Consultants to Review Minn. Problem-Plagued Crime Lab

Sept. 7, 2012
St. Paul police have hired two consultants to review and clean up the city's problem-plagued crime lab.

Sept. 07--St. Paul police have hired two consultants to review and clean up the city's problem-plagued crime lab.

One of the companies says it is "the very best in forensic laboratory and consulting," while the other says its approach to figuring out how a lab should work "involves laying out Post-it notes on a wall to represent the process steps and the flow of the work."

The city said Thursday, Sept. 6, that it had signed contracts with Integrated Forensic Laboratories of Euless, Texas, and Schwarz Forensic Enterprises of Ankeny, Iowa, to study the crime lab and figure out how to fix it.

The contracts total up to $140,800, and the Texans also will get expenses.

Police officials believe the consultants are the first step to righting the lab's wrongs, which have spilled out in a special evidentiary hearing in state court in Dakota County. In the hearing, two public defenders have called the unit's testing of suspected narcotics into question and presented evidence that the criminalists who do the analysis lack training, fail to follow standard practices and misuse their sophisticated testing equipment.

St. Paul police Chief Thomas Smith suspended the lab's testing of suspected narcotics, and prosecutors in Ramsey, Dakota and Washington counties have promised to review cases in which the lab's testing of drugs played a role.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman has said the city will explore whether the lab should seek accreditation from the American Society of

Crime Lab Directors, or ASCLD. The national group requires forensics units to abide by stringent procedures aimed at guarding against contamination of samples and ensuring the lab's work is scientifically reliable.

The court hearing continued Thursday, and a criminalist who performs the drug testing testified that she didn't think the lab was plagued by contamination because some samples they analyze test negative for drugs.

"Based on what I've done in the lab, I don't think there's any contamination," said Kari McDermott, who has been with the lab since August 2008. "I've seen negative samples."

McDermott took the stand during the sixth day of testimony in the special hearing, first convened in July. More witnesses will testify on Friday and in late October.

Although prosecutors and defense attorneys have clashed repeatedly, Thursday's testimony brought the first flash of anger from Dakota County District Judge Kathryn Davis Messerich.

Messerich appeared exasperated that public defenders Lauri Traub and Christine Funk were asking questions beyond the narrow scope the judge had set last month. Since Dakota County prosecutors had said they wouldn't use any St. Paul lab test results in the cases involved in the hearing, the judge said she wanted to hear evidence only about the possibility that other suspected drugs stored in the lab -- which could be re-tested by other agencies -- are contaminated.

Traub and Funk contend that because of the lab's shoddy practices, there is ample opportunity for samples to be contaminated and that any tests on them would be scientifically unreliable.

When Traub tried to question Assistant Chief Kathy Wuorinen about the contents of a police email published in the Pioneer Press, Phillip Prokopowicz, Dakota County's chief deputy prosecutor, objected on the grounds it wasn't relevant to the contamination issue. Traub began to reply, prompting the judge to blurt out, "Let's stop the bickering!" "I don't want this to turn into basically a discussion of what's been reported in the paper," she told the lawyers.

Throughout the day, Traub and Funk asked many of the same questions of six police department witnesses, prompting repeated objections from Prokopowicz. The judge allowed some questions and barred others.

Roberta DeCrans, the other criminalist who uses the department's two gas chromatographs/mass spectrometers, or GC/MS, to analyze suspected drugs, testified that if a sample she tested came back as negative for illegal drugs, she sometimes retested it, but she didn't retest samples that came back positive for drugs.

"What determines what you do more than once in your lab?" Traub asked her.

"It's on a case-by-case basis," the witness replied.

Experts have testified that the lab lacked standard operating procedures, rarely wrote down steps they followed and ignored basic scientific methods, casting doubt on whether the evidence should be used in court. The criminalists also don't do random tests to validate their work, nor do they double-check one another's work, steps required in an ASCLD-accredited lab.

McDermott, who earned a degree in biology at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, testified that even though her primary job in the lab was to test suspected narcotics, she hasn't been to training classes or seminars for that kind of work.

She described how she stored evidence and said she kept it in an in-box tray on her desk that she cleaned "periodically," if she sees that it "is getting dirty or dusty." On cross-examination, she told Prokopowicz that contamination wasn't a problem in the lab.

Questioning her again, Traub asked her if that belief was "based on science or a feeling." "Both," the witness replied.

Under further questioning, she said, "There could be contamination. I'm just saying it's not all the time."

The lab's procedures -- or lack of them -- will be reviewed by the two consulting firms the city hired. Those reviews will include how it examines latent fingerprints, and the companies will provide training and testing.

The contract with Integrated Forensic Laboratories, or IFL, is for $68,800 plus expenses. The company, which has an ASCLD-accredited lab, will review of about 100 drug-testing cases, looking for errors or systemic problems.

It will follow the tests with recommendations for training and changes in process.

IFL also will provide drug lab work training and competency testing for four St. Paul employees and design standard operating procedures to test suspected drugs. The procedures "will serve as the foundation to acquire accreditation," the contract says.

The contract with Schwarz Forensic Enterprises is for $69,743 to $72,000. The company will review the police department's latent-fingerprint unit and its crime-scene unit for "overall functionality, effectiveness and efficiency." The evaluation will include looking into the training of crime lab employees, quality of work, evidence handling and packaging practices, competency testing and "chain of custody integrity."

Richard Chin can be reached at [email protected] or 651-228-5560. David Hanners can be reached at dhanners@ pioneerpress.com or 612-338-6516.

Copyright 2012 - Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.

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