LITTLE ROCK — Should a crime laboratory exist to serve the investigative needs and agendas of law enforcement, or to respond to a higher calling, namely the objective truth?
The question suddenly has become much more than rhetorical. The federal government, after years of so many flaws revealed in forensic evidence used to convict the innocent and create havoc in the justice system, is naming a 30-member national commission that hopefully can help resolve serious questions about the role and efficacy of crime laboratories and forensic standards.
All I can say is this scrutiny is long past due when I recognize just how destructive an incompetent lab can be to public trust and confidence. I’ve experienced the results many times in 42 years as a journalist. Way back in the 1970s and early ’80s, I researched (with reporter Clay Bailey) and published two separate in-depth series that described multiple errors-and worse-within the State Crime Laboratory.
In other words, the deeply important matter of crime lab performance and competence in our own state is far from anything new. I only need utter one late teenager’s name for many in our state to understand that: Janie Ward of Marshall.
Four years ago, the National Academy of Sciences urged federal leaders to remove crime labs from the control of police and prosecutors or, at the very least, improve the qualifications and standards for employees. The Washington Post reported the other day that the academy back then was “responding to a drumbeat of crime lab scandals and DNA exonerations” that stretched across two decades.
Those involved at the highest levels of seeing justice done seem finally fed up with the bias and corruptive influences of having crime labs subject to the influence and control of public forces devoted to one goal: Gaining convictions.
The bias toward prosecution is not cloaked. The state Crime Lab, overseen by politically appointed Executive Director Kermit Channell, has as its mission “to provide forensic science services to the criminal justice system.”
The lab promotes itself this way: “Our staff of highly qualified trained forensic scientists provide assistance to law enforcement throughout the state and provide expert testimony when needed in Arkansas courts.”
A former Little Rock attorney once told me he overheard a previous Crime Lab technician who often testified in criminal cases ask a police officer with whom he was consulting, “What do we want to find here?”
That statement might be downright disturbing if you were the innocent defendant with no crime lab of your own.
That same technician provided crucial, yet erroneous, testimony about his findings in a Pulaski County murder case that helped wrongly convict an innocent man. His findings that he testified to about a hair sample wrongly linked the suspect to the victim, according to a later review of that case by the FBI Crime Lab. The man’s conviction was overturned, as that ugly case should have been before he was ever prosecuted.
And I shudder to think of the lab’s role in the dubious (at best) conviction of the so-called West Memphis Three. Arkansas author Mara Leveritt knows plenty about that mess, since she’s exhaustively researched and written about that nationally embarrassing case and the role the Crime Lab played in what I, too, believe was yet another travesty.
But the larger point today is not another review of the list of blunders, errors and escapades by our state’s Crime Lab.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole made it clear that this latest attempt to try and set straight the crooked paths being walked in recent years by crime laboratories nationwide is led by the principle that “scientifically valid and accurate forensic analysis strengthens all aspects of our justice system.”
There are valid concerns everywhere about the quality and reliability of forensic evidence being used to obtain convictions in criminal courts nationwide.
I read one scathing analysis of the FBI laboratory that summarized its shortcoming this way: “The FBI’s [once] vaunted crime lab is a scandal of atrocious forensic science. Its ‘junk science’ permeates the U.S. criminal justice system as its [often] bogus ‘findings’ routinely punish the innocent and set the guilty free, affecting thousands of lives in the process.”
It’s a safe bet that this new committee, which will meet several times a year, will never ask a journalist from the Ozarks to write an idealized mission statement for crime laboratories and their staffs in years to come.
But if they did, after more than four decades of writing about the injustices that falsehoods and mistakes from biased laboratories have created, I believe I’d word my statement this way:
“A wholly objective public agency devoted to ensuring justice and scientifically determining the most obtainable versions of truths connected with any crime, pursuing only facts wherever the science, itself, leads us regardless of the opinions of law enforcement or defendants.”
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Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.
Editorial, Pages 79 on 02/24/2013