California: The L.A. Times reports that Orange County's crime lab has been accused of doctoring DNA analysis In murder cases. "A onetime high-ranking Orange County Crime Lab official is being accused of doctoring key DNA analysis by giving conflicting testimony that aided prosecutors win two homicide trials. At issue are divergent, sworn statements Senior Forensic Scientist Mary Hong made in People v. Lynn Dean Johnson in 2008 and People v. Wendell Patrick Lemond the following year, according to records filed Sept. 23 in Orange County Superior Court."..."Hong's career includes receiving California statewide honors for her crime-solving forensic-science work in murder cases, serving as a past president of the California Association of Criminalists (CAC), and being the subject of a glowing 2012 Orange County Register feature. In 2009, she authored a CAC column advocating the importance of forensic-science ethics.........The crime lab is a division of the Orange County Sheriff's Department, in which deputies have been caught conducting unconstitutional scams against pretrial inmates, hiding evidence, disobeying lawful court orders and committing perjury to cover up misdeeds. In Nov. 2015, more than three dozen legal experts and scholars called on Attorney General Loretta Lynch to launch a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into the operations of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and Sheriff Sandra Hutchens. They argued that neither Rackauckas nor Hutchens could be trusted to act ethically. DOJ officials have acknowledged they are aware of the scandal, but haven't formally announced any action. Efforts to reach Hong for comment were not successful; a crime-lab employee told the Weekly that she retired."

STORY: "Orange County's Crime Lab Accused of Doctoring DNA Analysis In Murder Cases," by reporter R. Scott Moxley, published by The Los Angeles Times on September 27, 2016. (Thanks to forensic blogger Mike Bowers (CSIDDS - Forensics in Focus) for drawing this story to our attention. HL); SUB-HEADING: "Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana: How much confidence can we have in convictions here." GIST: "A onetime high-ranking Orange County Crime Lab official is being accused of doctoring key DNA analysis by giving conflicting testimony that aided prosecutors win two homicide trials. At issue are divergent, sworn statements Senior Forensic Scientist Mary Hong made in People v. Lynn Dean Johnson in 2008 and People v. Wendell Patrick Lemond the following year, according to records filed Sept. 23 in Orange County Superior Court. The Johnson case stems from the May 1985 killing of 19-year-old restaurant hostess Bridgett Lamon, who was found partially stripped in an Anaheim commercial trash dumpster. Three months later, in an unrelated crime that led to the Lemond case, relatives discovered 20-year-old office worker Catherine Ann Tameny murdered in her Anaheim apartment. In part because of a plethora of suspects and inconclusive physical evidence, professional homicide detectives couldn’t formally solve either case for more than two decades, not until Hong reopened forensic probes and provided deputy district attorneys Howard Gundy and Kevin Haskins (now a judge) information that would nail their targets: Johnson and Lemond. But Deputy Public Defender Scott Sanders, who represented Johnson, claims in his 133-page court filing that Hong misled jurors and the veteran prosecutors improperly hid evidence that would have wrecked her courthouse credibility by exposing her flip-flops. During the 2008 Johnson trial, Hong testified that the low quantity of semen recovered from Lamon's vagina, anus and thigh provided her a time range for the DNA’s deposit: “zero to 24 hours” before police collection. Daniel Gammie, the criminalist who filed the original report in the case in 1985, noted that the deposit happened at least 24 hours before collection, but he adjusted his opinion to match Hong’s stance during the trial. In altering his opinion, Gammie stated, he would “be very cautious about making a statement like” the one he made in 1985. For her part, Hong credited the presence of variables in the low-quantity semen deposit as the reason for the “zero to 24 hours” position instead of starting the clock at least 24 hours before collection. “There is just a number of variables that we can’t control or that we don’t know about, so that you really can’t make [the at least 24 hours] determination,” she testified. Haskins, who won the case but lost his push for a death-penalty punishment, asked her if her analysis “basically tells us” that the semen deposit occurred “between zero and 24 hours prior to the time it was collected—is that correct?" Hong replied, “Yes.” According to Sanders, who made a forceful case that another suspect is the killer, Hong’s testimony “fit perfectly for the prosecution—offering a window of time in which Johnson’s sexual contact with the victim [who had multiple sex partners in the weeks before her death] could have been near the time of death.” During his closing argument, Haskins mocked Sanders as a nutty conspiracy theorist for raising suspicions about the shifting analysis. However, it only took 15 months for the flip-flop to happen in open court. The “zero to 24 hours” crime-lab analysis didn’t fit Gundy’s needs during the 2009 trial against Lemond. He wanted a forensic scientist to testify that the low-quantity semen evidence meant “a more remote deposit,” according to court records. But the prosecutor had a problem. As in the Johnson investigation, Gammie originally declared the semen deposit in Lemond happened at least 24 hours before collection. Having testified a year earlier that his 1985 analysis had been fundamentally wrong, he couldn’t be called as a witness. That move would give jurors impeachment evidence against the government’s case. Instead, the prosecutor summoned Hong to the witness stand, and she told Gundy what he wanted to hear. The prosecutor asked when the semen had been deposited. Hong told jurors, who weren’t informed about either her or Gammie’s 2008 DNA testimony, that the answer was at least 24 hours before collection. That testimony helped lay blame on Lemond by destroying any defense argument that the actual killer was Larry Herrera—the suspect identified by DNA testing as the sperm source in the victim, according to court records. “In other words, Hong essentially turned her Johnson testimony on its head,” wrote Sanders, who credits Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy for inadvertently prompting his review of Johnson and Lemond by accusing him of committing defense misconduct against Haskins. “Suggesting that the evidence indicated a window of the time of deposit as being 24 hours before collection is wholly irreconcilable with the testimony in Johnson. . . . Which, if any, of these two versions is closer to the truth can be further analyzed in habeas litigation for Johnson and Lemond. But Hong’s failure to say the name ‘Gammie’ once in her testimony is noteworthy. She clearly had studied Gammie’s report and analysis and knew that Gammie’s testimony in Johnson and her own—in the hands of defense counsel—would have eviscerated her credibility in Lemond and all of the other cases she has touched throughout the course of her career.” Hong's career includes receiving California statewide honors for her crime-solving forensic-science work in murder cases, serving as a past president of the California Association of Criminalists (CAC), and being the subject of a glowing 2012 Orange County Register feature. In 2009, she authored a CAC column advocating the importance of forensic-science ethics.........The crime lab is a division of the Orange County Sheriff's Department, in which deputies have been caught conducting unconstitutional scams against pretrial inmates, hiding evidence, disobeying lawful court orders and committing perjury to cover up misdeeds. In Nov. 2015, more than three dozen legal experts and scholars called on Attorney General Loretta Lynch to launch a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into the operations of District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and Sheriff Sandra Hutchens. They argued that neither Rackauckas nor Hutchens could be trusted to act ethically. DOJ officials have acknowledged they are aware of the scandal, but haven't formally announced any action. Efforts to reach Hong for comment were not successful; a crime-lab employee told the Weekly that she retired." The entire story can be found at: http://www.ocweekly.com/news/orange-countys-crime-lab-accused-of-doctoring-dna-analysis-in-murder-cases-7538100?utm_source=Legal+Aid+DNA+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c2a59820f6-DNA_Newsletter_144_28_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_332a53a218-c2a59820f6-80240109&ct=t(DNA_Newsletter_144_28_2015) See also Los Angeles Times story - Prosecutors who withhold evidence now face felony charges - at the link below; "Amid an ongoing controversy in the Orange County courthouse involving accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, a new law will ratchet up penalties for California prosecutors who tamper with evidence or hide exculpatory material from the defense. Under the law, which was introduced by Assemblywoman Patty Lopez (D-San Fernando) and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday, a prosecutor can receive up to three years in prison for altering or intentionally withholding evidence that defendants might use to exonerate themselves. Previously, those acts were considered misdemeanors. “I hear so many stories about innocent people across California, and across the country, who have been wrongfully convicted,” Lopez said. “I just hope that when people think the rules don’t apply to them, they will think twice before they abuse their power.”Lopez said the legislation was not specifically inspired by events in Orange County. However, the controversy surrounding the office of longtime Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas spurred the bill’s advocates and informed the debate on the state Senate floor. In March 2015, Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals removed Rackauckas’ office from one of its most high-profile cases, the prosecution of mass murderer Scott Dekraai. The judge said prosecutors repeatedly had violated Dekraai’s rights by failing to turn over evidence, though he did not find they had engaged in willful misconduct. The California attorney general’s office, which has inherited the case, is appealing Goethals’ ruling.Dekraai’s attorney, assistant public defender Scott Sanders, has argued that Orange County jailers have flouted inmates’ rights for years with an illegal jailhouse-informant program, and that prosecutors consistently have tried to conceal it. The scandal, which has drawn nationwide attention, has resulted in the collapse of cases against numerous criminal defendants.........Among the bill’s advocateswas Obie Anthony, 42, who served 17 years behind bars after being convicted in 1995 of a murder outside a South Los Angeles brothel. He was exonerated in 2011 after it was revealed that a key prosecution witness, a pimp, had received leniency in exchange for his testimony — a deal prosecutors had not disclosed. “I’m glad the governor decided to put his foot down,” said Anthony who told his story to California lawmakers as they weighed whether to support the bill. “I went to talk to them about how those bad-acting prosecutors took 17 years of my life,” said Anthony, who now lives in Missouri and runs a nonprofit organization, Exonerated Nation, for the wrongfully convicted. Matthew Guerrero, president of the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a legislative advocacy group that pushed for the law, said the Orange County scandal “really invigorated our organization to recognize that there’s a problem.” “The prosecution in that situation seemed to be acting with impunity,” Guerrero said. “So we wanted to send a strong signal that the criminal justice system needs to do the right thing in the right way.”"  http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-prosecutor-misconduct-20161003-snap-story.html PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:  http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html  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.