COMMENTARY: "How Can America Fix Its Crime Labs?" by Kate Wheeling (Associate Editor of Pacific Standard) published by Pacific Standard on May 6, 2016. (Pacific Standard, formerly Miller-McCune, is an American magazine, published bimonthly in print and continuously online by the nonprofit Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media and Public Policy, headquartered in Santa Barbara, California.)
SUB-HEADING: "Scandals have plagued crime labs across the country. What can be done to prevent the next one?"
GIST: "How
does a drug addict steal from a state-run lab for nearly a decade
without anyone noticing? The Farak scandal is unusual, but it is not
unique. The Massachusetts District Attorney’s office is still recovering
from the case of Annie Dookhan — a chemist currently in jail for
tampering with evidence in drug cases. Dookhan handled
samples for more than 40,000 cases, and as many as 20,000 convictions
may have resulted from her work, according to the American Civil
Liberties Union. And it’s not just Massachusetts. Crime lab technicians in Montana and California
have been accused of stealing pills and cocaine from evidence. And in
Houston, Jonathan Salvador, a Department of Public Safety crime lab
employee, was let go for fabricating
drug tests, and a slew of guilty verdicts were overturned as district
attorneys across 30 counties began re-evaluating the evidence in the
nearly 5,000 cases Salvador had worked on. The
lack of oversight in crime labs, and the pressure to do more with less
creates an environment that allows misconduct like Farak’s to go
unnoticed. A 2009 report
from the National Academy of Sciences found that, in addition to
problems with the accuracy of the forensic sciences themselves, many
forensic labs across the country are underfunded and overworked, leading
to case backlogs and increasing the risk of errors — like the 400,000
rape kits in evidence rooms across the country dating back to the 1980s
that have yet to be processed
for lack of resources, many of which could contain enough evidence to
convict rapists. The lack of oversight in crime labs, and the pressure
to do more with less (funding, employees, etc.) creates an environment
that allows misconduct like Farak’s and Dookhan’s to go unnoticed. And
when these scandals are brought to light, so too are the extensive
collateral consequences of forensic misconduct.........Rigorous
background checks for all prospective crime lab personnel may have been
enough to prevent cases like Dookhan’s, who lied about her credentials.
Periodic background checks and drug tests might prevent cases like
Farak’s. The
Department of Justice announced last year that it would only use
evidence that comes from accredited labs — an endorsement that
laboratories are operating with a set of best practices and standards.
But accreditation is not a panacea. As Frontline reported: The
new policy, announced by Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates at a
meeting of the National Commission on Forensic Sciences, is unlikely to
precipitate any immediate or universal overhaul of the nation’s crime
labs. It will only directly affect labs contracted by the DOJ that
aren’t already accredited — and it will only begin doing so in 2020.
Furthermore, the new policy seemingly has a built-in loophole:
Prosecutors are required to use accredited labs “when practicable,” a
phrase Yates told the commission was not meant to be used loosely, but
only when using those labs would cause great delay or excessive cost. In addition, accredited labs are not immune to high-profile scandals. .......The
damage done by these lab scandals is exacerbated by the public’s
inflated trust in forensic science in the courtroom, thanks in large
part to popular crime lab procedurals on television today like NCIS. There is no official estimate yet on the number of cases that Farak may have tainted, but it could be as many as 10,000, the Boston Globe reports. The district attorneys’ office must now begin the hard work of identifying and re-evaluating each individual case."
The entire commentary can be found at:
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The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com;
Harold Levy;
Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
