Government Technology - July 2008 - (Page 32)

Biggest Crime Labs Have Big Budgets The 50 biggest publicly funded forensic crime laboratories employed the equivalent of 4,350 full-time employees in 2002, according to a U.S. Department of Justice survey. Forty-three of the 50 biggest labs also reported financial data: The median annual budget was $5.2 million. Unsurprisingly salaries were reported as the bulk of expenditures. Training was less than 1 percent of budgets. Source: U.S. Department of Justice Statistics, Ofﬁce of Justice Programs necessary or advisable practice, limiting the possibility for retesting. Though most of the errors can be attributed to sloppiness, incompetence and lack of training, Thompson found that the lab ordinarily erred on the prosecution’s side. Lab analysts cut corners by not using control samples to make sure there was no cross-contamination shown to be doing bad work over the last 10 to 15 years,” Thompson said. “Once the well funded private attorneys would win their cases, things would go back to normal — the rest of the lawyers wouldn’t pick up on that and take advantage of the insight to do their own work.” The defense attorneys can’t be absolved of blame in the problems with some of the cases, but even Munier admitted the defense is playing with a different deck of cards because it doesn’t have equal access to the lab tests. “Our procedures in Texas are more streamlined and the discovery process is more restrictive, so defense attorneys didn’t DNA labs is there’s such propaganda surrounding DNA testing.” William Thompson, professor, University of California, Irvine “No lab is perfect, and part of the problem with between two samples — a common problem in crime labs. “When I started looking at this, that was the first thing I saw,” Thompson said. “Where are the controls? The answer is they didn’t have any.” No Safeguards And there was nobody to review or catch the problems — no safeguards in the system. “To the extent that labs are doing bad lab work, there’s a whole series of points at which that should be caught,” Thompson said. “The criminal justice system in Houston, and much of Texas, doesn’t really function effectively to screen and evaluate scientific evidence, or probably many other kinds of evidence.” Thompson said there were times when well funded defense lawyers would file discovery motions and go to court to get access to lab materials and hire their own lab experts to test the materials. In many cases, they found problems. “So it wasn’t that nobody knew the lab was doing bad work, because the lab had been JULY_08 get to see all the stuff from the laboratory until trial sometimes,” Munier said. “Were there times when the defense attorney should have looked closely at [the evidence] and said, ‘I want this tested’ but didn’t have it tested? Probably. Were there times when the judge said, ‘Sorry, we’re going to go to trial anyway’? Probably. “It’s not good. In hindsight, you could say, ‘No, they should see the stuff so they can have an expert look at it and say you’ve got some problems,’” Munier continued. “All these things played a part in the train wreck, and then you have the police department, where the crime lab is seen as the stepchild: They don’t fund it. They don’t have enough staff. It’s like the perfect storm.” The HPD did not respond to a request for an interview. A Cry for Independence One solution for crime labs is to operate more independently of the police department and the DA’s office. Crime analysts are given evidence from a crime and usually told to look for something in particular. When the evidence or lab test results are unclear, the analysts might have incentive to find results favoring the police’s case. “I think forensic labs get a little bit caught up in the heat of the battle from our adversarial process,” Thompson said. “It’s like team spirit. They see the defense counsel as their enemy and tend to be kind of secretive and not want to disclose things outside of the family.” Another problem for crime labs, Munier said, is they don’t have the resources or time to test every bit of evidence. “When you have 50 pieces of evidence, what do you test and what do you look for if you’re not told?” She suggested giving the state some items to test and saving some for the defense. “Where you say, ‘We’re going to test a few items for [the state] and provide items for the defense.’ It’s an enormous problem and it’s everywhere.” There is plenty of shared blame, but part of it stems from a misunderstanding of DNA evidence. “No lab is perfect, and part of the problem with DNA labs is there’s such propaganda surrounding DNA testing,” Thompson said. “People are routinely claiming that it’s infallible.” He said anytime new scientific evidence is admitted into the legal system, it undergoes screening for admissibility. Proponents of the new science go overboard in advocating for it to the point that they claim it’s error-free. “In fact, that was never true,” Thompson said. “Like anything else, you can mislabel the samples or misinterpret the result.” Munier said there has been a large learning curve associated with the use of DNA in Houston and everywhere else. “Most of the training we got was internal, and nobody around here knew much about DNA,” she said. “We weren’t trained adequately about the emerging science of DNA and neither were the defense attorneys. There were a few hired experts who helped them, but that was 32 http://www.govtech.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - July 2008

Government Technology - July 2008 Point of View The Last Mile Big Picture On the Scene Four Questions for ... Generation 2.0 at Work Dangerous Convenience Tainted Justice? Are You Ready? E-Discovery Basics Smart Docs Advanced Math Online Video Blues Spectrum Personal Computing Products signal:noise

Government Technology - July 2008

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