D.C. is poised to review every case conducted by the Department of Forensic Sciences’ firearms and fingerprint units since the inception of the independent crime lab nearly 10 years ago, following the recommendations of a sweeping new report into the operations of the troubled agency released Monday night.
The 157-page report, dated Dec. 8 and completed by a forensic consulting firm SNA International, calls for a wholesale restructuring of agency management pointing to a series of failures across the lab, as well as a deficient quality-management system that failed to fix recurring high-risk problems, and a culture where employees felt they couldn’t speak up.
The report was ordered by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser in late May, after the lab lost its accreditation to perform forensic testing amid allegations lab managers concealed conflicting findings in a murder case and the former director resigned.
In an interview with WTOP on Monday night, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Chris Geldart said the report — and its voluminous findings — speaks for itself.
“I’m focused right now on how we go forward and make sure we don’t get us to a place where we are now,” Geldart said.
According to an order issued by the mayor in response to the SNA International report, Geldart is tasked with bringing together a committee made up of members of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Office of the Attorney General, the Public Defender Service for D.C., the District of Columbia Auditor and the chair of the Committee of the Public Safety and Justice Committee, among several others, to review the likely thousands of cases handled by the Firearms Examination Unit and the Latent Fingerprint Unit since the crime lab opened as an independent agency in 2012.
Both the attorney general’s office, which prosecutes juvenile cases in the District, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which prosecutes felonies, had pledged to conduct post-conviction reviews to determine if faulty forensics work contributed to wrongful convictions.
Geldart said the group would look at all cases handled by the troubled units.
“But not all cases may be relevant to the integrity of justice,” he said. “There will be cases that were settled that had nothing to do with any of the forensics.”
He said the group would “winnow” down the cases to those that may have been decided on the evidence processed by the Firearms Examination Unit or the Fingerprint Unit and those would be formally re-examined.
Its possible re-examination would yield the same finding originally rendered by DFS. “In which case, nothing changes,” he said. “If they’re not the same, then those are ones that we’re going to have to work with our stakeholders to determine what do we need to do in those cases,” he said.
DNA, drug units could be operational by spring
Under a plan recommended in the report, DFS plans to correct a few minor deficiencies in its Forensic Biology Unit, which performs DNA casework, and the Forensic Chemistry Unit.
Geldart said the aim is to have them individually reaccredited by the ANSI National Accreditation Board by the spring — nearly a year after the entire forensic lab halted casework because of the yanked accreditation.
Regarding the future of the firearms unit and the fingerprint unit where deep-seated problems in analysts’ casework were uncovered, Geldart said: “We may not bring them back into our lab. There’s a lot of work we need to do here to look back at cases.”
For now, the lab’s firearms casework is handled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the lab’s cases involving fingerprints cases are sent to a private forensic contractor,
“We’re going to continue to outsource them until we either feel comfortable to bring them back or not back at all,” Geldart said.
The lab’s firearms unit was already disbanded in September after all 11 remaining members were laid off, which Interim Director Anthony Crispino said was in response to early findings from the SNA experts.
‘Missed opportunity’
The SNA report largely validates the findings of a scathing audit conducted by a team of experts retained by the Office of Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C.
That report, disclosed in D.C. Superior Court in late March, alleged multiple firearm analysts falsely linked cartridge casings from two 2015 killings to the same gun, and that senior managers looking into the error buried a conflicting, exculpatory “elimination” finding and instead reported a finding of “inconclusive.”
The initial error connecting the two casings “is so disparate from the correct conclusion of elimination that it represents a significant issue relating to the competence of those examiners,” the new report stated, and management “compounded the erroneous identification by applying undue influence upon the firearms examiners.”
The report cited inadequate training of analysts in the unit and pressure to maintain high case numbers that forced examiners to spend hours performing ballistics comparison on a microscope “pushing for productivity at high levels.”
The report said the problems uncovered in the case were not unique and were running through other units, including the Latent Fingerprint Unit, where the report said, analysts were repeatedly botching the first stage of analysis in which examiners determine fingerprints lifted from crime scenes to be of “no value” and are not analyzed further.
When DFS recently sent 45 cases to be analyzed by a private contractor, the outside expert found that DFS examiners improperly evaluated the prints in all but three of the cases.
Pointing to the apparently long-running nature of the technical competence problems uncovered, the report singles out what it calls a “missed opportunity” nearly a decade ago when the crime lab was first being stood up as an independent agency.
Fingerprint examiners, who were largely “grandfathered” into the agency from the D.C. Police Department took skills tests conducted by an outside contractor. Only two of the 11 participants passed the assessment, according to the report. Nevertheless: “SNA was not able to identify any corrective action taken by DFS in response,” the report stated.
Root causes identified
Overall, the report lists 10 “root causes” for the problems that led to the lab’s loss of accreditation.
“Executive leadership” is cited in eight of them — including misinterpreting the concept of independence as a crime lab untethered to a police department or a prosecutor’s office.
Under the leadership of previous director Dr. Jenifer Smith, the lab refused to cooperate with the audit team assembled by prosecutors to look into the ballistics error, characterizing it as an attack on the lab’s independence.
The report concluded “that DFS management may have misapplied the term independent, equating it to dictating their own actions without regard to the needs” of prosecutors, defense attorneys and other stakeholders in the criminal justice system.
Other faults identified included that senior managers “did not consistently demonstrate the temperament required to navigate complex relationships” and were “unable to create an environment where they and the staff consistently demonstrated skills in conflict resolution both internal and external to the organization.”
The report concluded: “Executive Leadership did not create and facilitate an open and constructive environment to foster a culture of open dialogue and healthy debate.”
The report recommended a wholesale restructuring of the lab’s management structure, urging the creation of an executive director position with comprehensive management experience to lead the agency and the addition of a chief science officer position responsible for the nitty-gritty of forensic sciences and a new chief quality assurance officer position
In addition, the report calls for boosting the power of an independent panel of scientific experts that advises DFS. During the cascading series of problems that led to the loss of accreditation this past spring, the Science Advisory Board was largely cut out of the process or given incomplete information.
The changes to the management structure and the Science Advisory Board requires legislative changes to the 2011 law that established DFS.
The mayor’s order calls for a bill rewrite to be completed by March 16 so that it can be included in next year’s budget request.
In its report, SNA said it formed a team of 13 forensic experts across a variety of disciplines, including firearms, DNA, fingerprints and lab management with an average 32 years of experience among them to complete the report.
SNA reviewed some 20,000 documents, case files, manuals and forms; observed DFS employees on the job; conducted 29 interviews with a total of nearly 50 people and sent a staff survey to all employees.
There were questions raised about how the company was chosen to perform the review and the potential for a conflict of interest after it was revealed over the summer the company had previously done work for the lab and was in the running for a large software-upgrade contract at the time it was awarded the audit contract. However, current lab leadership pledged the company would “wall off” its work on the two contracts to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.
The final SNA report was initially due by the end of September but was pushed back to the end of November.
Last week, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine called on the mayor’s office to release the completed report, saying in a letter he would take legal action to obtain it if it were not publicly released.
In a response letter sent last week, Geldart said the District always intended on publicly releasing the report and that Racine’s letter seemed “aimed more at making a public point than advancing our common goal of restoring the viability of DFS operations and focusing on the critical work we do to further public safety in the District.”
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