Another San Francisco Crime Lab Scandal?

National headlines were made this past spring when it was uncovered that Debbie Madden, a now former San Francisco drug lab worker, was pocketing cocaine from the lab in which she worked to supply a personal habit. But while the nation was paying attention to the drug lab, which handles thousands upon thousands of cases every year, a quieter scandal was building within the city’s smaller but even more crucial DNA crime lab.

Evidence concealment, DNA switching and lax security are just a few of the issues uncovered in a remarkable report from SF Weekly released earlier this week. But with the San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris in the midst of the scandal and rising to her newly elected position as state Attorney General this coming year, one has to wonder where the complaints should go and what can be done.

In the wake of the Madden shakeup in the drug lab, eventually leading to the lab closing its doors, Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massulo found that Harris’ office had failed to live up to the requirement that prosecutor’s offices disclose potentially beneficial evidence to criminal defendants. She stated this constitutional obligation, as set forth in Brady v. Maryland, should be fulfilled with the prosecutor actively seeking such exculpatory information from the police rather than waiting for the police to disclose it. According to the SF Weekly report, this has not happened and the DA’s office, in fact, may have been purposefully hiding such evidence in an effort to cover their tracks.

In just one example laid out in their investigation, SF Weekly uncovers a mix-up of DNA test tubes. The evidence technician had switched two vials. Under her supervisor’s approval, they traded the labels and went on with their business, leaving behind “no documentation of the incident.” This in the words of the lab’s accreditation entity, ASCLD, a group with its own host of problems, and most recently tied to the North Carolina crime lab scandals. No documentation means no way for defense attorneys and even the prosecutor, in this case, to know about the mix-up and any of the cases it could have potentially impacted. Add to this the then-director of the lab, Jim Mudge, denying such a switch ever happened and you have a recipe for major questions as to the lab’s integrity and potentially dozens of appeals.

As if that wasn’t enough intrigue—in another case, criminalist for the lab, Cherisse Boland, gave grand jury testimony identifying two men as having left DNA on bicycles at the center of a murder investigation. Based in part on this testimony, the two men would be indicted. However, what Boland failed to disclose was that there wasn’t just a third set of DNA evidence, but that this third party was what could be referred to as a “major contributor," dwarfing the DNA evidence of the only two suspects in custody. Did her reports allude to the third party? Yes. But she made no effort to reveal just how extensive this third party evidence was and never ran the third-party DNA through the FBI database. The two suspects would later be acquitted, in part because of the questionable evidence handling procedures.

The DA’s office seems to have been given many opportunities to share the lab’s shortcomings with defense lawyers and other interested parties. In one particular report submitted to Harris’ office, Rockne Harmon, a consultant for the DA’s office, well known former prosecutor and so-called DNA “guru” himself suggested the office disclose issues with Boland’s testimony to defense attorneys. And to date, even in the wake of Massulo’s instruction in the Madden case, the District Attorney’s office has failed to do so. Now, the office is claiming it has no such report from Harmon at all.

As Harmon himself has said—the issues in his investigation aren’t earth-shattering, but “what’s earth-shattering is what’s happened to it.” The same sentiment could be applied to much of what is revealed by SF Weekly. If these are only a few cases that are known, there could be a much larger problem under wraps. The integrity of a crime lab, particularly a DNA crime lab which handles violent criminal investigations, must be top notch and mistakes, when made, should be disclosed to maintain that integrity. Secrecy and repeated denials that problems exist only serve to cast doubt on all cases that have gone through the lab.

New calls are being made to outsource the lab’s work, sending it to perhaps a private lab not caught up in or tied to the SFPD or the DA’s office at all. That significant of a shift could take years, however. In order for the city and the state to recognize the gravity of their problem, a complete investigation into the practices of the DNA crime lab must be completed. Join us in calling for a full and transparent investigation into the lab, its integrity, its evidence handling procedures and the cases that may have been adversely affected in recent years. Neither the DA’s office nor its “new trial integrity unit” should play a fact finding role in the investigation because of their potential part in several of the known questionable cases at hand.

Photo Credit: Windy