Friday, April 30, 2021

Beleaguered Hinton Lab: Massachusetts: Annie Dookhan; Sonja Farak: How does a District Attorney drop tens of thousands of convictions tied to the tainted state drug lab? Just watch Suffolk D.A. Rachael Collins, the Boston Globe (Reporter Maggie Mulvihill reports)..."Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins launched a historic effort Thursday to overturn charges in tens of thousands of criminal cases built on drug evidence she says were tainted by rampant mismanagement and misconduct at a now-shuttered state drug lab. Defense attorneys, academics, and staffers from across the criminal justice system gathered in a virtual meeting for Rollins’s inaugural “Hinton Lab Initiative” summit, embarking on a massive, yearlong attempt to remedy convictions tied to the largest drug lab scandal in US history. “This morning was a monumental first step where nearly 70 partners from every single part of the criminal justice system were on a call together to start the long process of recovery from a systemic failure,” Rollins told the Globe."


PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Rollins’s office has said more than 190,000 cases were processed through the facility between 2003 and 2012, and that approximately 74,848 test analyses could be tossed out. Dookhan pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence, including falsifying exam results and eyeballing drugs to judge their weight instead of actually testing them. She served less than three years in state prison. Farak pleaded guilty in 2014 to stealing drugs from the state lab in Amherst and was released after serving less than her full 18-month House of Correction sentence. The Hinton lab in Jamaica Plain was originally run by the state Department of Public Health before the State Police took over drug testing in 2012. The scandal started to unfold later that year and then-Governor Deval Patrick ordered the facility shuttered. The fallout from the scandal has percolated for years. Rollins unveiled her initiative last month, while moving to dismiss a heroin trafficker’s conviction because the drugs were tested at Hinton. The initiative only affects Suffolk County cases."


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STORY: "Suffolk DA kicks off effort to drop tens of thousands of convictions tied to tainted state drug lab, by Boston Globe Correspondent Maggie Mulvihill, published by  The Boston Globe on April 29, 2021.

GIST: "Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins launched a historic effort Thursday to overturn charges in tens of thousands of criminal cases built on drug evidence she says were tainted by rampant mismanagement and misconduct at a now-shuttered state drug lab.


Defense attorneys, academics, and staffers from across the criminal justice system gathered in a virtual meeting for Rollins’s inaugural “Hinton Lab Initiative” summit, embarking on a massive, yearlong attempt to remedy convictions tied to the largest drug lab scandal in US history.


“This morning was a monumental first step where nearly 70 partners from every single part of the criminal justice system were on a call together to start the long process of recovery from a systemic failure,” Rollins told the Globe.


About 20 minutes into the 90-minute videoconference, Rollins divided the attendees into groups and handed out assignments. One team was tasked with identifying convictions tied to evidence tested at the William A. Hinton State Laboratory Institute between May 2003 and August 2012, when disgraced chemists Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak worked there.


Another group will devise a strategy to dismiss the charges, and a third team will assist defendants whose convictions resulted in other adverse effects, such as immigration violations or enhanced sentences because of prior convictions. Others will work on a plan to ensure that such a crisis never occurs again in Massachusetts, Rollins said.


Rebecca Jacobstein, a Committee for Public Counsel Services attorney who took part in the strategy session, praised the effort.

“It’s a lot of work,” she said, “but it’s worth it because its meaningful to the people who get the relief.”


Rollins’s office has said more than 190,000 cases were processed through the facility between 2003 and 2012, and that approximately 74,848 test analyses could be tossed out.


Dookhan pleaded guilty in 2013 to tampering with evidence, including falsifying exam results and eyeballing drugs to judge their weight instead of actually testing them. She served less than three years in state prison.


Farak pleaded guilty in 2014 to stealing drugs from the state lab in Amherst and was released after serving less than her full 18-month House of Correction sentence.


The Hinton lab in Jamaica Plain was originally run by the state Department of Public Health before the State Police took over drug testing in 2012. The scandal started to unfold later that year and then-Governor Deval Patrick ordered the facility shuttered.


The fallout from the scandal has percolated for years. Rollins unveiled her initiative last month, while moving to dismiss a heroin trafficker’s conviction because the drugs were tested at Hinton.


The initiative only affects Suffolk County cases.


Earlier this week, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court rejected a request by Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan that the court review the adequacy of a state inspector general’s investigation into Hinton and consider vacating tens of thousands of drug cases statewide.


A 2014 investigation by Inspector General Glen A. Cunha — part of a 14-month, $6.2 million probe — concluded that Dookhan was the “sole bad actor” at the lab. But defense attorneys, judges, and prosecutors such as Ryan have since called for a broader examination.


Last month, Ryan pitched a potential systemic approach to a bulk dismissal of Hinton-tainted cases. But SJC Associate Justice David A. Lowy dismissed the request this week, stating the court oversees only the lower courts, not prosecutors. 

Lowy also said the high court provides advisory opinions to the governor, Governor’s Council, and the Legislature, but not to prosecutors.


But Lowy noted the gravity of the crisis and that the high court may yet be untangling the scandal, which to date has cost taxpayers $30 million.

Ryan said Thursday she is not giving up.


“The allegations of misconduct at the Hinton Lab have cast doubt on the integrity of cases statewide and the solution to this problem must reflect that by going beyond the cases in just one county,” Ryan said in an e-mail statement.


“While we are still exploring our options to move forward, we are determined to continue to pursue a comprehensive solution that not only addresses each defendant’s case but also addresses the collateral consequences.”


Rollins applauded Ryan for her resolve.

“Although she wasn’t successful, at least she was thinking big,” Rollins said.


State prosecutors have staked out different positions on the questions surrounding Hinton. Last month, Cape & Islands District Attorney Michael D. O’Keefe called the Hinton Lab Initiative a Rollins “political publicity stunt.”


Boston attorney Vince DeMore, who ran the Suffolk County District Attorney’s drug lab unit from 2012 to 2015, said the court is sending a message to the prosecutors to “get to the bottom” of the Hinton disaster. “The court seems to be saying, go litigate it, do an investigation, get to the bottom of it,” DeMore said. “It is not enough to dismiss the cases. The court wants to know what happened.""


The story can be read at:


https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/29/metro/suffolk-da-kicks-off-effort-drop-tens-thousands-convictions-tied-tainted-state-drug-lab/

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, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

Beleaguered DC Crime Lab...Bulletin: "Prosecutors say they are prepared to reexamine hundreds of open cases and convictions, if necessary, following a series of probes into the District’s crime lab, including an ongoing criminal investigation that centers on allegations that senior leaders concealed conflicting findings and pressured examiners to change results in a firearms case," WTOP (Reporter Jack Moore) reports..."Testifying at a marathon D.C. Council oversight roundtable Thursday on the operations of the troubled Department of Forensic Sciences, defense attorneys and prosecutors alike expressed grave concerns about the lab’s firearms casework and agency leadership. They ultimately suggested the allegations against the lab could upend the criminal justice system in D.C. The investigation into the lab, which is being carried out by the D.C. Office of Inspector General, is still ongoing and its findings have not yet been disclosed."


QUOTE OF THE DAY: "“I want to be clear about what’s at stake here: the integrity of scientific evidence in the District’s most serious criminal cases, faith in the validity of criminal convictions and public safety in the District of Columbia,” said D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine. He added, “This goes to the heart of the criminal justice system.”

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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Katerina Semyonova, special counsel for policy and litigation at the Public Defender Service, which represents people accused of crimes in D.C. who cannot afford lawyers, said she is “deeply concerned” by the allegations against the lab. She said they indicate the lab has “corrupted criminal trials, led to inadvisable plea agreements and deprived District residents, who are charged in the criminal legal system, of a fair process.” She said PDS doesn’t know how many cases have been affected by the multiple examiners whose work was flagged as either being faulty or subject to alleged management interference. To start with, Semyonova said PDS is asking the council to require the lab to disclose the names and cases of all defendants that were handled by those examiners. “It is likely that the uncovered information is only the tip of the iceberg,” Semyonova said. Jessica Willis, special counsel for forensics for the Public Defender Service, added, “I think right now we’re in a point of crisis — a crisis both for our clients who are sitting at the D.C. Jail, locked down 23 hours a day waiting for their trials in 2023, as well as for our clients who are currently in the Bureau of Prisons, because they’ve been convicted after a jury trial, where our attorneys and other defense attorneys didn’t have access to this information.”


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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Brown, the two men charged in the 2015 killings, are seeking to dismiss the indictments, pointing to the faulty ballistics analysis. Prosecutors have maintained that other evidence links each man to the killing in which he is charged. A hearing in D.C. Superior Court is set for June 2.


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STORY: "Probe of DC Crime Lab could 'blow up' criminal justice system," by reporter Jack Moore, published by WTOP News on April 30, 2021.

GIST: "Prosecutors say they are prepared to reexamine hundreds of open cases and convictions, if necessary, following a series of probes into the District’s crime lab, including an ongoing criminal investigation that centers on allegations that senior leaders concealed conflicting findings and pressured examiners to change results in a firearms case.


Testifying at a marathon D.C. Council oversight roundtable Thursday on the operations of the troubled Department of Forensic Sciences, defense attorneys and prosecutors alike expressed grave concerns about the lab’s firearms casework and agency leadership. They ultimately suggested the allegations against the lab could upend the criminal justice system in D.C.


The investigation into the lab, which is being carried out by the D.C. Office of Inspector General, is still ongoing and its findings have not yet been disclosed.


“I want to be clear about what’s at stake here: the integrity of scientific evidence in the District’s most serious criminal cases, faith in the validity of criminal convictions and public safety in the District of Columbia,” said D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine. He added, “This goes to the heart of the criminal justice system.”


Racine’s office, along with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., first launched an audit of the lab’s firearms casework last spring following the discovery of errors in a 2015 case in which several lab examiners linked cartridge casings from two different killings to the same gun.


‘Deeply troubling’ absence:

DFS Director Dr. Jenifer Smith, who has led the agency since 2015, did not testify before the committee.


Council member Charles Allen, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, voiced “extreme displeasure” at Smith’s absence, calling it “deeply troubling” that she didn’t appear before the committee to answer questions. He noted that she signed an oath under penalty of perjury when she was being confirmed to her post to appear before District lawmakers in response to any request.

Ad


Acting Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Chris Geldart, who was appointed to his post just three months ago, testified instead. He said the decision for him to appear before the committee instead of Smith was made by the mayor’s office.


In recent weeks, the deputy mayor said he has been “working to listen to anyone with concerns about DFS management and processes” and said he was interested in discussing “a way forward for the forensic science lab.”


In addition to the criminal probe, the lab had its accreditation to perform a wide array of forensic testing suspended earlier this month, halting some processing of evidence amid an ongoing spike in homicides in the District.


Geldart told the committee that the District has been informed by the ANSI National Accrediting Board that the lab’s accreditation would be withdrawn entirely on May 2, but that the lab planned to appeal the move.


The full withdrawal of lab accreditation comes just as jury trials in D.C. Superior Court are resuming following a pause during the coronavirus pandemic.


John Hill, chief of the Superior Court Division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said there are currently 900 pending cases that his office is prosecuting that rely in some form on DFS examination work.


“As trials resume, questions will have to be asked and answered regarding to what extent we rely upon the work that’s already been performed in those cases,” Hill said.


Racine, whose office prosecutes juvenile offenses in the District, said lawyers in his office are already doing preliminary work on what he said would be a “robust” review of convictions prosecuted by his office, in which DFS examiners conducted scientific analyses, identifying cases that will need to be looked into.


In addition, he said his office has six open juvenile homicide cases for which the District may have to hire costly private examiners to rework.


‘Tip of the iceberg?’

Katerina Semyonova, special counsel for policy and litigation at the Public Defender Service, which represents people accused of crimes in D.C. who cannot afford lawyers, said she is “deeply concerned” by the allegations against the lab. She said they indicate the lab has “corrupted criminal trials, led to inadvisable plea agreements and deprived District residents, who are charged in the criminal legal system, of a fair process.”


She said PDS doesn’t know how many cases have been affected by the multiple examiners whose work was flagged as either being faulty or subject to alleged management interference. To start with, Semyonova said PDS is asking the council to require the lab to disclose the names and cases of all defendants that were handled by those examiners.


“It is likely that the uncovered information is only the tip of the iceberg,” Semyonova said.

Jessica Willis, special counsel for forensics for the Public Defender Service, added, “I think right now we’re in a point of crisis — a crisis both for our clients who are sitting at the D.C. Jail, locked down 23 hours a day waiting for their trials in 2023, as well as for our clients who are currently in the Bureau of Prisons, because they’ve been convicted after a jury trial, where our attorneys and other defense attorneys didn’t have access to this information.”


The two cases in which the error was discovered — launching the initial investigation of the lab — are both now being challenged. Lawyers for Rondell McLeod and Joseph Brown, the two men charged in the 2015 killings, are seeking to dismiss the indictments, pointing to the faulty ballistics analysis. Prosecutors have maintained that other evidence links each man to the killing in which he is charged. A hearing in D.C. Superior Court is set for June 2.


In the broader ripple effect in the D.C. court system, federal prosecutors said the full impact was hard to discern since the inspector general’s investigation remains ongoing — and the review of casework carried out by the experts hired by prosecutors was stymied in part by the lab’s refusal to cooperate.


The lab had repeatedly pointed to its status as an independent agency in resisting cooperating with prosecutors’ audit.


Still, the experts’ final report, which was filed in D.C. Superior Court last month, alleged that several DFS examiners erred in linking the disputed cartridge casings to the same gun and that, when confronted by the error, lab managers sought to conceal conflicting conclusions, including an exculpatory finding — apparently only documented in a PowerPoint presentation for senior leaders — that concluded the casings had not been fired in the same gun.


“It was upon learning this information that we became deeply concerned that in addition to the firearms examination unit, we may not be able to use any evidence or witnesses from any part of DFS,” Racine told the committee.

He added later, “by no means was the purpose of the audit to blow up the criminal justice system.”


Some of the documents cited in the report, including the PowerPoint review, were only turned over to investigators after prosecutors subpoenaed the lab last year.


Complicated timeline:

Much of the hearing was spent reviewing the complicated timeline.

“If there was a mistake, we’re human, it happens,” Allen said. “That’s why you have multiple sets of eyes on things.”


Far more concerning, he said, was what he called a pattern of “very troubling leadership decisions,” all centered around the final week of April 2020. Based on documents and chain of custody records, on April 28, a firearms supervisor and another firearms examiner reexamined the disputed casings under a microscope and determined they were not fired in the same gun as the lab had originally concluded.


That finding was included in an April 30 PowerPoint presentation titled “Confidential Case Review” and apparently provided only to senior leaders at the lab and never disclosed outside the agency.


The next day, one of the examiners, who had originally worked the case in 2017, abruptly changed his finding to “inconclusive” with no supporting documentation, which he told investigators he felt  pressured to do while sitting in his manager’s office. A few days later, the “inconclusive” finding was reported to the lab’s accrediting board, according to the documents, and presented as the conclusion reached by the firearms supervisor after a full re-examination.


Only several days later, however, did the supervisor actually begin the re-examination that reported an “inconclusive” finding. The supervisor later told investigators he pushed to have an outside expert reexamine the case and that he felt “manipulated” by management into doing it himself.


“This one week … the end of April, beginning of May has significant impact on our entire criminal justice system,” Allen said.


When it came time for him to testify, Geldart, the deputy mayor, agreed that “there’s an issue” in the way the lab responded to the error, but he suggested the lab was following its quality corrective action plan when it completed multiple reviews of the evidence that were never disclosed outside the agency. “I’m not justifying that process,” he said. “I don’t agree with that process. And I agree with you that there’s an issue in that.”


Geldart said he asked DFS leadership about the examiner who changed his finding from his manager’s office.

“I specifically asked the question of the leadership of what happened here,” Geldart said. “And I did not get the answer that somebody was pressured — that they knew of.”



Geldart added, “My jury is out on that. And there, you know, I’m waiting for the corroborating (evidence) on that.”


Overall, the deputy mayor agreed that there were “some leadership issues” within the agency, but he said he was waiting on the inspector general probe “to come out and tell me exactly how far-reaching this is.”



At times appearing frustrated with Geldart’s responses, Allen said the hours of testimony Thursday pointed to a “significant leadership issue” that has gone unaddressed.


“Having sat through oversight hearings … where all of these issues have been minimized, I do not believe the DFS director has been forthright with me or this committee,” Allen said.


‘Sense of urgency’:

In another exchange about the lab’s troubles — Allen quipped at one point that he needed a “flow chart” to keep track of all of the problems — the council member questioned Geldart about the lab’s ability to process evidence given the loss of accreditation.


Geldart said he isn’t sure if the accrediting board will even consider the lab’s appeal, and he said he has “no idea” how long the process will take.


For now, the city is relying on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to process gun evidence from D.C. crime scenes and paying private labs to analyze DNA evidence.


However, the deputy mayor said the loss of accreditation doesn’t actually mean the lab has to stop conducting all forensic work.

“There’s a whole lot of laboratories and a whole lot of states that aren’t accredited,” Geldart said. “So it’s not like (if) you don’t have accreditation, can’t do the work.”


The legislation creating the agency in 2011 and setting out rules for how it can operate states: “The Department shall be accredited by an appropriate, bona fide national accrediting organization.”


When confronted with the statute language by Allen, Geldart said, “I’ll have to go and look at that,” and later said, “That can be interpreted, council member, you can interpret that how you want.”


At one point, Geldart claimed the lab didn’t achieve accreditation until 2017. A news release on DFS’ own website indicates the lab was first accredited in 2013, about a year after the lab opened, and that accreditation is mandated in the District.


Geldart later agreed the suspension of accreditation was a problem.


“We have to be accredited; we have to have a respected laboratory,” he said. “And we have to get to the bottom of all this, and I share the sense of urgency.”


Allen’s committee also heard from a union representative, who represents rank-and-file DFS employees.


LaToya McDowney, the local union president with the National Association of Government Employees, shared concerns regarding “mismanagement, unethical behavior and a lack of transparency” in the agency’s management. She said the agency has retaliated against employees in the past for speaking out and sharing their concerns, and she described the atmosphere as a “toxic workplace.”


Allen said he understands that workplace perceptions of management often vary but that his office, too, has received complaints of an “allegedly hostile work environment at DFS where employees do not speak out for fear of reprisal or punishment by senior leadership.”


The entire story can be read at:


https://thecrimereport.org/2021/04/30/probe-of-dc-crime-lab-could-upend-districts-criminal-justice-systems/

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;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;

Houston Forensic Science Center: The Christian Science Monitor reports (Reporter Henry Gass) on how a crime lab once referred to as "the worse in the country" became "a model of reform." (We will be watching! HL);



QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Why we wrote this: "Hollywood portrays forensic science as nearly infallible. It isn't. Now a Houston lab has become a model of reform, boosting trust in this critical part of the justice system." Christian Science Monitor.

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QUOTE TWO OF THE DAY: "If HFSC has a crown jewel, it’s the seven-person (and all-female) quality division. And if the lab has a standout innovation, it’s the division’s blind testing program. Each year, lab scientists create hundreds of pieces of fake evidence or meticulously fill burner phones with false content like apps, social media posts, and texts to probe for flaws in how the lab is functioning. “No other lab in the world has done that,” says Brandon Garrett, a Duke University law professor and author of “Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics.” 


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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Popular culture has long portrayed the world of forensic science as technologically sleek, staffed by bespectacled scientists in lab coats, ingeniously analyzing evidence – and almost never making mistakes. In reality, despite the existential stakes, many of these laboratories have lacked proper accreditation and oversight; been staffed by overworked, underfunded, and underqualified analysts; and been mired in scandal. And all this has contributed to cases where innocent people were convicted and guilty people walked free. The Houston Police Department (HPD) had one such lab – consumed by years of mismanagement, neglect, and corruption – out of which grew the reform effort that is HFSC. (Houston Forensic Science Center).

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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "The “CSI” problem:  “Concentrate on what cannot lie: the evidence.”  With that simple statement in the pilot episode of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” lead character Gil Grissom voices perhaps the greatest myth about forensic science: its certainty. For decades forensic science has been held up – and has held itself up – as nearly infallible. Did this hair come from that head? Or this bullet from that gun? The crime labs would know. But did they?: Certainty crumbled in 2009, with the seismic conclusion of a National Academy of Sciences report: When it came to “matching” evidence from a crime to a specific individual or source, no forensic method besides nuclear DNA analysis has “the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty” make those matching claims. “We’ve made assumptions and given latitude to less-than-rigorous work,” says Dr. Stout. “It’s part of why people don’t trust the justice system.”


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PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: “Tucked away in a police department, [the lab] might not be a very high priority,” says Sandra Thompson, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who spent seven years on HFSC’s board. The old HPD crime lab wasn’t just tucked away; it was getting rained on. “We were stuck in a closet like mushrooms; nobody ever looked at us,” says James Miller, whose 31-year career straddles the old lab and the new, where he heads the seized drugs division. A leaky roof went unfixed for years, soaking and destroying evidence. The backlog of untested rape kits hit 6,600 at one point, with one victim waiting five years to have hers tested. Senior positions went unfilled, and when misconduct was discovered, punishment was usually lenient.  An independent investigation of the HPD lab uncovered four cases between 1998 and 2000 of “dry labbing” (fabrication of or tampering with evidence, a cardinal sin for scientists). In 2003 The New York Times asked if the HPD crime lab was the worst in the country, or if – more troublingly – it was “typical.” Evidence since then suggests it wasn’t unusual.  The biggest scandal of them all is still unfolding in Massachusetts, where tens of thousands of criminal charges have been dropped because of misconduct by two former state chemists eight years ago.  St. Paul, Minnesota, closed its crime lab in 2012 after investigations found “major” errors in nearly every aspect of the lab’s work. In 2015 the FBI admitted to presenting flawed testimony on hair fiber comparisons in court for decades. But as bad as the intentional misconduct is, systemic flaws – underfunding and lack of oversight and standards – are bigger problems, experts say. Reform on that scale takes time, Dr. Stout knows, but he points to the HPD lab. It’s the “archetype of the failed laboratory,” and it was fixed."


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STORY: "CSI Houston: How a Texas lab has remade the science of forensics,"  by Henry Gass, published by The Christian Science Monitor on April 26, 2021. (Henry Gass, Texas Correspondent, joined the Monitor as an intern 2014, often reporting on criminal justice and environmental issues. He has became Texas Correspondent in September 2017. Thanks to 'The Crime Report' for bringing this story to our attention. HL): 

GIST: "We don’t know who the woman was, but we know she was sitting in the pickup truck when the burglary went south. 


We know it was a September afternoon in 1977, when Cornelia and Ivan Stout returned home to find the truck in their driveway. We know the burglary soon turned into a murder: Ms. Stout was beaten unconscious, and her husband beaten to death with his own .22-caliber rifle – almost certainly by Kenneth Felder, who was shot and killed later that night and had Mr. Stout’s wallet in his pocket.

But here the truth gets murky: Who was the woman in the pickup truck?


Police found a couple of fingerprints on the truck – prints they said belonged to Cherrie Ann Porter. A jury believed them and convicted her of murder.

Ms. Porter may have never been there at all. After four years in prison, her conviction was overturned due to insufficient evidence: A couple of fingerprints were not enough.


To this day it’s unclear if justice in the case has been served or denied. Those decades of uncertainty and trauma might have driven the victim’s grandson to become a cop or a prosecutor. But Peter Stout couldn’t stop thinking about those fingerprints. He became a forensic scientist.

“It weighs on me having had a family that may have been complicit, or participatory, in a wrongful conviction,” says Dr. Stout. “And all that revolved around forensic evidence.”


His life has been defined by a quixotic search to bring scientific truth to the justice system, a search that has led him to the cutting edge of criminal justice reform, heading what some call the nation’s most advanced and innovative crime lab, the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC).


Forensic science is a civilizing force, Dr. Stout believes, because nothing can deliver truth, fairness, and equity to the criminal justice system better than the hard evidence crime labs can unearth and verify.


He sees the criminal justice system as a complex quagmire so rife with human error he isn’t surprised that 9 in 10 Americans want it reformed. In that quagmire, he says, are kernels of hard truth – and in forensic science he sees the best hope of finding them. It can offer “a just result,” he says, “something that actually is fair, evenhanded, and reflects, as close as you can understand, the actual truth.”


Forensic science failed Dr. Stout in his grandfather’s case. It compounded his uncertainty about other brushes with violence he says he experienced early in his life – from an improbable Mafia war in his middle-class Denver neighborhood to his yearslong  sexual abuse by a neighbor. 


A violent act, Dr. Stout knows better than most, can echo for generations – far beyond just the victim and perpetrator. But while he’s emerged with a successful and comfortable life, he doesn’t want forensic science failing anyone else.


Unashamedly nerdy: 

In a quiet corner office at HFSC, Dr. Stout does the numbers. 


Through the window, downtown Houston sprawls around him, a bottomless pit of casework. The lab produces about 100 reports every day, and each report is about a crime. Each crime touches about 20 people, he estimates, so that’s about 2,000 lives the lab affects each day. “Across a year, we alter hundreds of thousands of people’s lives,” he says. “The ongoing impact of that – that is the difference of whether civilization becomes more civilized or not.”


Popular culture has long portrayed the world of forensic science as technologically sleek, staffed by bespectacled scientists in lab coats, ingeniously analyzing evidence – and almost never making mistakes.


In reality, despite the existential stakes, many of these laboratories have lacked proper accreditation and oversight; been staffed by overworked, underfunded, and underqualified analysts; and been mired in scandal. And all this has contributed to cases where innocent people were convicted and guilty people walked free.


The Houston Police Department (HPD) had one such lab – consumed by years of mismanagement, neglect, and corruption – out of which grew the reform effort that is HFSC.


Indeed, HFSC represents a nerdy brand of criminal justice reform – filled with jargon, acronyms, and huge implications.

Scientific evidence “is disproportionately persuasive evidence, and in that disproportionate power comes an awful lot of responsibility,” says Dr. Stout. “I’m not sure we’ve done a particularly good job historically of treating it appropriately.”


That may now be changing. Turning around one lab doesn’t turn around an entire justice system, he knows, but it’s a good start to a long journey.


The lab now operates independently, outside of – and on an equal footing with – police, prosecutors, and other players in Houston’s justice system. The 208-person staff – three-quarters of which is female, with an average age of 32 – works out of four floors and a few basement rooms in a glass-and-concrete tower shared with the district attorney’s office. Its about $30 million budget funds a “full service” laboratory, with sections for toxicology, DNA, firearms, and latent prints, among other disciplines.


And besides processing evidence for America’s fourth-largest city, HFSC has produced innovations – big and small – that are setting industry standards. It’s working with academics – and publishing research – to improve the validity and reliability of forensic disciplines. It’s a global leader on quality control – the practice of detecting mistakes and ensuring they don’t happen again.


“The Houston lab is really doing something special and unique. ... It’s almost a unicorn among crime labs,” says Jessica Gabel Cino, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law.


In many respects, HFSC is an outlier among the country’s roughly 400 crime labs. Most remain inside law enforcement agencies, with constrained budgets and staff. Yet they all produce evidence and testimony that are disproportionately persuasive because they come from the presumably precise and hermetically sealed world of forensic science.


The “CSI” problem: 

“Concentrate on what cannot lie: the evidence.” 

With that simple statement in the pilot episode of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” lead character Gil Grissom voices perhaps the greatest myth about forensic science: its certainty.

For decades forensic science has been held up – and has held itself up – as nearly infallible. Did this hair come from that head? Or this bullet from that gun? The crime labs would know.



But did they?: 

Certainty crumbled in 2009, with the seismic conclusion of a National Academy of Sciences report: When it came to “matching” evidence from a crime to a specific individual or source, no forensic method besides nuclear DNA analysis has “the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty” make those matching claims.


“We’ve made assumptions and given latitude to less-than-rigorous work,” says Dr. Stout. “It’s part of why people don’t trust the justice system.”


The kicker is that no forensic discipline may ever be 100% reliable. But compared with nonscientific forms of evidence – such as eyewitness testimony, which is now widely questioned – forensics “is closer to [being] that kernel of truth,” he says. That uncertainty should in fact be comforting, he adds.


“We are wickedly prone to believing absolute statements,” he continues. “Evidence that should carry much more weight comes with that hard but very necessary conversation about ... its limitations.”


Ultimately, reforming forensic science needs both practical and cultural shifts, from improving standards and procedures to embracing uncertainty and limitations. Analysts being clear about what they know – and don’t know – is especially critical given the weight juries give scientific evidence.






“We have to take the responsibility to produce [forensic evidence] as rigorously as we can,” says Dr. Stout. “Because the number of trials that swing on one piece of physical evidence is really terrifying.”


Beyond the yellow tape:

The body has been in the dumpster for a few hours at least – maybe a dozen. It’s a male, and he was shot – maybe in the head. 


The dumpster sits under a warm, overcast February sky, behind a Brutalist strip mall in an industrial corner of Houston’s west side. The buzz of highway traffic fills the air.


Two Houston police detectives in shirts and ties orbit the dumpster, which is cordoned off by yellow tape. They pause every few moments to study some new detail or jot down notes. A dumpster is a logical place to dispose of a body, but maybe not in front of the store surveillance camera trained on it. After reviewing the footage with a police detective, investigators from HFSC’s crime scene unit (CSU) put up a narrower cordon of red tape.


Of all the reforms HFSC is cultivating, the red tape is a small but significant one. It marks the most sensitive area of a crime scene; you can’t cross it unless you’re in full protective gear. It’s a product of the CSU becoming fully civilianized, not staffed by police officers like it was in the past – and like many CSUs still are.


Crime scenes are where investigations start. It’s where the first mistakes can be made, and where the first biases can take root. Having a civilian CSU on scene has let confidence and trust permeate the justice system, says Stacey Mitchell, chair of the HFSC board of directors. In the past “we had officers investigating officer-involved shootings,” she adds. “Because we have civilianized crime scene investigators who are specially trained, [now] everyone is confident that the evidence is the evidence.”


Forensic information travels through a long, meticulous chain of custody, however, and a more secure and expertly managed crime scene doesn’t eliminate the possibility of mistakes down the line.


Which is why HFSC’s most lauded reform has nothing to do with the collection or testing of actual evidence. It’s the testing of the lab itself. 


Faking evidence, with purpose" 

Last year, to verify what the forensic biology division was doing, an HFSC analyst needed some fake evidence. Uncontaminated female DNA, to be precise. So she lifted her hair, swabbed the back of her neck, and sealed it like genuine crime scene evidence in a container to send to the lab.


A well-functioning research facility with well-trained staff would be expected to analyze it and find only female DNA. So when the final analysis revealed a mix of female and male DNA, the analyst had to investigate.


The male DNA ended up being from the husband of the analyst who swabbed her neck – the first of three cases that year of HFSC accidentally contaminating its own “blind test.” Dr. Stout is now considering publishing a paper about it to teach DNA analysts around the country how easy it can be to contaminate samples.


If HFSC has a crown jewel, it’s the seven-person (and all-female) quality division. And if the lab has a standout innovation, it’s the division’s blind testing program. Each year, lab scientists create hundreds of pieces of fake evidence or meticulously fill burner phones with false content like apps, social media posts, and texts to probe for flaws in how the lab is functioning.


“No other lab in the world has done that,” says Brandon Garrett, a Duke University law professor and author of “Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics.” 


Of the 25,000 requests the lab completes each year, about 5% are blind tests. That’s a ratio hand-picked by Dr. Stout – frequent enough that analysts expect them, infrequent enough to be hard to predict. Other labs may do a handful a year, and most don’t do this at all.

The constant surveillance could make for a toxic workplace. 


But Dr. Stout and the lab’s department heads make it a friendly cat-and-mouse game throughout HFSC. Analysts who identify a blind test win a Starbucks gift card. Those who don’t owe Dr. Stout $1. 


More importantly, the lab has normalized a workplace culture that sees mistakes as inevitable and as opportunities to improve, not punish.


“Without that quality check, your answer, even though you have it ... isn’t necessarily the right answer,” says Erika Ziemak, director of the quality division. “Part of what we do every day [is] making sure that we are, as [Dr. Stout] says, the right answer at the right time.”


Independence days:

But the foundation of it all is the parity HFSC enjoys in Houston’s justice system. Independence from law enforcement was key to the city’s creation of HFSC in 2014. But in spinning off HPD’s crime lab and CSU to form the center, Houston officials went even further: giving HFSC a corporate, quasi-governmental structure.


Dr. Stout’s official title is president and chief executive officer, and he reports to a diverse nine-member board of directors of scientists, lawyers, police, and those wrongfully convicted. The board reports to local government the way police and prosecutors do, making their own personnel decisions and budget requests.


The result is not only that a scientist, rather than a law enforcement officer, is in charge, but also that the facility has a bigger budget with a larger, higher-paid, better-equipped staff than most crime labs. And there’s less bureaucracy: Dr. Stout can tinker himself with a new gadget – a drone – to help CSU digitally map crime scenes, which in turn reduces time on-site so they can respond to more than the meager 1% of aggravated assaults they got to last year. And he can provide suitable mental health support for staff members who are exposed daily to the unfiltered horrors of society.


“Tucked away in a police department, [the lab] might not be a very high priority,” says Sandra Thompson, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center who spent seven years on HFSC’s board.


The old HPD crime lab wasn’t just tucked away; it was getting rained on.


“We were stuck in a closet like mushrooms; nobody ever looked at us,” says James Miller, whose 31-year career straddles the old lab and the new, where he heads the seized drugs division.


A leaky roof went unfixed for years, soaking and destroying evidence. The backlog of untested rape kits hit 6,600 at one point, with one victim waiting five years to have hers tested. Senior positions went unfilled, and when misconduct was discovered, punishment was usually lenient.


 An independent investigation of the HPD lab uncovered four cases between 1998 and 2000 of “dry labbing” (fabrication of or tampering with evidence, a cardinal sin for scientists).


In 2003 The New York Times asked if the HPD crime lab was the worst in the country, or if – more troublingly – it was “typical.” Evidence since then suggests it wasn’t unusual. 


The biggest scandal of them all is still unfolding in Massachusetts, where tens of thousands of criminal charges have been dropped because of misconduct by two former state chemists eight years ago.


 St. Paul, Minnesota, closed its crime lab in 2012 after investigations found “major” errors in nearly every aspect of the lab’s work. In 2015 the FBI admitted to presenting flawed testimony on hair fiber comparisons in court for decades.


But as bad as the intentional misconduct is, systemic flaws – underfunding and lack of oversight and standards – are bigger problems, experts say. Reform on that scale takes time, Dr. Stout knows, but he points to the HPD lab. It’s the “archetype of the failed laboratory,” and it was fixed.


“It’s not easy, but you can actually make a difference,” he adds. “You can get to a point where people begin to start trusting what comes out of [labs] again.”


Light in the darkness:

Dr. Stout still doesn’t have an elevator pitch for a politician on the importance of forensic science. It’s just too Byzantine.


But if he could take the stairs with a government official, he’d probably talk about his own journey. They would have to walk up the 18 flights to HFSC’s top floor. Slowly.


What happened with his grandfather and Ms. Porter changed his life forever, but he’d already had more exposure to violence than your average preteen. A neighbor was gunned down in a mob hit when he was 3 years old – an age where you might think you imagined something like that. For a long time Dr. Stout did.


That Mafia war in his Denver suburb did happen. But much of his younger years, after his grandfather’s murder, remain wreathed in darkness. His family had all retreated into private shells of grief. No one was really looking out for him, he says, and for several years a neighborhood boy sexually assaulted him.


He doesn’t remember much – in part because he doesn’t want to. But as he’s grown older, as his forensic science career has progressed, he says he’s begun to see through the darkness with a bit more clarity. It’s made him think about trauma, and how it changes memories and lives. It’s made him think differently about those fingerprints on that truck in 1977.


He won’t ever know if Ms. Porter was in that truck. And he may never want to shine a light on every dark trauma in his past. But now he hopes that the forensic science lab he runs can provide a clarity he never enjoyed.


“I keep having to come back to look for those little crystalline facts to try and ground my fractured and fragmented memories,” he says. “I get a lot of assurance out of those facts. And I think what that has led me to is: Others have to have that same thing.” 


The entire story can be read at:


https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2021/0423/CSI-Houston-How-a-Texas-lab-has-remade-the-science-of-forensics

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, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions.   They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they’ve exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;