There is a thought that make you wonder…if DNA plays such a huge role in criminal court, why is it that there is no federal oversight?
“Take the series of questionable drug and alcohol tests that cropped up in North County criminal cases in recent months. Hundreds of toxicology tests done by a private lab, Pacific Toxicologies, had to be reviewed after mistakes were found. Eleven people were released from jail; at least seven of them saw their criminal cases dismissed. The incident raises the question: Who polices the labs the police use? No governmental body, no state or federal agency oversees the forensic labs that run tests on DNA, fingerprints, ballistics, even on the blood of drunken driving suspects. Some labs voluntarily seek accreditation from private professional organizations. But nobody who checks the labs has the power to shut one down…”
In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences issued a congressional funded report on the state of forensic labs. Among the findings: “… oversight and enforcement of operating standards, certification, accreditation, and ethics are lacking in most local and state jurisdictions.” Another problem is that crime labs are often part of the law enforcement agencies, as opposed to independent agencies. The implication is that the possibility exists for bias, no matter how unintentional, toward the prosecution.
Brooks, of the Innocence Project, called it “one of the most frustrating things about being a defense attorney. The structure is wrong,” he said. “You put a crime lab with one side of the investigation.”
Even the best labs can make mistakes. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology landed at the center of the high-profile case of Cynthia Sommer, a widow convicted in 2007 of poisoning her Marine husband, who was based at Miramar when he died in 2002. Sommer’s attorney, Allen Bloom, said the military lab was wrong when it found arsenic in Todd Sommer’s organs. Later testing, at a different lab, revealed no arsenic. Prosecutors dropped the charges, and Cynthia Sommer was freed after spending more than two years in jail. Bloom said “the real scary situation” comes when lab workers trying to do the right thing make blunders. Innocent errors “are among the greatest systemic problems in wrongful convictions,” Bloom said.
The Innocence Project’s Brooks said jurors might rely too heavily on forensic findings. “Jurors are just so easily manipulated,” Brooks said. “In this ‘CSI’ age, as soon as there is some science involved, they are dazzled. … There is always going to be human error as long as humans are involved.”
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