The D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS), a once-vaunted crime lab now mired in management woes, will cease its work on criminal investigations while a consultant conducts “a complete assessment of the agency,” with police and federal and private labs taking over the DFS’s job of analyzing crime scenes and evidence, the city said Friday.
In a letter to two D.C. Council members, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) also said a top official of the District’s Department of Public Works will serve as interim director of the DFS, working to restore the agency’s credibility after a scathing report by a panel of experts cited technical errors and management lapses at the lab.
Anthony Crispino, the DPW’s chief administrative officer, has replaced DFS director Jenifer Smith, who officials said had recently submitted her resignation. There was confusion in recent days about whether Smith had actually left the agency. Bowser said in her letter that Crispino’s temporary appointment was effective Friday.
Established with much fanfare in 2012, the DFS was described by authorities as scientifically and administratively cutting edge, “with the goal of making forensic science transparent, science-driven and free from prosecutorial or law enforcement influence or politics,” as Bowser put it in her letter.
The agency is a separate municipal department, independent from the police force, court system and U.S. attorney’s office, which prosecutes local crimes in the District.
In the letter to D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) and Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, Bowser implied that other agencies share the blame for DFS’s recent problems.
She said “this markedly different relationship between law enforcement and prosecutors on one side and forensic scientists on the other side created institutional tensions that have led to stalemates, miscommunications, and questionable demands on DFS staff about methodology, testing priorities, resource allocation, and even personnel.”
In a statement, acting U.S. attorney Channing D. Phillips said “while we do not agree with some of the Mayor’s characterization of events, we do look forward to working with all of the relevant stakeholders to re-establish DFS as a transparent lab in which we can all have great faith, confidence, and trust.”
In the statement, Phillips said his office “works collaboratively with many forensic labs around the country, including independent forensic labs.”
The DFS was responsible for analyzing evidence in all types of criminal cases. But a panel of experts last month found that the lab erroneously concluded that bullet casings collected at the scenes of two fatal shootings had been fired from the same gun, and that the lab then sought to minimize the mistake.
“Such actions by management indicate a lack of adherence to core principles of integrity, ethics, and professional responsibilities,” the experts, who were commissioned by the D.C. attorney general, concluded in their report. Although the lapses were largely confined to the firearms unit, the report said, “management has cast doubt on the reliability of the work product of the entire DFS laboratory.”
Then, early last month, the ANSI National Accreditation Board suspended the DFS’s seal of approval for all analyses, including of DNA, firearms and evidence of sexual assaults.
In her letter, Bowser said that public controversy over the faulty ballistics report might have been avoided if the lab, the U.S. attorney and the D.C. attorney general had followed established procedures for resolving disagreements.
The process involves “taking complaints to the Science Advisory Board, the Stakeholders Council, and the accrediting agency,” the mayor said.
“We regret that both DFS and local prosecutors failed to follow these processes — DFS which failed to follow a well-documented internal review, and prosecutors who eschewed the established review process in favor of their own audit,” she said.
While the consultant, SNA International, completes its assessment of the agency, Bowser said, Crispino will “oversee our internal review, including workplace culture.”
Work once done by the DFS’s crime scene sciences unit will be overseen by D.C. police, the mayor said, while analyses once conducted by the agency’s public heath laboratory will be overseen by the D.C. medical examiner’s office.
She said federal and private labs will handle “all forensic testing . . . including ballistics, DNA, drugs and electronic evidence, to ensure no interruption in criminal investigations and cases, and that these analyses are free from law enforcement, prosecutorial, or political influence.”
Peter Hermann contributed to this report.
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