Two crime lab failures in processing DNA evidence casts doubt on convictions.
New York - A DNA analyst at the Monroe County Crime Laboratory is undergoing training after she botched testing in five cases.
Though the incidents happened in 2011, Monroe County officials in August officially notified the state’s Office of Forensics Services — which oversees crime labs — about the analyst errors. County lab officials say the errors were not necessarily reportable but they chose to do so after discussions with state criminal justice officials.
The five errors affected no cases because they were caught during a review process, said the lab’s DNA technical leader, Ellyn Colquhon.
County officials are now preparing a thorough report on the laboratory operation for state officials who sought it after the former lab director was fired. That director, Janet Anderson-Seaquist, was fired by Monroe County Executive Maggie Brooks in June after a state inspector general’s investigation challenged the professionalism of the lab operation.
Anderson-Seaquist has filed a notice that she intends to sue the county.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20121003/NEWS01/310030023/Monroe-crime-lab-DNA-testing?nclick_check=1
DNA rape sample procedures 'not adequate'
United Kingdom - Forensic procedures carried out by a private firm which wrongly linked the DNA of a man to a rape were "not adequate", a report says.
Adam Scott, from Devon, was held for a couple of months after being accused of raping a woman in Manchester.
The charges were dropped when it emerged a DNA sample had been contaminated at LGC Forensics.
Forensic Science Regulator Andrew Rennison said Mr Scott was an "innocent victim of avoidable contamination".
LGC Forensics said that it "deeply regrets the incident of contamination".
Mr Scott was charged in 23 October 2011 after a plastic tray containing a sample of his DNA was re-used in the analysis of a swab from a rape victim in Plant Hill Park, Blackley. The result of that test linked him to the crime.
The report said police investigating the rape allegations raised concerns seven weeks later because phone records suggested Mr Scott had been in Plymouth a few hours after the alleged attack.
The rape charges were eventually dropped in March 2012.
A few days later Mr Scott said in a statement that he was "angry that I was falsely accused [and] am angry about the amount of pain it has put me and my family through".
Mr Rennison's report said that the contamination was the result of human error by a technician who "failed to follow basic procedures for the disposal of plastic trays used as part of a validated DNA extraction process".
He also said that the procedures themselves were not adequate, which also meant that records were not being maintained by the technicians and nothing was being done to mark trays once they had been used.
He went on to say that some 26,000 other samples have been checked and no further errors had been identified.
The re-use of plastic trays was identified on 11 October 2011 and should have triggered a more comprehensive response than that undertaken, the report added.
"These errors were compounded by the failure at LGC to consider the possibility of contamination despite concerns expressed by the investigating officer about the reliability of the DNA profile," Mr Rennison said.
A Home Office spokesman said: "Andrew Rennison's independent report has found the incident was caused by human error and failures at LGC Forensics to respond to warning signals. "Both he and the UK Accreditation Service are content that processes have been put in place to stop this happening again."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19782917
The right and privilege of post-conviction DNA testing.
In 2009, the Supreme Court found no constitutional right to DNA testing. “The dilemma,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., “is how to harness DNA’s power to prove innocence without necessarily overthrowing the established system of criminal justice.” And because the goal of finality is deeply entrenched in that system, there is an innate tug of war for those who want to give victims’ families justice but also to serve justice itself.
“While I appreciate, by implication, the value assigned to the principle of ‘finality’ in criminal justice,” says Rago, “I find myself asking the added question: ‘Whose finality are we talking about?’ Surely the victim and the victim’s family are deserving of this consideration. So, too, is the government. No prosecutor wants to try a case twice.”
Rather than risk executing an innocent, why not permit Death Row inmates to have DNA testing on available biological evidence in their cases? Why not offer access to testing to others convicted of serious non-capital crimes? It’s quicker and cheaper to test than to hold a court hearing to block it. Besides, testing is no “get out of jail free card”—DNA may also corroborate guilt, and may not go far enough to completely establish innocence.
Lindsay Herf, DNA Project manager and executive co-director of the Arizona Justice Project, says arguments that expanding access to testing would open floodgates to frivolous stalling have no evidence.
“Our canvassing of 5,000 inmates led to just over 300 people applying for help,” she says. “Prior to that, we have found that in 12 years of Arizona having a post-conviction DNA testing statute, there have been approximately 45 defendants – that’s about four a year! – who have applied in all of the Arizona counties. And not all of them were granted DNA testing.”
Innocence Project experts say prosecutors in more than 80 percent of the cases they handle are open to giving inmates access, although others “employ every legal avenue to block testing and exoneration.”
In 2000, only two U.S. states had laws allowing post-conviction access to DNA testing. A dozen years later, 49 states – Oklahoma is the odd man out — have some kind of laws on the books. In February, Massachusetts got a new DNA access law. Kentucky introduced but did not pass legislation this year to allow for expanded DNA testing post-conviction; currently, testing is only accessible to death row inmates.
In practice, many statutes limit requests dramatically. For example, some states deny requests if an inmate originally confessed to the crime. (Eleven of the first 225 people declared innocent after DNA testing in the U.S. initially entered guilty pleas.) Other laws exclude those who failed to request DNA testing at trial or who entered a guilty plea.
In Alabama, prisoners convicted of capital crimes can apply for DNA testing as long as none was previously performed in their cases – but they only have a year after conviction to file a request.
Some test access restrictions also put an impractical burden on the defense, argue Innocence Project experts, requiring they effectively solve the crime and prove in advance that DNA evidence will implicate someone else.
How long a window of time prisoners should be given in which to request DNA-testing is hotly debated. Puzauskus would abolish time limits “because new DNA testing technologies develop regularly and there should never be a limit put on someone to prove their innocence.”
In Pennsylvania, a bill is pending that if passed would abolish that state’s particularly restrictive “60-day rule” which bars an inmate who later discovers evidence of his innocence from presenting it to the courts.
According to the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, “No matter how compelling the evidence that the inmate is actually innocent, if the petition is even a day late, a court will not hear it. Period.”
“The 60-day rule simply doesn’t work,” says Duquesne University law professor John Rago, who headed the state’s Commission to Study Wrongful Convictions. “It doesn’t work in Pennsylvania and I cannot imagine a similar limiting rule working well anywhere,” he says, citing a report the commission released in September 2011. “Genuine claims of actual innocence take much more time to develop in a post-conviction setting and the rule that currently exists does little more than frustrate legitimate claims. While it was designed to eliminate frivolous claims, it has, in fact, worked poorly in terms of actual innocence claims.”
A study released in June by the Urban Institute of Virginia on sexual assault convictions between 1973 and 1987 underscores the importance of preservation and why it’s another Innocence Project goal. By testing old evidence kept in files, it set out to discover what proportion of a group of 715 convicted offenders might have been cleared by DNA. Since Virginia began its post-conviction DNA testing project in 2005, thousands of tests involving hundreds of cases have exonerated half a dozen inmates.
http://www.psmag.com/legal-affairs/the-right-and-privilege-of-post-conviction-dna-testing-47781/