NY- More revelations revealed concerning the Nassau County crime lab scandal.

Evidence sat unmarked for identification and lacked the proper seals designed to protect its integrity, charges the report. Evidence was mishandled, improperly stored and safeguarded. Internal audits to ensure the lab’s compliance with accreditation standards were never conducted, it reads. Control and standard samples mandated for use and documentation to ensure the validity of examination results were not utilized. Equipment and instrumentation were not calibrated and documentation lacked the necessary oversight used to identify exactly who conducted the tests, continues the report, among a long laundry list of other damning problems.

Echoing Lo Piccolo’s concerns, William J. Kephart, the NCCCBA’s immediate past president, describes the still-unfolding saga of the lab as “beyond troubling.”

“It negates the integrity of the system,” he explains. “You’re talking about the collectors of evidence, the police, the testers of evidence and the ones who conduct everything from the other side of things, the one side that they have complete autonomy to be able to collect, maintain, test and present the evidence—it’s now being revealed to us that they’ve done it either incompetently, or with reckless disregard, or potentially in a criminal fashion. Any of those are problematic, certainly the more extreme being the criminal conduct.”

“People asked me in the beginning, ‘How far back does this go?’” says Kephart. “I always answered, ‘Infinitely.’ And I still say—based on what we know now, it’s 2003—I believe it goes back into the ’90s.

“It was systemic,” he continues. “It wasn’t a one-time or two-time or under-one-administration or -one-commissioner or -one-lab-director-type of issue that you can confine to a certain group… I find it very troubling that our officials here in Nassau County, from the county executive’s office to the police department to the DA’s office—no one knew this? And yet Albany and people upstate know of these issues?

“Clearly there was dialogue in memos and letters between the state and Nassau County’s officials,” he adds. “There was phone conversations and possibly in-person conversations that further delved into this area. To tell us that, ‘We didn’t know,’ I find completely unacceptable and quite frankly, unbelievable. I don’t think anybody finds that credible.”

“I can’t imagine they didn’t,” adds Lo Piccolo. “To imagine they didn’t is almost making a mockery of people that are making hundreds of thousands of dollars who are required to protect and serve the highest-taxed county in the nation. It’d be shocking if they didn’t know.”

Link:
http://www.longislandpress.com/2011/07/21/new-revelations-in-nassau-county-police-crime-lab-scandal/