State hits crime lab on DNA cache

Massachusetts State Police lab col­lect and store DNA pro­files they shouldn’t be allowed to. This is an inher­ent prob­lem with data­bases that col­lect per­sonal infor­ma­tion, when there is no over­sight. The police can store infor­ma­tion they are not sup­posed to. This case may or may not have been “acci­den­tal”, but this lab­o­ra­tory is accred­ited by the Association of Crime Lab Directors (ASCLD-LAB).

It goes to show that even with accred­i­ta­tion, labs still don’t always fol­low proper protocols.

A sim­ple case of human error? Or a delib­er­ate case of help­ing “Big-Brother” watch over you? In either case, this is an exam­ple of why it’s per­fectly rea­son­able for gun-owners to fear secret (ille­gal) gun reg­is­tra­tion data­bases, like in the case of the Delaware State Police.

Original arti­cle posted here.

Some files improp­erly kept, IG says

The State Police crime lab­o­ra­tory is stor­ing the DNA pro­files of hun­dreds of peo­ple whose crimes do not war­rant it, accord­ing to an inves­ti­ga­tion of the his­tor­i­cally trou­bled lab, rais­ing the specter of what one civil lib­er­tar­ian called a “shadow DNA database.”

Under state law, the crime lab is autho­rized to col­lect genetic sam­ples from any­one con­victed of a felony and to store them in the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, the FBI-funded com­puter data­base that serves as a reg­istry for more than 6.3 mil­lion DNA sam­ples of con­victed crim­i­nals col­lected by law enforce­ment nationwide.

But the analy­sis by state Inspector General Gregory W. Sullivan, which is to be released today, found that the lab mis­tak­enly entered the pro­files of other defen­dants, includ­ing those who were con­victed of mis­de­meanors, or felonies that were later reversed.

The lab, which dis­cov­ered most of the errant pro­files before the inves­ti­ga­tion, removed them from the fed­eral data­base but is still stor­ing them in a sep­a­rate, search­able data­base while offi­cials deter­mine what to do with them.

“We saw no legal author­ity that autho­rized them to do this,” said Barbara Hansberry, gen­eral coun­sel for the inspec­tor gen­eral and one of two authors of the report by the watch­dog agency. The analy­sis, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe, cul­mi­nated a 21-month inves­ti­ga­tion launched after improper han­dling of DNA test results led to the res­ig­na­tion of the lab’s direc­tor and other per­son­nel changes.

The report does not say how many pro­files were in the unau­tho­rized data­base. But John A. Grossman, under­sec­re­tary of foren­sic sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy for the state, put the num­ber at about 540, or a lit­tle more than 1 per­cent of the approx­i­mately 45,000 Massachusetts offend­ers whose pro­files have been collected.

Grossman said the lab removed the pro­files over the last two years after dis­cov­er­ing they had been mis­tak­enly included in the fed­eral data­base. Other states have laws that allow them to keep DNA pro­files that were erro­neously obtained, as long as it was an hon­est mis­take, he said, but Massachusetts does not address the sit­u­a­tion and offi­cials were reluc­tant to destroy them.

“So we decided that the best course was to pull them but pre­serve the files,” Grossman said. He added that the data­base is not eas­ily searched and that the lab direc­tor has never autho­rized employ­ees to exam­ine them to see if they match DNA found at crime scenes.

But civil lib­er­tar­i­ans expressed alarm about the lab hold­ing onto them.

“It’s trou­bling,” said John Reinstein, legal direc­tor of the ACLU of Massachusetts, who said it rekin­dled fears about an ille­gal “shadow DNA data­base.” He asserts in an ongo­ing law­suit that the State Police are ille­gally stor­ing the genetic pro­file of a Cape Cod man who vol­un­tar­ily gave a DNA sam­ple to rule him­self out as a sus­pect in the noto­ri­ous 2002 rape and mur­der of fash­ion writer Christa Worthington.

“If they’re not search­ing this sep­a­rate data­base for evi­dence, I don’t under­stand what the pur­pose of main­tain­ing it is,” Reinstein said.

Among the other find­ings gleaned from Sullivan’s report and inter­views with the authors:

# Mary Kate McGilvray, a vet­eran of the lab who was appointed act­ing direc­tor after Carl Selavka resigned under pres­sure in March 2007, has reduced the back­log of DNA evi­dence await­ing analy­sis. But she is often rely­ing on inex­pe­ri­enced ana­lysts, and that alarms employ­ees who fear it could lead to mis­takes. McGilvray’s under­lings com­plained that she runs the oper­a­tion in a “para­mil­i­tary” man­ner that some find humil­i­at­ing and intim­i­dat­ing. They told the authors of the report that she used to ring a bell at staff meet­ings to cut speak­ers off and allowed oth­ers to only nod or shake their heads.

Reached at home last night, McGilvray deferred com­ment to Grossman and Gregory I. Massing, gen­eral coun­sel for the pub­lic safety office.

# The lab­o­ra­tory has failed to obtain sam­ples of DNA from many employ­ees who han­dle such evi­dence — a require­ment in other labs — so sci­en­tists can deter­mine whether their own DNA might have acci­den­tally con­t­a­m­i­nated a sam­ple. Some employ­ees have balked because of a “trust issue” with man­age­ment, the report said.

# The inspec­tor gen­eral ques­tions whether the lab should con­tinue report­ing to the State Police because sci­en­tists might feel pres­sured to tai­lor find­ings to suit crim­i­nal investigators.

The report was co-written by a con­sul­tant, Dr. Robin Cotton, who directs bio­med­ical foren­sic sci­ences at Boston University’s School of Medicine.

In inter­views, the authors said lab employ­ees told them that DNA pro­files were mis­tak­enly col­lected from some defen­dants at the direc­tion of other state work­ers who mis­un­der­stood the law.

A bill signed into law by then-Governor Mitt Romney in 2003 expanded the data­base from indi­vid­u­als con­victed of seri­ous or vio­lent felonies to all con­victed felons. But some state employ­ees erro­neously took sam­ples from peo­ple not required to give them.

In a six-page response to the report, Massing said the only way the unau­tho­rized data­base could be searched for matches with crime scene DNA is if the pro­files were uploaded back to CODIS. Nonetheless, he wrote that the lab agrees that it should review stor­age of the unau­tho­rized profiles.

He also wrote that the report “goes out of its way to iden­tify and high­light the neg­a­tive.” It over­looked major accom­plish­ments, he said, includ­ing accred­i­ta­tion of all of the lab’s foren­sic func­tions by the American Society of Crime Lab Directors’ Laboratory Accreditation Board in December.