August 27
TEXAS:
NEW EVIDENCE FUROR HITS HPD----Mislabeled boxes may be final straw for
full-scale probe
The Houston Police Department has discovered evidence from thousands of
cases that was improperly tagged and lost in its property room, Chief
Harold Hurtt said Thursday, suggesting that problems with handling
evidence may go back 25 years.
The evidence was contained in 280 mislabeled boxes that were found in the
department's property room last August. But the boxes sat unopened for a
year, even as an ongoing Harris County District Attorney's Office effort
to retest DNA from 379 cases stalled because of missing evidence in 20
cases.
Investigators began opening the boxes last week and found an array of
evidence that ranged from a fetus and human body parts to clothes and a
bag of Cheetos.
The boxes were labeled with the numbers of individual cases. Now, HPD
officials said, it appears that evidence from as many as 8,000 cases, from
1979 to 1991, was packed into the 280 cartons.
The discovery, the latest in a long list of problems at HPD's crime lab,
may move officials closer to an independent investigation of the entire
operation.
For the 1st time, Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal was
among those seeking a full-scale independent investigation of the crime
lab.
Rosenthal had resisted previous calls for such a probe.
- - - - -
FORGOTTEN EVIDENCE
Boxes containing improperly stored evidence: 280
Cases with evidence in the boxes: 8,000
Dates of cases: 1979-1991
Time it will take to catalog the evidence: 12 months
"I am now a firm believer that I was initially wrong and there needs to be
an in-depth audit over there by some outside group," Rosenthal said. "I
don't think the special master ought to have a blank check, but I want to
do whatever it takes to resolve these problems."
- - - - -
Hurtt said he will bring in outside experts to look at the department's
procedures. An HPD spokesman said Hurtt wants to have a former prosecutor
act as a special master, a format that would give the investigation
autonomy.
Lawyer Barry Scheck, who founded the Innocence Project in New York City,
and who repeatedly has called for an independent investigation of HPD's
crime lab, said the special master "must be able to go where the evidence
leads. Nothing short of that will restore public confidence."
The discovery of the forgotten boxes of evidence comes as questions about
the analysis in a 1987 rape case have widened doubts about the quality of
the crime lab's work.
The lab first came under scrutiny in November 2002, when DNA testing was
suspended amid questions about its accuracy. Retesting of evidence from
379 cases was ordered. Since then, concerns have been raised about several
other lab divisions, including toxicology and ballistics.
Hurtt said the full implications of the uncovered evidence cache remained
unclear Thursday because investigators so far have sifted through only
about 5 % of the boxes' contents. The evidence could affect cases of
convicted defendants seeking DNA testing under a state law, as well as
unsolved crimes in which evidence has never been exposed to new
technologies that could help authorities close the cases.
"It is very significant in the fact that we don't know what we have in
those boxes," Hurtt said. "Were they cases that are open? We don't know
yet. The bottom line is to ensure that justice is done whether it is
proving people innocent or convicting others."
Hurtt said the boxes were not opened because they appeared to be from
closed cases that did not include DNA materials and because investigators
were committed to other investigations.
The boxes were opened last week, Hurtt said, as part of an effort to
examine department procedures for cataloging evidence.
All of the boxes came to the property room from the HPD crime lab, where
analysts and other employees had mislabeled them.
HPD personnel have begun the painstaking effort of unpacking all of the
boxes and regrouping the materials, case by case. The 280 boxes, many of
them splitting apart, fill a room on HPD's 24th floor.
HPD personnel are working two shifts a day, seven days a week to catalog
the evidence, a process officials said could take a year to complete.
As they archive the materials, HPD investigators also will look for
evidence from cases in which convicted defendants are requesting DNA
testing under a state law that took affect in 2001.
Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson said 200 to 300 such
post-conviction DNA tests have been requested in Harris County. She said
she knew of no cases where missing evidence was a problem, but added, "I
can't say it won't come up."
(source: Houston Chronicle)
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Lost Evidence Is Found in Houston Crime Lab
Internal police investigators looking into the already discredited Houston
police crime laboratory have found 280 boxes of lost evidence that include
a fetus and body parts and involve some 8,000 cases, including murders,
going back to the 1970's, the Houston police chief announced Thursday.
The unexpected disclosure by Chief Harold Hurtt that the items were found
a year ago, before his arrival, staggered defense lawyers and criminal
justice officials, who said they could not begin to assess the effect on
an already overworked criminal justice system.
The cases affected date from about 1979 to 1991, Chief Hurtt said. "Some
of them are open cases, open murder cases," he said.
After his announcement, at downtown Police Headquarters, reporters were
shown to a 24th-floor office where cartons stacked from floor to ceiling
were being opened, emptied and cataloged by a half-dozen laboratory
workers in face masks and rubber gloves.
Chief Hurtt said it could take up to a year to sort out the material and
match it to inmates in prison or suspects in other cases. Some of the
evidence, he said, may be linked to the 379 cases in which prisoners
convicted in Harris County have requested the retesting of DNA evidence to
establish their innocence.
Chief Hurtt, who arrived from Phoenix in February with a mandate to clean
house, said the boxes, mislabeled with case numbers that did not reflect
the evidence workers had been "shoveling" inside, were found last August
in a police property room where they had been sent by the laboratory. He
said that the significance of the discovery had not been immediately
recognized, that he had been made aware of it only in April or May and
that the inventorying of the contents did not begin until last week.
Capt. Mark Curran of the inspections division said the items included "a
fetus that had been tagged and brought back" and "some other body parts
from different homicide cases."
Asked how the department could have lost track of so much evidence, Chief
Hurtt cited unnamed laboratory staff members and said, "What we know right
now has happened because of poor work habits and sloppy efforts." The
laboratory's toxicology division, which tested DNA, blood and hair
evidence, was shut down in January 2003 after an audit found that
technicians there were poorly trained, kept shoddy records and
misinterpreted data. One prisoner, Josiah Sutton, convicted of rape at 16
in 1999, was released last year and pardoned after DNA retesting showed
the Houston crime laboratory's results implicating him had been faulty.
The Harris County district attorney, Chuck Rosenthal, whose prosecutorial
district is the 3rd-largest in the country, after those of Los Angeles and
Chicago, said his felony trial bureau and writs section took the news
hard. "I thought they were going to cry," Mr. Rosenthal said.
Defense lawyers voiced amazement. "This is in a league by itself," said
Barry Scheck, a defense lawyer and director of the Innocence Project,
which represents prisoners claiming to have been unfairly convicted. He
called the mishandling of evidence "unparalleled in the Houston police
lab's legacy of fraud, incompetence and confusion."
Earlier this month, the group attacked as faulty the testimony of the
former supervisor of the laboratory's DNA section, James Bolding, that
sent a Houston man, George Rodriquez, to prison for 17 years for rape. The
real evidence, Mr. Scheck said, pointed to another man.
Chief Hurtt, in a written statement Thursday, noted that Mr. Bolding had
"inappropriately documented" property in another case. Mr. Bolding, who
resigned in June 2003 in the face of a recommendation by the chief at the
time that he be fired, did not respond to a telephone message left at his
home.
Mayor Bill White, who took office this year succeeding Lee P. Brown, a
former New York City police commissioner and a three-term occupant of City
Hall, called the mishandling of evidence intolerable, adding, "It's hard
to get away from the fact that sloppiness in anything of this matter is
inexcusable." But he said he had confidence in Chief Hurtt, whom he
appointed.
Mr. White said that while no current prosecutions seemed affected by the
misplaced evidence, he was hopeful that the recovered evidence could
establish the innocence of wrongfully convicted prisoners.
Mr. Rosenthal, the district attorney, said that in some of the 379 cases
in which prisoners had filed for the retesting of DNA evidence that
convicted them, the police reported that the evidence had been destroyed
or lost, and so prosecutors told the courts that it was unavailable. Now,
he said, his lawyers may have to go back to court to say some of the
evidence, if found, is available after all.
Chief Hurtt said there were more questions than answers at this point. He
said he was in the process of hiring outside investigators and a project
manager to conduct the inquiry. "We don't know what we have in these
boxes," he said.
Asked if anyone should be held accountable, he said, "If we need to
conduct further investigations, whether administrative or criminally, we
will do that."
Captain Curran said he and the chief were themselves astonished at the
multitude of boxes. "Yes, they're bigger than I thought," he said, "and
the chief, when he saw them, he said, 'Wow, they're big.'"
(source: New York Times)
