Detroit Police Suspend Firearms Testing

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DETROIT (AP) — The Detroit Police Department has sus­pended all firearms inves­ti­ga­tions con­ducted by its crime lab and ordered it to undergo an inde­pen­dent audit.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy also has ordered an audit of all of her office’s files that resulted in a trial or a guilty plea that relied upon the crime lab’s findings.

Worthy says a defense attor­ney noti­fied her two weeks ago about “sig­nif­i­cant dis­crep­an­cies” in firearm evi­dence reviewed by the crime lab in two homi­cide cases and sev­eral other cases.

She says that in one case, the crime lab con­cluded that more than 40 fired bul­let cas­ings came from a sin­gle weapon but sub­se­quent tests showed they came from at least two dif­fer­ent guns.

FROM DETROIT POLICE

Approximately two weeks ago a defense attor­ney brought infor­ma­tion to Wayne County Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy that uncov­ered sig­nif­i­cant dis­crep­an­cies in firearm evi­dence reviewed by the Detroit Police Department Crime Laboratory in two homi­cide cases and sev­eral other cases.

In one homi­cide case the defense attor­ney hired an inde­pen­dent expert to exam­ine evi­dence that was reviewed by DPD firearms exam­in­ers that con­cluded the fired cas­ings came from a sin­gle weapon. The defense expert con­cluded that there were 24 fired cas­ings from one weapon, 17 fired cas­ings from another weapon, and 1 piece of fired evi­dence that could not be identified.

Prosecutor Worthy imme­di­ately sent the evi­dence for eval­u­a­tion by an inde­pen­dent expert. Late in the day on April 23,2008 the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office received infor­ma­tion from the inde­pen­dent lab­o­ra­tory that con­firmed that the find­ings of the defense expert. Prosecutor Worthy then informed Chief Ella Bully Cummings of this problem.

On Thursday, April 24, 2008 Prosecutor Worthy instructed her staff to con­duct an audit of all Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office files that resulted in a trial, or a guilty plea which relied upon find­ings from DPD firearm exam­in­ers. The audit will go back for one year. All and the defense attor­neys on these files will be con­tacted and after con­sul­ta­tion any fired evi­dence in ques­tion will be sub­mit­ted for re-examination.

The Detroit Police Department has sus­pended oper­a­tions of the Firearm Section and has ordered and inde­pen­dent audit.

“This a seri­ous mat­ter, but extremely nec­es­sary to pro­tect the intergrity of our con­vic­tions, past, present and future,” said Prosecutor Worthy. We will also be re-evaluating any firearms evi­dence in our upcom­ing trials.