PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I find this story quite discouraging. An evidence room in a major American city tainted from top to bottom, staffed by the least committed officers, sadly failing in its responsibility to preserve exhibits for introduction in the criminal courts so that justice can be done in each case. That didn't happen here. It hasn't happened here for years. Basic rule of operation: share the passcodes for access to the room. Madness. Think of all of the hard work that went into gathering that evidence for use in court. Gone to waste whenever a charge gets thrown out because the evidence happens to be missing. And why is it missing? A gun perhaps? Drugs? I hope that's not the case in Santa Fe. But when an evidence room has been so compromised pretty well anything goes. But Santa Fe doesn't stand alone. Over the years I have documented far too many tainted evidence rooms in North American police forces, including on in York Region, Ontario, my own back yard. All of these raising questions of supervision, accountability and protection of accused persons where the missing evidence may go towards proving the accused person's innocence. Take a deep breath and read on.
Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
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PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: "A few months before news of missing evidence in the 2017 stabbing death
of 21-year-old Selena Valencia came to light, Meek and another former
police officer, Gardner Finney, raised concerns about evidence room
procedures in separate memos to their superiors. The memos are dated
days apart. Specifically, they
reported officers on light duty who were assigned to work in the
evidence room on a temporary basis to alleviate “overworked” evidence
technicians were sharing passcodes to an evidence management software
system — virtually eliminating all accountability in the process. “I
think that was just SOP — standard operating procedure — up until very
recently, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still going on down
there,” said Finney, who retired last year. “It’s
a disaster, as you can imagine,” he added. “They still have people
working that evidence room that probably shouldn’t be down there.”
Officers
who are assigned to work in the evidence room are on alternate or light
duty for a variety of reasons, ranging from sprained ankles and broken
bones to being the subject of internal affairs investigations for
excessive use of force or domestic violence, Finney said. “All these
types of people get temporarily assigned that job,” he said."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Finney, who was born and raised in Santa Fe, said the missing evidence in the Valencia case could have far-reaching consequences. “Look, losing the murder evidence is outrageous,” he said. “But another thing that’s lost — and I hear this because my family lives here — is the public trust. There is no public trust now in the police department.” Finney predicts the police department’s sloppy practices will create problems for the District Attorney’s Office. “If I was a defense attorney, I would take every single case to trial — every single case — and challenge every bit of evidence,” he said. “Let me put it to you this way: If your truck is in evidence and you’re accused of a crime but you knew that multiple people had access to your truck, would you rely on what the police pulled out of there?”
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Finney, who was born and raised in Santa Fe, said the missing evidence in the Valencia case could have far-reaching consequences. “Look, losing the murder evidence is outrageous,” he said. “But another thing that’s lost — and I hear this because my family lives here — is the public trust. There is no public trust now in the police department.” Finney predicts the police department’s sloppy practices will create problems for the District Attorney’s Office. “If I was a defense attorney, I would take every single case to trial — every single case — and challenge every bit of evidence,” he said. “Let me put it to you this way: If your truck is in evidence and you’re accused of a crime but you knew that multiple people had access to your truck, would you rely on what the police pulled out of there?”
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STORY: "Evidence room problems extend from techs to top command," by reporter Daniel J. Chacon, published by The Santa Fe New Mexican on January 25, 2020.
PHOTO CAPTION: "As the deputy chief of administration, Andrew Padilla, now chief of the Santa Fe Police Department, was supposed to inspect the property room and file a monthly report ‘to ensure that all procedures are being followed, and to ensure the proper accountability procedures are being maintained.’ A recent review by an outside consultant, however, found various problems with evidence handling, including guns overdue for destruction, items stored in ‘no logical order,’ oversized items kept in unsecured areas, and time-consuming drug sorting, among other issues. ‘There were other lieutenants, captains, deputy chiefs and chiefs who also didn’t follow the policy,’ Padilla says."
GIST: "Panic set in at the Santa Fe Police Department last year when officials discovered evidence in a first-degree murder case had vanished. Rich Bemis, the police department’s property custodian, started going through every box of evidence in a desperate, yet futile search, said former Santa Fe police Officer Dale Meek, who was present. “You’re not talking about a misdemeanor theft case where we collected some evidence and now it’s gone, so [the suspect] is going to get to walk,” said Meek, who is now police chief of Center, Colo., a small town near Alamosa. “This is a murder case.”
Guidelines for handling and storing evidence at the police department are spelled out in an eight-page directive issued in May 2017. It was designed to ensure each item can be accounted for. But a recent third-party review of processes, policies and procedures Santa Fe police are supposed to employ while collecting and managing property and evidence uncovered a number of failures, including a critical step that points back to an officer who now is in charge of the department: Chief Andrew Padilla. The directive states that the deputy chief of administration — a position Padilla held for about two years before Mayor Alan Webber appointed him police chief in 2018 — is required to inspect the property room and file a monthly report “to ensure that all procedures are being followed, and to ensure the proper accountability procedures are being maintained. The policy laying out the responsibilities of the deputy chief of administration was not being followed, according to an outside review by SCS Northwest Consulting Services LLC. “Inspections per department policy have not been done until recently. This is a requirement to help ensure accountability and best operation of the Evidence Unit,” Steve Campbell, owner of SCS Northwest Consulting, wrote in a withering report that triggered a corrective action plan the police department says it is in the process of implementing Padilla declined repeated requests for an interview last week but said in an email the police department is “determined” to follow and focus on the recommendations from the outside review “We are diligently working on this matter!” the chief wrote. “To now try and say I single handedly created this issue is a stretch, but I do understand you have to follow up on your leads or tips and keep the public informed.” Padilla contends there is plenty of blame to go around, including a long list of commanders who preceded him. “There were other lieutenants, captains, deputy chiefs and chiefs who also didn’t follow the policy,” he wrote. In a follow-up email, Padilla said he carries “the responsibility of the actions of our organization” as chief of police. “We have stopped past practices,” he wrote. “We will hire more staff and purchase a standalone evidence management software.” Meek, a former Santa Fe County sheriff’s deputy who served on the city police force from November 2015 until last year, agreed others besides Padilla played a role, adding Santa Fe’s evidence management issues are part of a systemic problem that goes back many years. “If I was to sum it up in one word: apathy,” Meek said.
‘It’s a disaster’
A
few months before news of missing evidence in the 2017 stabbing death
of 21-year-old Selena Valencia came to light, Meek and another former
police officer, Gardner Finney, raised concerns about evidence room
procedures in separate memos to their superiors. The memos are dated
days apart. Specifically, they
reported officers on light duty who were assigned to work in the
evidence room on a temporary basis to alleviate “overworked” evidence
technicians were sharing passcodes to an evidence management software
system — virtually eliminating all accountability in the process.
“I
think that was just SOP — standard operating procedure — up until very
recently, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still going on down
there,” said Finney, who retired last year. “It’s
a disaster, as you can imagine,” he added. “They still have people
working that evidence room that probably shouldn’t be down there.” Officers
who are assigned to work in the evidence room are on alternate or light
duty for a variety of reasons, ranging from sprained ankles and broken
bones to being the subject of internal affairs investigations for
excessive use of force or domestic violence, Finney said. “All these types of people get temporarily assigned that job,” he said. Meek and Finney were particularly sensitive to the problem of sharing passcodes. Though
it wasn’t related to the evidence management system, they previously
had gotten in trouble after Meek used Finney’s password to approve a
police report Meek wrote while Finney, then a senior sergeant, was out
of the office, they said. “The
software we used for our reports required a passcode to log in, so you
could approve reports and send them to the DA’s Office. [Meek] was
allowed to use my passcode while I was on vacation, and the passcode
thing blew up because it puts an electronic signature on a document,”
Finney said. “It’s a technical policy violation, we found out later.” Meek
reported to the evidence room while he was on alternate duty because of
the passcode issue, as well as an inquiry into a high-speed pursuit in
which he was involved. He voiced concerns soon after reporting to work. “I
was told that I could use Rich Bemis’ login to complete the work. I
advised Rich Bemis that I could not use anyone else’s login to open a
computer program,” Meek wrote in a March 18, 2019, memo to Deputy Chief
Ben Valdez and Lt. Sean Strahon. “I was being requested to perform an
action that I had just received a sustained Internal Affairs
investigation regarding the misuse of logins and passwords.” Bemis, who has worked for Santa Fe police since at least 2003, did not return messages seeking comment. The
outside review by SCS Northwest Consulting determined the Evidence Unit
is understaffed and that the inventory has grown to “unmanageable
levels” with the current number of personnel. “It’s
not just two guys working in an evidence room where that’s their only
assignment,” Meek said. “They all have extra duties, so they’re
overworked.” One of the tasks
assigned to officers on alternate duty is handling “disposition sheets”
from the District Attorney’s Office, which indicate what evidence is no
longer needed. “You get the
disposition sheet, which has the case number on it,” Meek said. “You
locate the evidence in the evidence room, then you pull the evidence,
check it to the disposition form and that evidence gets put into a large
pile for destruction.” While
officers have access to the evidence management software system, “not
everybody in the department has administrative rights to get into the
evidence section to pull evidence out,” Meek said.
The solution? Sharing passcodes, he said. “It
is so hard to get administrative rights for someone who’s going down
there on a temporary assignment that by the time they get the rights to
do it, they’re already back onto full duty,” Meek said. “It’s just a lot
of red tape to get through it, but the job needs to get done. So, what
was going on is the [evidence technicians] would log into the system for
the alternate duty officers and then they would remove it through the
tech’s entry.” Meek said the practice stopped him in his tracks. “I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m using someone else’s login to do it? Wait a second,’ ” he recalled. While
Campbell’s report recommends training officers and evidence room staff
on how to use the new evidence management software the department plans
on purchasing, it does not address the login credential issues. If it is not in the report, Campbell said it means he did not look at that in the review process.
Evidence room practices ‘grossly irregular’
Finney reported his concerns about officers sharing passcodes about a week before Meek filed his memo. Finney
wrote in his complaint that he was contacted by an officer who told him
“that everyone on light duty is still violating the law, even though
[now-retired] Deputy Chief Robbie Vasquez was notified in writing on
February 26, 2019 about people on light duty using passcodes from a
former employee to access” various computer systems. In an interview, Finney said an officer he supervised at the time told him the passcodes were in plain sight. “She
said, ‘Hey, they have a notebook down there next to the AS 400
terminal, which is the computer down there in the evidence room, and
it’s got passcodes written on it,’” he said. “It was left down there so
that any officer working that terminal could manage the evidence
management system so they can enter evidence, take evidence out, that
sort of thing.” Finney called the practice “grossly irregular and irresponsible.”
The
missing evidence in the Valencia case resulted in a plea deal for her
killer, 28-year-old Christopher Garcia, who pleaded no contest to one
count of voluntary manslaughter and guilty to two counts each of
tampering with evidence and drug possession. Garcia,
who faced life in prison under a first-degree murder conviction, was
instead sentenced to 12 years behind bars, which could be cut in half
with time off for good behavior. The police department said it lost 11 pieces of evidence, including fingernail clippings and traces of hair found on Valencia. “I
just remember Rich started going through every single box of evidence
because evidence was missing,” Meek recalled, referring to the evidence
custodian. “He had record of it going to the lab and coming back from
the lab, but it couldn’t be located.” Finney,
who was born and raised in Santa Fe, said the missing evidence in the
Valencia case could have far-reaching consequences. “Look,
losing the murder evidence is outrageous,” he said. “But another thing
that’s lost — and I hear this because my family lives here — is the
public trust. There is no public trust now in the police department.” Finney predicts the police department’s sloppy practices will create problems for the District Attorney’s Office. “If
I was a defense attorney, I would take every single case to trial —
every single case — and challenge every bit of evidence,” he said. “Let
me put it to you this way: If your truck is in evidence and you’re
accused of a crime but you knew that multiple people had access to your
truck, would you rely on what the police pulled out of there?” Meek
said he believes complacency in the department about evidence
management procedures was largely to blame for the controversy. He said
the vast majority of officers pursue a career in law enforcement “for
the right reasons” and only a minuscule number — “0.1 percent” — would
be involved in something “dirty” or illegal. “Do
I think that that’s what was going on in the evidence room [at the
Santa Fe Police Department]? No,” he said. “But you don’t have
accountability, so someone could’ve easily pulled evidence from the
shelf and threw it away and pulled it out of the computer system, and no
one would know.”
The entire story can be read at:
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;
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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