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DrPrison tonight on CBS News
See DrPrison tonight on CBS News discussing yesterday's L.A. police killing an unarmed man.
Saturday, March 20, 2010
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EXCLUSIVE: Policing the crime labs
No government bodies regulate forensic labs
By TERI FIGUEROA - tfigueroa@nctimes.com
Forensics, the use of science to answer questions of law, play a vital role in the courtroom. Using tools such as blood tests, DNA and ballistic evidence, science establishes fact in legal cases.
Though the work is reliable in the vast majority of cases, forensic laboratories and their results are not flawless, critics say. Take the series of questionable drug and alcohol tests that cropped up in North County criminal cases in recent months.
Hundreds of toxicology tests done by a private lab, Pacific Toxicologies, had to be reviewed after mistakes were found. Eleven people were released from jail; at least seven of them saw their criminal cases dismissed.
The incident raises the question: Who polices the labs the police use? No governmental body, no state or federal agency oversees the forensic labs that run tests on DNA, fingerprints, ballistics, even on the blood of drunken driving suspects.
Some labs voluntarily seek accreditation from private professional organizations.
But nobody who checks the labs has the power to shut one down.
"It is very hard to challenge ... if there was a problem with the lab. If they screw up, you are out of luck," said Justin Brooks, the director of the California Innocence Project at California Western School of Law in San Diego.
Flawed tests found
The problems with faulty tests in local cases came to light after puzzled San Diego County sheriff's deputies started questioning test results, according to the county district attorney's office.
It generally came up, prosecutor Damon Mosler said, in instances where a deputy felt strongly that a suspect had been under the influence of drugs, but the test came back clean.
Mosler said that prompted officials to review cases and ask questions.
Then a teenage defendant tested positive for morphine; the boy's attorneys asked for a retest. The second test showed no morphine in the boy's system.
That false positive sent the review of work done by Pacific Toxicologies into overdrive, Mosler said. Within a week, prosecutors notified defense attorneys about the problem. Officials said faulty training of two new laboratory technicians at Pacific Toxicologies was to blame.
The mistakes led the Sheriff's Department to end its use of Pacific Toxicologies, based in Chatsworth. Sheriff's spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said the department now uses Bio-Tox, a Riverside lab recently in the news for problems of its own.
Last year, hundreds of tests done by Bio-Tox had to be retested after former lab tech Aaron Layton reportedly admitted to falsifying lab results while working in another state. Bio-Tox officials, who responded immediately when alerted to the problem, said the review turned up no mistakes in Layton's work for them.
Oversight lacking
Last year, the National Academy of Sciences issued a congressionally funded report on the state of forensic labs. Among the findings: "... oversight and enforcement of operating standards, certification, accreditation, and ethics are lacking in most local and state jurisdictions."
When questions about a particular lab or analyst's work come up, no agency is in charge of looking into complaints, said defense attorney Gary Gibson, a senior official with the San Diego County public defender's office.
"If we are seeing a repeated problem, we take it to the DA (district attorney's office)," Gibson said. "We bring our problems on an informal basis, and overwhelmingly the problem is resolved by the DA."
Another problem noted in the National Academy of Sciences report is that crime labs are often part of the law enforcement agencies, as opposed to independent agencies. The implication is that the possibility exists for bias, no matter how unintentional, toward the prosecution.
Brooks, of the Innocence Project, called it "one of the most frustrating things about being a defense attorney."
"The structure is wrong," he said. "You put a crime lab with one side of the investigation."
The Sheriff's Department runs its own crime lab, though it sends some evidence ---- about 7,500 blood and urine tests a year ---- to private labs for testing.
In-house at the sheriff's lab last year, the five analysts in the controlled substances analysis section reviewed about 7,500 pieces of evidence, including powders, tablets, liquids and the like.
Local police can send evidence to the sheriff's lab. The Oceanside Police Department sends much of the physical evidence from crime scenes to the sheriff's lab for testing. Carlsbad's Police Department sends some evidence there, but also has an in-house unit that handles fingerprint analysis and other areas.
Sheriff Bill Gore said his department "couldn't disagree more" with the National Academy of Sciences recommendation to divorce labs from law enforcement.
"To imply that laboratories operated by law enforcement agencies are predisposed to seek outcomes that are anything other than true and objective is a disservice to the men and women who perform this important function throughout the country," he said.
Sheriff's spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said the sheriff's lab "has a number of internal procedures to assure quality in the laboratory."
Among them, she said in an e-mail, are technical and administrative reviews of reports, reviews of procedures, internal audits, and proficiency testing of analysts. Courtroom testimony by lab workers also is monitored, she said.
Innocent errors
The sheriff's lab is accredited by an organization known as the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board, or ASCLD/LAB.
The private, nonprofit body has given its tough-to-get seal of approval to the country's premier crime labs, including those run by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Secret Service.
Ralph Keaton is the executive director of the accrediting organization, and he said labs that get its approval are held to a very high standard, and must have checks and balances in place.
And, he said, labs with the ASCLD/LAB accreditation are expected to take immediate corrective action when mistakes are uncovered.
"It is a matter of public trust," Keaton said. "The labs really are the final say in a lot of decision-making in the courtroom. ... The accused and the accusers really are at the mercy of good science."
And even the best labs can make mistakes. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology landed at the center of the high-profile case of Cynthia Sommer, a widow convicted in 2007 of poisoning her Marine husband, who was based at Miramar when he died in 2002.
Sommer's attorney, Allen Bloom, said the military lab was wrong when it found arsenic in Todd Sommer's organs. Later testing, at a different lab, revealed no arsenic. Prosecutors dropped the charges, and Cynthia Sommer was freed after spending more than two years in jail.
Bloom said "the real scary situation" comes when lab workers trying to do the right thing make blunders.
Innocent errors "are among the greatest systemic problems in wrongful convictions," Bloom said.
The Innocence Project's Brooks said jurors might rely too heavily on forensic findings.
"Jurors are just so easily manipulated," Brooks said. "In this 'CSI' age, as soon as there is some science involved, they are dazzled. ... There is always going to be human error as long as humans are involved."
Call staff writer Teri Figueroa at 760-740-5442.
http://nctimes.com/news/local/sdcounty/article_8a62334c-c3a1-539b-935b-c41bbb1e5217.html
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