city police crime lab fired
Database update reveals employees' DNA tainted evidence, throwing lab's
reliability into question
By Julie Bykowicz and Justin Fenton

August 20, 2008

 Baltimore crime analysts have been contaminating evidence with their own
DNA -- a revelation that led to the dismissal this week of the city Police
Department's crime lab director and prompted questions Wednesday from
defense attorneys and forensic experts about the professionalism of the
state's biggest and busiest crime lab.

Edgar Koch, who had been the city lab's director for the past decade, was
fired Tuesday because of the DNA contamination and other "operational
issues," said police spokesman Sterling Clifford.

He declined to elaborate on the other issues and said no one else was
terminated.

City officials said the employee contamination did not lead to anyone being
falsely accused of a crime, and they played down its importance.

But Baltimore's top public defender called the findings "atrocious" and
Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy said she has asked her senior
staff to review the potential impact on open and closed cases.

By introducing their own DNA into crime evidence, lab employees may have
created more work for detectives and made prosecutions harder, as the
presence of unknown DNA can leave the impression of a phantom suspect,
experts said.

Defense attorneys said any flaws in the city's handling of DNA could raise
broader questions about evidence that is generally considered infallible. As
testing becomes more sophisticated and new standards for labs emerge, cities
across the country, including Houston and Seattle, have been discovering
contamination issues that in some cases led to convictions being overturned.

"There are some concerns," Mayor Sheila Dixon said. "We don't have the
details yet to know if these cases are in jeopardy, so I can't speak on that
publicly yet."

The problem in Baltimore came to light when a new DNA supervisor in the lab,
Rana Santos, began entering employee DNA samples into a database and
comparing them against "unknown" genetic profiles found in evidence from
crime scenes.

Santos' work has revealed about a dozen instances out of 2,500 in which a
previously unknown genetic profile turned out to be that of a lab employee,
Clifford said. The analysis is continuing, he said, with more employees' DNA
being entered into the database and more unknown samples being re-examined.

Reached at home Wednesday, Koch, a former Anne Arundel County police officer
who developed the forensics lab there, said supervisors had mistakenly
believed since 2005 that the lab staff's DNA samples had been entered into
the database when they had in fact been sitting on a shelf.

He said he notified Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III when the
oversight was discovered. He said Bealefeld was "not happy" and told him to
resign late Tuesday.

"I was there 12 years and never had any issues," Koch said, adding that he
was never informed of any other concerns with his job performance. "That's
good personnel in there, and they should not be knocked for everything. I
think [the criticism] is blown out of proportion."

Several experts, including the director of the national crime lab
accreditation board, said they were surprised that Baltimore had failed to
take what they called the basic step of cataloging the employees' DNA.

"It's a uniformly standard practice of laboratories doing DNA testing," said
Ralph Keaton, director of the American Society of Crime Laboratory
Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board. That board accredited Baltimore's
lab in December 2006.

Keaton said that maintaining an employee database is not a requirement of
accreditation but that not doing so is all but unheard of. After learning
about Baltimore's contamination from reporters and a public defender
Wednesday, Keaton said he would call the Police Department to follow up but
did not say whether the lab's accreditation could be at risk.

Two local agencies, the Maryland State Police and the Baltimore County
Police, said they have always maintained DNA databases of laboratory
employees who come into contact with the samples. Police spokesman Bill
Toohey said that since Baltimore County began testing DNA in 2001, the first
step in any analysis has always been to test samples against the staff
profiles.

Clifford stressed that the contamination "didn't produce false positives,"
meaning that no suspects were inadvertently identified because of the lab's
mistakes. He said the city crime lab and its DNA section were fully
operational Wednesday.

"Fewer than 15 known incidents of staff contamination over seven years isn't
the kind of thing that holds up lab operations," Clifford said.

But Patrick Kent, chief of the forensics division at the state public
defender's office, said police are "talking out of both sides of their
mouth."

"They're saying, 'Oh, it's not a problem at all,' and on the other hand they
have fired the crime lab director," Kent said. "And I can tell you that
never happens. Crime lab directors are only fired when you have some serious
quality control violations."

Baltimore Public Defender Elizabeth Julian said her office is researching
the cases directly affected by the problems and trying to learn more about
the potential overall impact.

Kent said that the number of cases of known DNA contamination matters less
than the fact that there has been contamination at all. He said defense
attorneys have good cause to wonder if DNA collected from suspects has been
transferred to samples from crime scene evidence.

"Contamination of any sort shows that there has, in fact, been a failure of
lab practices," he said. "Any suggestion that is not a systemic problem
simply shows a lack of basic understanding of how a lab should operate."

Dean Wideman, a forensic expert in San Antonio, Texas, said the
contamination reflects poorly on the individual analysts and on the lab
itself.

"It comes down to technique and carelessness - either way, it shouldn't
happen that often," Wideman said. "It's bad for that analyst as well as the
credibility of the lab. It's a reflection of the kind of work being done and
the way they process samples in general."

Koch said that contamination does occur but called criticism a "smoke
screen" and an attempt to "taint a jury pool by making accusations."

A 2004 report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found that forensic
scientists at the Washington State Patrol laboratory had contaminated tests
or made other mistakes while handling DNA evidence in at least 23 cases
involving major crimes over a three-year period, including eight instances
in which analysts contaminated samples with their own DNA.

And in 2003 the Houston Police Department suspended DNA testing and
disciplined nine crime laboratory employees after an audit revealed that
thousands of cases had to be retested because of errors in DNA analysis and
possible contamination of samples. Evidence of DNA mishandling there
resulted in a handful of convictions being overturned.

Practices in Baltimore's crime lab have been called into question before.
Three years ago, Kent's forensics division launched a campaign against the
crime lab's methods of analyzing gunshot residue, tiny particles left behind
when a gun is fired. Police practices and disorganization at the lab led to
contamination and unreliable gunshot residue test results, Kent said. He
said his office is still sifting through years of cases to check for
potentially false gunshot residue tests.

Kent said the city's lab has been "consistently unable to produce accurate
scientific analysis" and Koch's dismissal is "years overdue." Koch was paid
about $105,000 last year. Sharon Talmadge will serve as acting director of
the lab, which has 114 employees, including 22 in the DNA section.

Copyright C 2008, The Baltimore Sun

  

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