PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The TFSC launched an investigation into NMS (National Medical Services) and its cases in Texas last year... The TFSC conceded it doesn’t normally consider issues raised in a criminal case halfway across the country from Texas, but they were interested in determining the reliability of DNA cases by NMS in the Lone Star State, and elsewhere"
STORY: "Texas Forensic Science Commission Report Prompts ‘Course Correction’ at Private Lab," by Seth Augustine, published by Forensic Magazine on May 10, 2018. (Seth Augenstein is a reporter for Forensic and Laboratory Equipment magazines. He spent a decade as a reporter at New Jersey newspapers, most recently at The Star-Ledger.)
GIST: "A screenshot from a video of a Texas Forensic Science Commission meeting on April 20. During the meeting, the Commission adopted a report citing errors at a private Pennsylvania forensic laboratory. The defense’s DNA data in a Washington, D.C. rape case was thrown out by a judge in 2015, due to technical errors by a Pennsylvania forensic laboratory. Now the Texas Forensic Science Commission has cited the laboratory’s failings in an extensive report on the case, touching off a series of reviews and changes at the private lab. The report has prompted a lab-wide review of about 1,500 DNA analyses handled by National Medical Services (NMS), Inc., a Pennsylvania-based forensic and medical facility, to see if “overblown data” may have affected other cases across the country. The NMS lab has agreed to a major “course correction” requested by the Texas forensic watchdog agency. Part of that course correction involves two scientists specifically cited in the TFSC report. Both are no longer affiliated with NMS. However, both men are still part of the national forensic community’s standards-setting board: the Organization for Scientific Area Committees, or OSAC. While a handful of government crime labs have been implicated in sweeping scandals over several years, the latest report is one of the few official actions taken against a private laboratory. "
