The head of the District’s troubled Department of Forensic Sciences has resigned after reports of technical errors and management lapses at the crime lab caused its accreditation to be suspended, officials said Wednesday.
Jenifer Smith, a chemist and former FBI agent, was appointed DFS director in July 2015 by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D). In announcing Smith’s resignation, Chris Geldart, the acting deputy mayor for public safety, made no mention of the problems at the lab.
“We thank Dr. Smith for her service and appreciate the job she has done in progressing the agency during her tenure,” Geldart said in a brief statement. The statement said her last day would be May 26.
The lab’s accreditation was suspended in early April after an independent panel of forensic experts concluded that the DFS had made an error in testing ballistics evidence in two homicide cases and refused to acknowledge the mistake.
The auditors also determined that the lab “misrepresented” the mistakes when the accreditation board investigated the allegations. The ANSI National Accreditation Board then suspended the lab’s seal of approval for all types of analyses, including examinations of DNA, firearms and sexual assault evidence.
The department has said it is working to regain accreditation.
D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety, applauded Smith’s departure in a statement.
“I think it’s the right move, and new leadership will allow the agency a chance to chart a path back to being the independent and trusted lab that our city needs,” said Allen, who called for Smith to resign last week.
Jessica Willis, special counsel at the D.C. Public Defender Service, echoed Allen.
Smith’s resignation “is an opportunity for a new direction at the lab,” Willis said. “Taking advantage of that opportunity will require a transparent, accountable process for selecting a new DFS Director and must be coupled with meaningful legislative reform.”
“There are broken systems in place at DFS that must be reformed,” Willis said.
Emails seeking comment from Smith and DFS spokesman Darrell Pressley on Wednesday night were not immediately returned.
Smith holds a doctorate in physiological chemistry, according to the department’s website. She was an FBI special agent from 1986 to 2009, then worked as a consultant before Bowser chose her to head the crime lab, which is a city department by itself, separate from the D.C. police department and the court system.
In a murder prosecution that is ongoing in D.C. Superior Court, the lab erroneously concluded that bullet casings found at the scenes of two fatal shootings were fired from the same gun, then sought to minimize the mistake, according to a panel of independent forensic experts commissioned by the D.C. attorney general.
Prosecutors said in court filings that the error was uncovered when outside examiners took a fresh look at the evidence. The auditors concluded that the DFS failed to own up to the mistake even though internally it reached the same result after a follow-up examination.
The auditors also said that an analyst was pressured into changing the second finding. They said the lab “misrepresented” the mistakes to two national accrediting boards.
“In the opinion of the audit team, such actions by management indicate a lack of adherence to core principles of integrity, ethics, and professional responsibilities,” the report says. Even though the incident was largely confined to the firearms unit, the report adds, “management has cast doubt on the reliability of the work product of the entire DFS laboratory,” which includes numerous units other than firearms examiners.
Smith’s resignation follows the 2015 resignation of the previous DFS director, Max Houck, who left the position after the U.S. attorney’s office said it had discovered errors in some of the lab’s DNA analyses.
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