Colorado Springs Metro Crime Lab Blood Alcohol Results WRONG.

Numerous news sources in Colorado are report­ing about a series of erro­neously high blood alco­hol results in DUI cases that were reported by the crime lab. The Colorado Gazette pub­lished the following:

Prosecutors have begun con­tact­ing lawyers for 82 defen­dants whose drunken dri­ving charges were based in part upon incor­rect blood alco­hol tests by the Colorado Springs police crime lab.

In each of the cases, test results reported by the foren­sic chemist unit of the Metro Crime Lab were higher that the actual results, police offi­cials dis­closed Friday.

The Examiner.com reports this:

It is unknown how much impact the inac­cu­rate tests have had on crim­i­nal con­vic­tions this year. According to the Gazette, pros­e­cu­tors are con­tact­ing lawyers for the defen­dants affected by the incor­rect test results. The Revenue Department has already restored the dri­ving priv­i­leges of at least three indi­vid­u­als who had been con­victed of drunken dri­ving as a result of the faulty results.

Several Colorado author­i­ties includ­ing the Bureau of Investigations and the Police Internal Affairs depart­ment are inves­ti­gat­ing the sit­u­a­tion to deter­mine what went wrong.

KRDO (a local ABC affil­i­ate) reported:

“We’re going to have them retested. They’re going to be retested by an inde­pen­dent lab­o­ra­tory, that’s going to be CBI (Colorado Bureau of Investigation),” said El Paso/Teller County Assistant District Attorney Dan Zook. “On those cases that are retested, if those indi­vid­u­als are still over the limit, we’ll pros­e­cute them, if they’re not, we won’t.”

The thing to take away from this report is that THIS time the lab caught their error, and sam­ples are being re-analyzed. The impor­tant thing to remem­ber, is that they will be re-analyzed by an inde­pen­dent crime lab. This is where Forensics Guy, Inc. and Forensic Analysis Consulting Services, Inc. can help. Feel free to con­tact us with ques­tions about how we can meet your inde­pen­dent foren­sic sci­ence needs. Whether you are a police agency, pros­e­cu­tor, defense attor­ney, or pri­vate cit­i­zen, we can help.

4 comments to Colorado Springs Metro Crime Lab Blood Alcohol Results WRONG.

  • Mind blow­ing stuff. If it was not machine error, what do you believe was the spe­cific cause of the prob­lem (besides blind faith in gov­ern­ment testing)?

  • I really don’t have enough data to iden­tify the prob­lem in these cases. It would be nice to get tran­scripts of inter­views or tes­ti­mony from lab­o­ra­tory staff to under­stand how they dis­cov­ered the errors.
    Basically errors in blood alco­hol analy­sis can be bro­ken down into three major categories:

    1) Collection and preser­va­tion. Most blood sam­ples are drawn by med­ical staff (not in Arizona where we have police offi­cers who will per­form this). The issue with med­ical employ­ees doing the draw­ing, is that in med­ical blood alco­hol analy­sis, they use a type of blood col­lec­tion tube that is designed to cause the blood to clot. In foren­sic test­ing, clot­ting can lead to incor­rect results which are biased high. One of the major tube man­u­fac­turer warns that if the blood sam­ple is not prop­erly han­dled imme­di­ately after the draw, clump­ing, clot­ting, or erro­neous results can be obtained.

    2) Storage. Incorrect stor­age con­di­tions can have adverse effects on the blood alco­hol level in the tubes while they are wait­ing to be ana­lyzed. This gen­er­ally takes a while, so it is highly depen­dent on the stor­age tem­per­a­ture, and stor­age dura­tion. Depending on the cir­cum­stances, the blood alco­hol read­ing can go up or down with improper stor­age conditions.

    3) Human error. This is pri­mar­ily at the var­i­ous stages of sam­ple prepa­ra­tion before instru­men­tal analy­sis. There area vari­ety of things an ana­lyst can do wrong, that can cause a result to be biased higher or lower than actual.

    If we knew in the cases dis­cussed in the arti­cle were very con­sis­tent, it would be a good guess there was a sys­tem­atic error. These could be prob­lems with one of the instru­ments used to ana­lyze or pre­pare the sam­ples, bad stan­dards (con­trols or cal­i­bra­tors), or var­i­ous con­t­a­m­i­na­tion sources.

    There is also the pos­si­bil­ity it could have a reoc­cur­ring prob­lem with one par­tic­u­lar ana­lyst who was new, or just had bad lab­o­ra­tory practices.

    Worst case sce­nario is there was no gen­eral pat­tern of occur­rence. These are very dif­fi­cult to trou­bleshoot, but very rare.

    We’ll just have to wait and see. Hopefully the lab will fully dis­close the source of the prob­lem, so that other labs around the coun­try can eval­u­ate their own ana­lyt­i­cal sys­tems to see if they are poten­tially vul­ner­a­ble to the same error.

  • […] Colorado Springs metro crime lab’s blood alco­hol results were just plain wrong. […]

  • […] Colorado Springs metro crime lab’s blood alco­hol results were just plain wrong. […]

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