Put scientists, not cops, in crime labs

This may seem like a no-brainer to most peo­ple. But some police agen­cies have a hard time let­ting civil­ians per­form jobs at the police depart­ment that police offi­cer have his­tor­i­cally per­formed. In the case of the crime lab, it has been shown that it’s gen­er­ally bet­ter to have sci­en­tists work­ing in the foren­sic sci­ence lab.

Original arti­cle posted here.

By David A. Moran and Samuel R. Gross • November 8, 2008

The Michigan State Police released a final report late last month on the firearms unit of the Detroit Police Crime Lab. It’s a highly dis­turb­ing doc­u­ment.
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MSP found, among other defi­cien­cies, that guns and bul­lets were kept unse­cured and unpro­tected from pos­si­ble loss and con­t­a­m­i­na­tion; that essen­tial records were miss­ing in some 90% of the files; that crit­i­cal sci­en­tific equip­ment had never been prop­erly cal­i­brated; and that many of the firearms exam­in­ers were untrained and unqualified.

An audit of 283 of the cases han­dled by the unit found an error rate greater than 10% – includ­ing sev­eral cases in which the exam­in­ers appar­ently assumed that the sub­mit­ted bul­lets and shell cas­ings came from the defen­dants’ guns with­out actu­ally test­ing all of the evi­dence. It is likely that errors by this unit have led to many wrong­ful convictions.

Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney Kym Worthy and Detroit Police Chief James Barren have responded force­fully to this fiasco. In September, after a pre­lim­i­nary ver­sion of the report was issued, they shut down the entire Detroit Police Crime Lab. Worthy is also com­mit­ted to retest­ing evi­dence in the hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of cases in which peo­ple have been con­victed based on results from the firearms unit.

We com­mend Worthy and Barren for their com­mit­ment to see­ing that jus­tice is done. Their task will get even harder if the city finds the funds to com­plete the audit of the crime lab, includ­ing the units that deal with fin­ger­prints, DNA evi­dence and other phys­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal specimens.

The good news is that Detroit may be no worse off than many other cities. The bad news is that the good news – if you can call it that – is really ter­ri­ble. This is a cri­sis that is national in scope. Consider three exam­ples, among many:

• The Houston Police Department’s crime lab was shut down in 2003 after a media inves­ti­ga­tion uncov­ered mas­sive incom­pe­tence. Thousands of cases were affected. After the shut­down 280 boxes of lost or mis­han­dled evi­dence were dis­cov­ered in a prop­erty room, includ­ing human body parts and a fetus.

• Last month, the Los Angeles Police Department fired a fin­ger­print ana­lyst and sus­pended three oth­ers for report­ing false fin­ger­print iden­ti­fi­ca­tions. We don’t know yet how wide­spread the prob­lem in Los Angeles is, but sim­i­lar things have hap­pened else­where. An ABC News report in 1994 found that offi­cers had faked fin­ger­print matches in dozens of cases in at least seven states.

• In 1997 a Justice Department report con­cluded that 13 tech­ni­cians at FBI crime labs had made seri­ous errors or slanted tes­ti­mony to help pros­e­cu­tors. A later inves­ti­ga­tion con­cluded that thou­sands of cases may have been tainted by shoddy work or mis­lead­ing evidence.

Fixing this prob­lem will take money, train­ing, and super­vi­sion. We’ll never get CSI evi­dence worth using if the work is done with out­dated equip­ment by untrained, under­paid and over­worked technicians.

But money alone can’t solve every­thing. Most crime labs in the United States are run by police depart­ments. That should change. We need inde­pen­dent crime labs run by sci­en­tists, not by police officers.

Some foren­sic exam­in­ers in police crime labs come to believe that their advance­ment depends on pleas­ing the offi­cers who give them evi­dence to test. In the worst cases, this leads to out­right fraud and the con­vic­tion of inno­cent people.

• Joyce Gilchrist, a chemist in the Oklahoma City Police Crime Lab, became a star as the “go to expert” – the one who could deliver a con­vic­tion where oth­ers failed. By the time she was fired in 2001, her fraud­u­lent tes­ti­mony had sent at least three inno­cent men to prison, includ­ing two to death row. Hundreds of her other cases are still under inves­ti­ga­tion by the authorities.

• Fred Zain was chief of serol­ogy – blood sci­ence – at the West Virginia State Police lab, where he was impli­cated in hun­dreds of cases of fraud and per­jury. He went on to pur­sue his igno­min­ious career in San Antonio, Texas – where he died while per­jury charges were pend­ing – but only after he was named West Virginia State Trooper of the Year. Zain’s fraud­u­lent tes­ti­mony sent at least five inno­cent peo­ple to prison.

Systematic fraud is only the most extreme prob­lem with police-run crime labs. After the police arrest a sus­pect, their job is to get him con­victed. This applies to every­body in the police depart­ment: We all believe in our own teams and want to help them win. This can lead the most hon­est inves­ti­ga­tors to mis­in­ter­pret evi­dence and to reach con­clu­sions that are con­sis­tent with their ini­tial beliefs.

Worse, this type of tun­nel vision causes lab work­ers to ignore evi­dence that points to other sus­pects. Fingerprints that were left by some unknown per­son – or blood with DNA that doesn’t match the sus­pect – may seem unim­por­tant when you’re focused on get­ting a con­vic­tion. The Innocence Project has doc­u­mented scores of cases around the coun­try, includ­ing at least three in Michigan, in which inno­cent defen­dants were con­victed while phys­i­cal evi­dence point­ing to the real crim­i­nals was ignored or discounted.

Physical evi­dence — unlike wit­ness tes­ti­mony – offers the promise of an objec­tive truth free from the taint of human bias and error. It is as impor­tant for the defense in crim­i­nal cases as for the pros­e­cu­tion. Fingerprints, blood, semen, guns, bul­lets and drugs can all pro­vide highly reli­able evi­dence of a defendant’s guilt – or of his inno­cence – if they are prop­erly col­lected, stored and tested. If not, there may never be a sec­ond chance to do it right.

We need crime lab inves­ti­ga­tors who do their work with scrupu­lous care with­out regard to the sus­pi­cions or beliefs of the police. We need labs to be open to defense attor­neys as well as pros­e­cu­tors. We need inde­pen­dent, science-driven crime labs rather than labs run by police departments.

David A. Moran and Samuel R. Gross are pro­fes­sors at the University of Michigan Law School. Moran is also co-director of the Michigan Innocence Clinic.