CLPEX Chat Board

Let's get experts to test evidence
By PATRICK F. MCCANN
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
June 26, 2010, 7:23PM

On television, on the police drama CSI (for Crime Scene Investigation), the brilliant, dedicated completely professional staff of the Las Vegas Police Department solves every crime that comes into its hands through flawless forensic science and with ironclad integrity each week. Unfortunately for us as taxpayers, the reality of local forensic work is much closer to the old British comedy Monty Python's Flying Circus than to the admittedly fictional CSI.

Once again we are faced with the forensics branches of the Houston Police Department scrambling to cope with new revelations of incompetence and mistakes regarding their use of everything from lab reports to, in the most recent case, fingerprint identification. The Chronicle has published stories that followed up on a previous audit of the fingerprint identification section of HPD's crime scene and forensic departments. The Chronicle specifically identified a local man named Manuel Quinta Guerra who was mistakenly identified by the section as a suspect in a homicide and held for four months before the police realized their mistake. We all grew up thinking that fingerprints were extremely powerful, and in some cases, damning evidence. Yet it turns out that for some time the police departments in Harris County have been, let us say, less than rigorous in their application of this forensic tool.

The audit by a firm called Ron Smith and Associates found a very large error rate in the handling of identifications made by the fingerprint lab technicians, including a number of cases where an identification could have been made but was not. It also found a lack of credible training and national standards. Though the audit was focused only on HPD, in my experience this is true not just of HPD but of all fingerprint identification sections in Harris County. Budget constraints and the pressure of backlogged cases make taking time out to actually make sure the sections get things right a foreign concept to most police and sheriff's departments. When one questions the technicians in court who perform these tasks on a routine basis, one discovers that their training, after an initial course, is mostly on the job. They have no actual standards to measure themselves against, only a "confidence" that they have a "match," which they then proclaim to a jury usually matches the fingerprints of the accused. This might be justified ... except that the audit found that the HPD techs had problems about half the time. I say again … half.

The HPD brass turned out swiftly after the first story broke and said they were unaware of any false or misidentifications that resulted in innocent people being imprisoned or arrested. Not that it did not happen, mind you, but that they did not know about any. While they should be commended for ordering up the audit in the first place, as the continuing and sad reality of HPD's abysmal forensic record continues to unfold, we learned this past week that the brass apparently did not want to know. We learned, thanks to diligent reporting, that a fingerprint technician was actually disciplined by HPD for identifying the wrong person in, of all things, a murder case. I refer here to the case of Manuel Guerra. The top folks at HPD deserve credit for finally trying to be transparent about their problems. However, these problems have been ongoing for far too long. Transparency may help identify the problem, but so far these problems have never truly been fixed.

We have been subjected to a decade of unfolding scandals at HPD's lab, on everything from DNA, to toxicology, to firearms, to outright falsification of lab results, to failure to even review evidence in capital and other serious cases. Now we discover that their fingerprint "identification" section is not only unworthy of the name, but should be renamed the "mis-identification" section, because their techs are unable to get this right even on a murder case where someone's life could literally be at stake. Do not get me wrong — the other labs run by law enforcement have all had their share of problems. The Department of Public Safety regional system was rocked by its own scandal a few years ago, and is now plagued by tremendous backlogs that result in justice being denied for the innocent and needlessly delayed for the guilty. The DPS actually hired a terminated DNA supervisor whom even HPD found was unsuitable after it was revealed she helped technicians "excel" on their proficiency exams. In some of the surrounding counties, questionable dog-scent evidence is being used to convict people, and some of these defendants are now suing the counties that held them based upon this type of junk science. These mistakes cost the taxpayers millions in case reviews, and retesting and lawyer fees for cases that should have been done right the first time. They have also resulted in grave injustice and false imprisonment, as HPD's own internal disciplinary records have shown.

Enough is enough. Although this is admittedly a difficult budget year, either the state of Texas in the upcoming legislative session or the regional counties and cities should come together and simply remove all handling of forensic evidence from law enforcement once and for all. Our leaders should create a regional crime lab, actually run by scientists, perhaps under a university, and not under any elected sheriff or appointed law enforcement officer, that can run actual, neutral and competent forensic testing untainted by pressure and uncorrupted by malfeasance or negligence. The people accused of crimes are owed that much. We as taxpayers are owed that much.

It is time for us to end this round robin of scandal and put science where it belongs - in the hands of independent scientists whose only goal is the truth.

The author is a criminal defense attorney and a former president of the Harris County Criminal Lawyers Association.