PHOTO CAPTION: "The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department was still trying to determine how many cases could have been affected by the faulty tests."
GIST: "Los Angeles County will retest about 4,000 DNA samples connected to criminal cases after discovering that it had been using potentially defective test kits to collect evidence for several months, Sheriff Robert Luna said in a statement this week.
The kits were “prone to intermittently poor performance,” the sheriff said on Wednesday, and were used on thousands of samples from July 2024 through February 2025 even though the manufacturer of the tests informed the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in an Aug. 28 letter that the tests could lead to incomplete results, the sheriff said.
The department was still trying to determine how many cases could have been affected by the faulty tests.
According to the statement, the department was not aware of the letter until Monday, when a supervisor with its scientific services bureau realized that it had been sent to a person who was no longer employed by the Sheriff’s Department. The department has begun an internal investigation, the sheriff said.
“The Scientific Services Bureau is actively assessing how many cases may have been impacted and to what degree,” Sheriff Luna added, noting that the faulty tests would also affect other law enforcement agencies, as well as the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
In a statement posted on social media, the Los Angeles County public defender, Ricardo D. García, said that the use of the faulty kits had a “far-reaching impact on countless pending and adjudicated cases.”
He added, “This kind of negligence is a violation of due process and further erodes trust in the entire criminal legal system.”
The Sheriff’s Department did not supply a copy of the letter or the name of the test kit manufacturer. It also did not provide further information about the employee who first received the letter, nor when the employee left the department. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has about 18,000 employees, says it is the largest in the nation.
“Based on the information provided by the DNA testing kit manufacturer, the use of the affected kits may have led to incomplete or suboptimal results but is not likely to have falsely identified any individual,” Sheriff Luna said in the statement. The department plans to retest the approximately 4,000 samples, he added, though he acknowledged that “certain samples may not be able to be retested due to their limited sample size.”
Nathan Hochman, the Los Angeles County district attorney, said in the statement issued by the Sheriff’s Department that his office was working to “assess the scope of the situation” so that anyone affected could make informed decisions about their cases.
“We will follow the facts in whichever direction they take us on any individual case and make decisions that are in full accordance with the law on how to remedy any particular situation that requires such remediation,” Mr. Hochman said.
His office did not immediately respond to a request for additional information about the faulty tests on Thursday.
Defective DNA tests, or those that are misused, can delay investigations and sometimes, implicate innocent people. One 2018 study showed that crime laboratories were likely to implicate an innocent person in a hypothetical bank robbery when they relied on DNA testing. Human errors have also led to major mistakes involving DNA evidence used in criminal cases.
Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor and criminal justice scholar at Duke University, said that the faulty tests call attention to the lack of regulation when it comes to DNA testing in criminal cases.
The fact that the manufacturer did not appear to have checked that its message had been received by the Sheriff’s Department, and that those conducting the tests didn’t detect any issues independently, he added, also raised questions.
“There’s this larger problem that quality controls just do not exist in the world of forensics like they do in the world of medicine,” Professor Garrett said."
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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/
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/
——————————————————————————————
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;
