Charges dismissed after state lab mix-up

A foren­sic scientist’s worst night­mare — get­ting sam­ples (or sam­ple results) mixed up.

Don’t say it can’t hap­pen, just hope it only hap­pens as rarely as it is discovered/reported. It very well might be much more common.

Original arti­cle posted here.

Tooele County pros­e­cu­tors on Wednesday dis­missed auto­mo­bile homi­cide charges against a Tooele man after dis­cov­er­ing a mix-up at a state laboratory.

Charges against Steven D. Jakeman, 43, were filed after the Utah Bureau of Forensic Toxicology reported the results of his blood test incor­rectly, lead­ing pros­e­cu­tors to believe he had been drunk when a dump truck he was dri­ving col­lided with a UPS truck Dec. 1.

The UPS dri­ver, 54-year-old Alan Christopherson, of West Jordan, was killed in the crash at the inter­sec­tion of State Roads 36 and 138.

Utah Highway Patrol offi­cers took a blood sam­ple at the scene and sent it to the Bureau of Forensic Toxicology for analy­sis, said pros­e­cu­tor Gary K. Searle.

The results came back with a blood-alcohol con­tent of 0.19, nearly 2½ times the legal limit. On Dec. 31, Jakeman was arrested and later charged with auto­mo­bile homicide.

But Jakeman said he wasn’t drunk, and wit­nesses and UHP offi­cers also raised doubts, Searle said. A hos­pi­tal report con­firmed that he showed no signs of drunk­en­ness. He was released six days after his arrest.

The blood sam­ple was re-tested at a pri­vate lab, and it came back show­ing no alco­hol. The sam­ple was then tested again at the tox­i­col­ogy lab with the same result.

It turned out that an ana­lyst mis­read a numer­i­cal code iden­ti­fy­ing the sam­ple and labeled it incor­rectly, likely right after the blood sam­ple was received, bureau direc­tor Gambrelli
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Layco said. While the blood was ana­lyzed cor­rectly, the lab passed along the results of a dif­fer­ent case.

The ana­lyst respon­si­ble has been assigned to a dif­fer­ent rota­tion, and the lab will change its pro­ce­dures so ana­lysts will check the label­ing three more times, Layco said. It was the first such inci­dent for the lab, she said.

The auto­mo­bile homi­cide charges were dis­missed, though Jakeman may be charged with fail­ure to yield, a class C mis­de­meanor, Searle said.

Defense attor­ney Danny Quintana, said his client feels vin­di­cated, but the mix-up was “a human error.”

“Our prayers go out to the fam­ily of the indi­vid­ual that died,” he said.