D.C. crime lab restarts DNA testing on limited basis after shutdown cast doubts over analysis

Head of D.C. crime lab defends analysis of DNA data

In the wake of criticism from federal prosecutors, the head of the District’s new crime lab stood behind his lab’s analysis of DNA data Thursday but told a key D.C. Council member that his lab is understaffed. “The method we use is the most common method used by many labs around the country, including the FBI,” Max M. Houck, director of the lab, said during testimony at the council’s Judiciary Committee oversight hearing. The D.C. lab, which is in a $220 million facility in Southwest Washington that opened in 2012, has come under scrutiny after prosecutors said they found critical “errors” in the DNA work at the lab. The U.S. Attorney’s Office has stopped using the lab to evaluate evidence, instead opting to use outside labs. It also has hired independent DNA experts to review 116 cases previously examined by the city-run lab. Both the U.S. Attorney’s Office and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) have initiated separate audits of the lab and its work. Houck said that his lab has been audited five times in the past two years and that he “welcomed” the reviews. The dispute between federal prosecutors and the city’s Department of Forensic Sciences was first reported last week by The Washington Post. During the hearing, Houck, as he has in the past, repeatedly defended the work by his lab and disputed that there were any errors. He argued that the other labs and experts hired by prosecutors were merely interpreting analyses differently than his scientists were. The biggest problem, he said, is that the lab does not have enough staff to keep up with demands. “To me, a critical error is the wrong person in jail or the right person not in jail,” he said. “We provide information that is one of many tools to help make that decision.” Prosecutors say the purported problems with DNA analyses have not led to any exonerations or any charges being dismissed. Attorneys say the dispute could trigger appeals or civil lawsuits, but the impact ultimately will depend on how important DNA evidence was in each case. The dispute centers on the analysis of samples that include DNA from more than one person. The lab, prosecutors allege, understated or overestimated the likelihood that a particular person’s DNA was left at a crime scene. In one federal case, prosecutors said, the D.C. lab concluded that a defendant’s DNA could have been on the magazine of a gun seized as evidence. But an expert who reviewed the data said the lab should have interpreted the results to mean that the defendant was not the source of the DNA. Houck noted that various labs have different ways of interpreting data from DNA mixtures. “It’s a complicated and very difficult process that is open to interpretation,” he said. “The method is not as clear as it should be. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who oversees the Judiciary Committee, repeatedly asked questions in hopes of understanding why various labs could have different interpretations and why there was no standard procedure across the forensic community. McDuffie, who previously has worked as a prosector in Prince George’s County as well as with the Justice Department, said he was concerned about understanding the implications of the dispute between prosecutors and the lab. “I want to get this right. But I also don’t want to leave an impression that the sky is falling and it isn’t,” McDuffie said. Last year, the lab worked on 879 DNA cases, up from 330 cases in 2013, and the amount of fingerprint evidence submitted also has jumped dramatically. Houck said his biggest challenge has been turnaround time for the examination of DNA and firearm evidence. Houck said the lab has 12 slots for DNA analysts but had only eight employees working. He said there has been a 60 percent reduction in the lab’s firearm analysis staff, largely because of retiring police officers who worked in the division. Currently, it takes about 103 days to turn around a DNA analysis. Houck said he hopes to get that down to fewer than 70 days.

D.C.’s new crime lab goes under the microscope

WHAT’S THE point of spending millions of dollars on a crime lab if people don’t trust its findings and won’t use it? That is one question D.C. officials should be asking in light of the unsettling revelation that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has stopped sending DNA evidence to the new Consolidated Forensic Laboratory because it claims there have been serious mistakes. Far more than money is at issue: Forensics plays a key role in determining the guilt or innocence of crime suspects. The concerns of federal prosecutors must be investigated and the integrity of the lab assured. In January federal prosecutors stopped sending evidence for DNA testing to the crime lab, which is operated by the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences, opting instead to pay for tests at outside labs. The move, as The Post’s Keith L. Alexander reported, came after an outside expert, in a routine review of evidence for an upcoming case, found errors in the interpretation of test results; a subsequent review of 116 cases by two nationally known experts found what federal prosecutors characterized as critical errors in analysis. Officials who operate the lab, housed in a $220 million state-of-the-art facility that opened in 2012, have defended their work, arguing that differences among experts over interpretation are not all that unusual in the scientific community. “It’s like a financial planner doing a financial assessment of someone’s net worth in U.S. currency and in Japanese yen. They’re both correct, just different measurements,” said Max M. Houck, director of the forensics department. The concerns of federal prosecutors cannot be so easily discounted. Differences in interpretation of DNA data can determine whether a person goes to jail. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine why U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. would want to create so many problems for his office — notifying defense attorneys, calling cases into question, incurring additional expense — if he were not convinced there was cause for real concern. Such caution on matters that could lead to false convictions or criminals not brought to account is commendable. Mr. Machen has retained a panel of experts to do a review that will include cases involving DNA analysis performed by the city lab that led to convictions. Another step in the right direction is the decision by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to have a separate audit that will be conducted by independent scientists recommended by the city lab’s accrediting agency. These are complex issues, and tension between law enforcement and independent crime labs is not unusual. But it is in everyone’s interest to settle the questions that have been raised about the D.C. lab and instill public confidence in its work. **Read more on this topic:** Radley Balko: How courts trap people convicted by bad forensics The Post’s View: The dark side of forensic science

Director of D.C.’s embattled DNA lab resigns after suspension of testing

The embattled director of the District’s first independent DNA lab resigned Thursday, a week after two audits found that the lab’s procedures were inadequate, thereby forcing a national accreditation body to suspend all of the lab’s DNA testing. Max M. Houck has been the director of the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences since the lab opened its $220 million facility in Southwest Washington three years ago. In addition to Houck’s resignation, two other senior officials, the chief scientist for the lab and the senior manager for DNA testing, were let go. The interim director of the lab will be the city’s medical examiner, Roger A. Mitchell Jr. Last week, the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board determined in its audit that analysts at the lab were “not competent and were using inadequate procedures.” The authors of the audit, which was ordered by the District, gave the lab 30 days to address the concerns. Despite the sweeping executive personnel changes, people familiar with the operations of the lab said its accreditation still remained at risk as a result of the board’s findings. The Washington Post first reported last month that District prosecutors within the U.S. attorney’s office alerted city officials to what they described as numerous errors with the DNA analysis performed at the lab. Houck, whose resignation is effective this week, will not be paid for the rest of his contract. Prosecutors stopped sending DNA evidence to the lab earlier this year. Houck had a year and a half left in his four-year contract with the city as director of the lab. Local prosecutors have ordered the review of 182 cases as a result of the errors they said they discovered in the lab’s DNA results. Prosecutors, as well as the accreditation board, had problems with the interpretation in DNA mixtures cases, those in which more than one person’s DNA is present in the evidence. It remains unclear how many cases have been affected by the lab’s problems. The prosecutors said the errors have not resulted in the dismissal of any cases or in any exonerations. Prosecutors rely on DNA evidence not just to seek convictions, but also to exonerate. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said earlier this week that she was “very troubled” by the results of the two audits. Bowser spokesman Michael Czin said the mayor was “committed” to working with attorneys, prosecutors, police and other users of the lab “to ensure that everyone can have confidence” in the lab’s work. In a brief interview Thursday, Houck praised his colleagues at the lab and called them the “finest people” he had ever worked with. He also said the employees were doing the “best-quality work” they can do with “the resources that they are given.” He declined to elaborate. Houck has repeatedly defended the lab’s operations, even after prosecutors said they found numerous flaws in the analyses. Houck argued that his lab technicians followed the same protocol that many city and state labs across the country use in interpreting evidence. As the city looks for an alternative lab to perform DNA work, city officials said this week that they expect to spend as much as $1 million on using that alternative lab to examine past and current cases. The audit by the DNA-lab accreditation board criticized the D.C. lab’s practices as not in compliance with FBI standards. It ordered “at a minimum” the revalidation of test procedures, new interpretation guidelines for select DNA cases, additional training and competency testing of the staff. Board officials said they found that the problems with the lab started in 2013, during its first year of operation. The audit was published in the same week as a separate review by the U.S. attorney’s office. That review found problems similar to those noted by the accreditation board. Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to comment on the personnel changes at the lab. But he said his office was “hopeful” that the lab “will follow the recommendations of two panels of experts so that we have confidence in relying on the lab to perform this important DNA work.”

National accreditation board suspends all DNA testing at D.C. crime lab

One of the national organizations that govern DNA laboratories has ordered the District’s new crime lab to immediately suspend all DNA casework after concluding that the lab’s procedures are “insufficient and inadequate.” D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser ordered the audit by the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board last month after the U.S. attorney’s office said it had discovered numerous errors in some of the lab’s DNA analyses. The audit, which was published Friday, criticized the lab’s practices and said they were not in compliance with FBI standards. It ordered “at a minimum” the revalidation of test procedures, new interpretation guidelines for DNA mixture cases, additional training and competency testing of staff. The DNA analysts at the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences, according to the audit, “were not competent and were using inadequate procedures.” The authors of the review said the lab must begin to address the concerns within 30 days. Legal experts say the audit could trigger a further investigation of hundreds of District criminal cases — including murder, sexual assault and gun possession cases — that have involved evidence tested at the lab since it opened in 2012. In March, The Washington Post reported about alleged problems that prosecutors said they found in some of the lab’s DNA analyses. As a result, the city ordered an investigation of the lab’s practices. The city-ordered audit was delivered the same week as the separate audit ordered by the U.S. attorney’s office. Forensic experts, commissioned by the attorney’s office, found similar problems. Auditors from the accrediting group said they first discovered problems with the lab in 2013, a year after the lab opened in a $220 million facility in Southwest Washington. Lab officials then adopted corrective methods to address the concerns. But a year later, in 2014, problems arose again within the lab. “It is apparent the corrective action plans that were put in place in 2013 were not effective since they occurred in 2014,” the analysts wrote. The lab’s director, Max Houck, has repeatedly defended the lab, even after prosecutors said they found flaws with the analysis. Houck argued that his lab technicians followed the same protocols that many city and state labs across the country used in interpreting evidence. Earlier this year, prosecutors stopped sending all DNA evidence to the city-run lab after finding what they called DNA-analysis errors on several cases. The office began using outside labs and reviewing old cases. Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said the office has ordered outside reviews of 182 cases, costing “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in federal taxpayer money. After the audits were published last week, Houck said his office is “working diligently” to respond to both audits and that officials there take the reviews “seriously.” Keith St. Clair, a spokesman for the lab, said the processes that were identified as flawed “will be corrected.” In an interview, Bowser (D) said that she was “very troubled” by the findings and that her office is working on its own “corrective plan” to address the concerns. “We have an obligation to look at everything with a fresh set of eyes. That’s what we’re going to start” on Monday, she said. Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who is chairman of the D.C. Council’s judiciary committee, said “any deficiencies in the work performed by [the DNA lab] must be immediately addressed due to the broader implications of inaccurate forensic testing on the fair administration of justice in our courts.” DNA analyses makes up 21 percent of the lab’s operations, the third-largest percentage of work for the lab, behind firearm and fingerprint analysis, St. Clair said. By ordering the suspension of all DNA analyses, D.C. police, Park Police, Capitol Police and the District’s office of the attorney general will have to find other labs to perform DNA work. District officials spent Monday trying to identify an alternative lab to handle DNA examinations and assess such costs. The D.C. lab was audited last fall by the same accreditation organization that the city used to perform the new review. Houck said his lab passed the previous audit by the group. The FBI also audited the lab last year, he said. In an interview, Terry Mills, an accreditation manager for the board that issued the report, said the audits were only a “snapshot in time” of a lab’s operations and that board officials would have to be “camped out for about six months” to thoroughly investigate a lab’s procedures. Mills said other labs across the country, including one lab last year, have been ordered to suspend their DNA testing and revamp their programs or risk losing their accreditation. The problems with the District lab have centered on the analysis of evidence that includes DNA from more than one person — and their conclusions regarding the likelihood that a certain person’s genetic material is included in the sample. In their initial findings earlier this year, experts contracted by the U.S. attorney’s office said the problem came to light when an outside expert reviewed the DNA analysis conducted in a rape case. The biggest mistake involved the analysis of DNA found on a stolen car’s gearshift, prosecutors said. D.C. analysts looking at the evidence found that the car owner’s DNA could have been on the gearshift and said the chance that a randomly selected person had the same genetic traits was 1 in 3,290. The outside experts said the more accurate finding was 1 in 9. Acting U.S. Attorney Vincent H. Cohen Jr., who oversaw his office’s initial investigation into the lab, said DNA analysis is critical in securing not only convictions, but also exonerations. “When done properly, DNA analysis is a powerful tool for holding criminals accountable and exonerating the innocent,” Cohen said in a statement. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office relies on leading scientists to ensure that we present only top-quality forensic science in court. We want D.C. jurors to know that the forensic evidence we present to them is based on solid science. That is why the Office acted quickly and decisively after its experts identified basic errors in the work done” by the lab. In their report, two forensic specialists who reviewed the lab for the U.S. attorney’s office wrote that although variations in DNA analysis interpretation exist nationwide, they found times when the lab’s conclusions were “questionable.” In those instances, they wrote, differences between the lab’s findings and those of outside experts were not differences that “could be attributed to acceptable variation of DNA interpretation within the relevant scientific community.” Defense experts say that although they commend the city and the U.S. attorney’s office for ordering the reviews, their biggest concern is the lack of standardization of how DNA mixtures are interpreted and that there is no universal standard in such interpretations. “Thus the more important question here is whether DNA mixtures can accurately be interpreted by any forensic laboratory,” said Julia Leighton, general counsel for the District’s Public Defender Service.

Prosecutors criticize D.C. crime lab’s handling of some DNA evidence

D.C. prosecutors have stopped sending DNA evidence to the city’s new state-of-the-art crime lab after they said they discovered errors in the way analysts determined whether a sample can be linked to a suspect or a victim. Prosecutors have hired two outside DNA experts to review 116 cases, including rapes and homicides, and have been notifying defense attorneys. In one federal case, prosecutors said, the D.C. lab concluded that a defendant’s DNA could have been on the magazine of a gun seized as evidence. But an expert who reviewed the data said the lab should have interpreted the results to mean that the defendant was not the source of the DNA. In other cases, prosecutors said, the lab either understated or overestimated the likelihood that a particular person’s DNA was left at a crime scene. Officials at the Department of Forensic Sciences, which is located in a $220 million facility that opened in 2012, defend their work and say disagreements among scientists in the field are not uncommon. The dispute has essentially created a standoff between the city-run lab and federal prosecutors in the nation’s capital. U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. said that his office has been paying to send evidence for testing at outside labs and that so far an additional 102 cases have been farmed out. At the same time, independent experts are taking a fresh look at the cases analyzed by the District’s lab. “To date, we have not found any evidence to suggest any wrongful conviction and have not acted to dismiss any cases,” Machen said in a statement. “However, in an abundance of caution, we are conducting a rigorous review of the analysis done in current and older cases to ensure that criminal defendants are treated fairly.” Max M. Houck, director of the Department of Forensic Sciences, said that the lab follows the same protocols in place at many city and state labs across the country and that experts may disagree on how to interpret evidence. The lab has made recent improvements, he said, but he stands by the work done before those changes. “This is an estimate — an estimate of probability,” said Houck, a former FBI supervisor who worked in the agency’s anthropology and trace evidence unit. “The issue is that their experts would do the analysis differently. Differently isn’t wrong,” Houck said. “It’s like a financial planner doing a financial assessment of someone’s net worth in U.S. currency and in Japanese yen. They’re both correct, just different measurements.” Houck said he could not explain why the outside experts sometimes reached very different conclusions, because he does not know which methods they used. The issue involves the analysis of combinations of genetic material from more than one person — such as samples collected from weapons, cars or a victim’s body. The scientists try to tease out who left the DNA behind. Although TV dramas such as “CSI” make DNA testing look simple, experts said, such disputes are not uncommon and the industry does not have a single accepted method for interpreting DNA mixtures. John M. Butler, special assistant to the director for forensic science at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, based in Gaithersburg, Md., recently wrote a 600-page book on the topic. “You can have the same data, and scientists at different labs — or even within the same lab — can interpret that data differently,” Butler said. “We are trying to help standardize things. We are in the process of working on that.” Prosecutors said they first became concerned in September, when they asked an outside expert to look over the DNA evidence in an upcoming case, a practice they said is not uncommon. Tavon Barber was accused of two 2013 burglaries, prosecutors said. In one case, laptops and car keys were taken from a home while two people slept inside, and the thief used the keys to steal a car. In the other case, a robber woke a sleeping couple and sexually assaulted the woman while holding her husband at gunpoint. The expert found errors in the interpretation of six pieces of evidence analyzed by the Department of Forensic Sciences, according to the U.S. attorney’s office. The biggest mistake involved the analysis of DNA found on the stolen car’s gearshift, prosecutors said. D.C. analysts looking at the evidence found that the car owner’s DNA could have been on the gearshift and said the chance that a randomly selected person had the same genetic traits was 1 in 3,290. The outside experts said the more accurate finding was 1 in 9. Lab officials noted that the evidence was not key to the case — it did not involve linking a suspect to a crime. But prosecutors say they worry generally about systemic problems. “We examined this case in the lead-up to the trial. We weren’t looking for this error,” Vincent H. Cohen Jr., principal assistant U.S. attorney, said in an interview. “The test was done correctly, but the analysis was incorrect.” Barber ultimately was convicted. His trial lawyer did not return phone calls, and his current attorney declined to comment. Once prosecutors began notifying defense attorneys this year about the concerns, some cases were delayed. Although most of the affected cases are in D.C. Superior Court, some are in federal court. Prosecutors began sending new cases to two outside labs for testing. The U.S. attorney’s office wouldn’t say how much that costs. Prosecutors and defense attorneys say the dispute could trigger a wave of appeals or civil lawsuits. The impact ultimately will depend on how important DNA evidence was in each case, and what other evidence linked a defendant to a crime. “This could be devastating for some of the cases where convictions have already been made and helpful to those defendants whose cases relied on DNA calculations,” defense attorney Kevin Mosley said. “I don’t think the U.S. attorneys or DFS have a handle on the breadth of this problem.” Mosley said prosecutors sent a letter alerting him there was a problem with DNA evidence in a client’s burglary case. Mosley’s client was convicted of several charges including unlawful entry and tampering with evidence and was sentenced to 22  1/ 2 years in jail. But Mosley said DNA evidence was not used in the trial and prosecutors relied on other evidence, so he doesn’t think his case would be affected. Prosecutors said they did use DNA evidence, but it has not been called into question. After prosecutors raised their concerns, lab officials created a four-member advisory panel selected from the industry to review their procedures. In November, the panel suggested enhancements for when and how to evaluate DNA mixtures, and how decisions are made about each analysis. Houck said the changes refine the way the lab reaches its conclusions but are not overhauls. “You can improve things without there being an error or problem,” he said. The lab, Houck says, still conducts DNA evidence examination for agencies including the U.S. Park Police and the D.C. attorney general’s office. In a statement, D.C. police Chief Cathy L. Lanier noted that the lab is accredited, and she said that anyone with issues should go to the board that granted the accreditation. One pending case that got conflicting results is that of George Cocroft, who is accused of a 2012 sexual assault. The District lab concluded that Cocroft’s DNA could have been at the scene and said that the chance of finding a random person with similar genetic traits was 1 in 318. But when prosecutors had an outside DNA expert perform a different calculation, which they say was consistent with the lab’s protocols, the odds shifted to 1 in 900 million. Cocroft’s attorney, Craig N. Moore, said he was informed about the inconsistent findings two weeks ago. He said he was not sure what he was going to do with the information because his client says the sex was consensual, so the DNA may not relevant. The trial is set to begin this month, but Moore said he is considering asking for a delay to examine the findings. Moore says his biggest concern now is not knowing the full impact of the DNA dispute for Cocroft’s case and others, or which conclusions to believe. “I don’t know what I don’t know,” he said. **Read more:**   Federal review stalled after finding forensic errors by FBI   How the courts trap people who were convicted by bad forensics   How accurate is forensic analysis?   Justice Dept. admits flaws in forensic testimony

Convicted defendants left uninformed of forensic flaws found by Justice Dept.

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled. Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials. In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts. As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects. In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo. The case of a Maryland man serving a life sentence for a 1981 double killing is another in which federal and local law enforcement officials knew of forensic problems but never told the defendant. Attorneys for the man, John Norman Huffington, say they learned of potentially exculpatory Justice Department findings from The Washington Post. They are seeking a new trial. Justice Department officials said that they met their legal and constitutional obligations when they learned of specific errors, that they alerted prosecutors and were not required to inform defendants directly. The review was performed by a task force created during an inspector general’s investigation of misconduct at the FBI crime lab in the 1990s. The inquiry took nine years, ending in 2004, records show, but the findings were never made public. In the discipline of hair and fiber analysis, only the work of FBI Special Agent Michael P. Malone was questioned. Even though Justice Department and FBI officials knew that the discipline had weaknesses and that the lab lacked protocols — and learned that examiners’ “matches” were often wrong — they kept their reviews limited to Malone. But two cases in D.C. Superior Court show the inadequacy of the government’s response. Santae A. Tribble, now 51, was convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1978, and Kirk L. Odom, now 49, was convicted of a sexual assault in 1981. Key evidence at each of their trials came from separate FBI experts — not Malone — who swore that their scientific analysis proved with near certainty that Tribble’s and Odom’s hair was at the respective crime scenes. But DNA testing this year on the hair and on other old evidence virtually eliminates Tribble as a suspect and completely clears Odom. Both men have completed their sentences and are on lifelong parole. They are now seeking exoneration in the courts in the hopes of getting on with their lives. Neither case was part of the Justice Department task force’s review. A third D.C. case shows how the lack of Justice Department notification has forced people to stay in prison longer than they should have. Donald E. Gates, 60, served 28 years for the rape and murder of a Georgetown University student based on Malone’s testimony that his hair was found on the victim’s body. He was exonerated by DNA testing in 2009. But for 12 years before that, prosecutors never told him about the inspector general’s report about Malone, that Malone’s work was key to his conviction or that Malone’s findings were flawed, leaving him in prison the entire time. After The Post contacted him about the forensic issues, U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. of the District said his office would try to review all convictions that used hair analysis. Seeking to learn whether others shared Gates’s fate, The Post worked with the nonprofit National Whistleblowers Center, which had obtained dozens of boxes of task force documents through a years-long Freedom of Information Act fight. Task force documents identifying the scientific reviews of problem cases generally did not contain the names of the defendants. Piecing together case numbers and other bits of information from more than 10,000 pages of documents, The Post found more than 250 cases in which a scientific review was completed. Available records did not allow the identification of defendants in roughly 100 of those cases. Records of an unknown number of other questioned cases handled by federal prosecutors have yet to be released by the government. The Post found that while many prosecutors made swift and full disclosures, many others did so incompletely, years late or not at all. The effort was stymied at times by lack of cooperation from some prosecutors and declining interest and resources as time went on. Overall, calls to defense lawyers indicate and records documented that prosecutors disclosed the reviews’ results to defendants in fewer than half of the 250-plus questioned cases. Michael R. Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and the inspector general who investigated the FBI lab, said in a statement that even if more defense lawyers were notified of the initial review, “that doesn’t absolve the task force from ensuring that every single defense lawyer in one of these cases was notified.” He added: “It is deeply troubling that after going to so much time and trouble to identify problematic conduct by FBI forensic analysts the DOJ Task Force apparently failed to follow through and ensure that defense counsel were notified in every single case.” Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said the federal review was an “exhaustive effort” and met legal requirements, and she referred questions about hair analysis to the FBI. The FBI said it would evaluate whether a nationwide review is needed. “In cases where microscopic hair exams conducted by the FBI resulted in a conviction, the FBI is evaluating whether additional review is warranted,” spokeswoman Ann Todd said in a statement. “The FBI has undertaken comprehensive reviews in the past, and will not hesitate to do so again if necessary.” John McCormick had just finished the night shift driving a taxi for Diamond Cab on July 26, 1978. McCormick, 63, reached the doorstep of his home in Southeast Washington about 3 a.m., when he was robbed and fatally shot by a man in a stocking mask, according to his widow, who caught a glimpse of the attack from inside the house. Police soon focused on Santae Tribble as a suspect. A police informant said Tribble told her he was with his childhood friend, Cleveland Wright, when Wright shot McCormick. After a three-day trial, jurors deliberated two hours before asking about a stocking found a block away at the end of an alley on 28th Street SE. It had been recovered by a police dog, and it contained a single hair that the FBI traced to Tribble. Forty minutes later, the jury found Tribble guilty of murder. He was sentenced in January 1980 to 20 years to life in prison. Tribble, 17 at the time, his brother, his girlfriend and a houseguest all testified that they were together preparing to celebrate the guest’s birthday the night McCormick was killed. All four said Tribble and his girlfriend were asleep between 2 and 4:30 a.m. in Seat Pleasant. Tribble took the stand in his own defense, saying what he had said all along — that he had nothing to do with McCormick’s killing. The prosecution began its closing argument by citing the FBI’s testimony about the hair from the stocking. This January, after a year-long effort to have DNA evidence retested, Tribble’s public defender succeeded and turned over the results from a private lab to prosecutors. None of the 13 hairs recovered from the stocking — including the one that the FBI said matched Tribble’s — shared Tribble’s or Wright’s genetic profile, conclusively ruling them out as sources, according to mitochondrial DNA analyst Terry Melton of the private lab. “The government’s entire theory of prosecution — that Mr. Tribble and Mr. Wright acted together to kill Mr. McCormick — is demolished,” wrote Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service and the lawyer who represents Gates, Tribble and Odom. In a motion to D.C. Superior Court Judge Laura Cordero seeking Tribble’s exoneration, Levick wrote: “He has waited thirty-three years for the truth to set him free. He should have to wait no longer.” In an interview, Tribble, who served 28 years in prison, said that whether the court grants his request or not, he sees it as a final chance to assert his innocence. “Ms. Levick has been like an angel,” Tribble added, “. . . and I thank God for DNA.” Details of the new round of hair testing illustrate how hair analysis is highly subjective. The FBI scientist who originally testified at Tribble’s trial, Special Agent James A. Hilverda, said all the hairs he retrieved from the stocking were human head hairs, including the one suitable for comparison that he declared in court matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.” In August, Harold Deadman, a senior hair analyst with the D.C. police who spent 15 years with the FBI lab, forwarded the evidence to the private lab and reported that the 13 hairs he found included head and limb hairs. One exhibited Caucasian characteristics, Deadman added. Tribble is black. But the private lab’s DNA tests irrefutably showed that the 13 hairs came from three human sources, each of African origin, except for one — which came from a dog. “Such is the true state of hair microscopy,” Levick wrote. “Two FBI-trained analysts, James Hilverda and Harold Deadman, could not even distinguish human hairs from canine hairs.” Hilverda declined to comment. Deadman said his role was limited to describing characteristics of hairs he found. Kirk Odom’s case shares similarities with Tribble’s. Odom was convicted of raping, sodomizing and robbing a 27-year-old woman before dawn in her Capitol Hill apartment in 1981. The victim said she spoke with her assailant and observed him for up to two minutes in the “dim light” of street lamps through her windows before she was gagged, bound and blindfolded in an hour-long assault. Police put together a composite sketch of the attacker, based on the victim’s description. About five weeks after the assault, a police officer was talking to Odom about an unrelated matter. He thought Odom looked like the sketch. So he retrieved a two-year-old photograph of Odom, from when he was 16, and put it in a photo array for the victim. The victim picked the image out of the array that April and identified Odom at a lineup in May. She identified Odom again at his trial, telling jurors her assailant “had left her with an image of his face etched in her mind.” At trial, FBI Special Agent Myron T. Scholberg testified that a hair found on the victim’s nightgown was “microscopically like” Odom’s, meaning the samples were indistinguishable. Prosecutors explained that Scholberg had not been able to distinguish between hair samples only “eight or 10 times in the past 10 years, while performing thousands of analyses.” But on Jan. 18 of this year, Melton, of the same lab used in the Tribble case, Mitotyping Technologies of State College, Pa., reported its court-ordered DNA test results: The hair in the case could not have come from Odom. On Feb. 27, a second laboratory selected by prosecutors, Bode Technology of Lorton, turned over the results of court-ordered nuclear DNA testing of stains left by the perpetrator on a pillowcase and robe. Only one man left all four partial DNA profiles developed by the lab, and that man could not have been Odom. The victim “was tragically mistaken in her identification of Mr. Odom as her assailant,” Levick wrote in a motion filed March 14 seeking his exoneration. “One man committed these heinous crimes; that man was not Kirk L. Odom.” Scholberg, who retired in 1985 as head of hair and fiber analysis after 18 years at the FBI lab, said side-by-side hair comparison “was the best method we had at the time.” Odom, who was imprisoned for 20 years, had to register as a sex offender and remains on lifelong parole. He says court-ordered therapists still berate him for saying he is not guilty. Over the years, his conviction has kept him from possible jobs, he said. “There was always the thought in the back of my mind . . . ‘One day will my name be cleared?’ ” Odom said at his home in Southeast Washington, where he lives with his wife, Harriet, a medical counselor. Federal prosecutors declined to comment on Tribble’s and Odom’s specific claims, citing pending litigation. One government official noted that Odom served an additional 16 months after his release for an unrelated simple assault that violated his parole. However, in a statement released after being contacted by The Post, Machen, the U.S. attorney in the District, acknowledged that DNA results “raise serious questions in my mind about these convictions.” “If our comprehensive review shows that either man was wrongfully convicted, we will promptly join him in a motion to vacate his conviction, as we did with Donald Gates in 2009,” Machen said. ****Popularized in fiction by Sherlock Holmes, hair comparison became an established forensic science by the 1950s. Before modern-day DNA testing, hair analysis could, at its best, accurately narrow the pool of criminal suspects to a class or group or definitively rule out a person as a possible source. But in practice, even before the “ ‘CSI’ effect” led jurors to expect scientific evidence at every trial, a claim of a hair match packed a powerful, dramatic punch in court. The testimony, usually by a respected scientist working at a respected federal agency, allowed prosecutors to boil down ambiguous cases for jurors to a single, incriminating piece of human evidence left at the scene. Forensic experts typically assessed the varying characteristics of a hair to determine whether the defendant might be a source. Some factors were visible to the naked eye, such as the length of the hair, its color and whether it was straight, kinky or curly. Others were visible under a microscope, such as the size, type and distribution of pigmentation, the alignment of scales or the thickness of layers in a given hair, or its diameter at various points. Other judgments could be made. Was the hair animal or human? From the scalp, limbs or pubic area? Of a discernible race? Dyed, bleached or otherwise treated? Cut, forcibly removed or shed naturally? But there is no consensus among hair examiners about how many of these characteristics were needed to declare a match. So some agents relied on six or seven traits, while others needed 20 or 30. Hilverda, the FBI scientist in Tribble’s case, told jurors that he had performed “probably tens of thousands of examinations” and relied on “about 15 characteristics.” Despite his testimony, Hilverda recorded in his lab notes that he had measured only three characteristics of the hair from the stocking — it was black, it was a human head hair, and it was from an African American. Similarly, Scholberg’s notes describe the nightgown hair in Odom’s case in the barest terms, as a black, human head hair fragment, like a sample taken from Odom. Hilverda acknowledged that results could rule out a person or be inconclusive. However, he told jurors that a “match” reflected a high likelihood that two hairs came from the same person. Hilverda added, “Only on very rare occasions have I seen hairs of two individuals that show the same characteristics.” In Tribble’s case, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further as he summed up the evidence. “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair,” he said in his closing arguments, sounding the final word for the government. Stanley declined to comment. The Tribble and Odom cases demonstrate problems in hair analysis that have been known for nearly 40 years. In 1974, researchers acknowledged that visual comparisons are so subjective that different analysts can reach different conclusions about the same hair. The FBI acknowledged in 1984 that such analysis cannot positively determine that a hair found at a crime scene belongs to one particular person. In 1996, the Justice Department studied the nation’s first 28 DNA exonerations and found that 20 percent of the cases involved hair comparison. That same year, the FBI lab stopped declaring matches based on visual comparisons alone and began requiring DNA testing as well. Yet examples of FBI experts violating scientific standards and making exaggerated or erroneous claims emerged in 1997 at the heart of the FBI lab’s worst modern scandal, when Bromwich’s investigation found systematic problems involving 13 agents. The lab’s lack of written protocols and examiners’ weak scientific qualifications allowed bias to influence some of the nation’s highest-profile criminal investigations, the inspector general said. From 1996 through 2004, a Justice Department task force set out to review about 6,000 cases handled by the 13 discredited agents for any potential exculpatory information that should be disclosed to defendants. The task force identified more than 250 convictions in which the agents’ work was determined to be either critical to the conviction or so problematic — for example, because a prosecutor refused to cooperate or records had been lost — that it completed a fresh scientific assessment of the agent’s work. The task force was directed to notify prosecutors of the results. The only real notice of what the task force found came in a 2003 Associated Press account in which unnamed government officials said they had turned over results to prosecutors and were aware that defendants had been notified in 100 to 150 cases. The officials left the impression that anybody whose case had been affected had been notified and that, in any case, no convictions had been overturned, the officials said. But since 2003, in the District alone, two of six convictions identified by The Post in which forensic work was reassessed by the task force have been vacated. That includes Gates’s case, but not those of Tribble and Odom, who are awaiting court action and were not part of the task force review. The Gates exoneration also shows that prosecutors failed to turn over information uncovered by the task force. In addition to Gates, the murder cases in Texas and Maryland and a third in Alaska reveal examples of shortcomings. All three cases, in addition to the District cases, were handled by FBI agent Malone, whose cases made up more than 90 percent of scientific reviews found by The Post. In Texas, the review of Benjamin Herbert Boyle’s case got underway only after the defendant was executed, 16 months after the task force was formed, despite pledges to prioritize death penalty cases. Boyle was executed six days after the Bromwich investigation publicly criticized Malone, the FBI agent who worked on his case, but the FBI had acknowledged two months earlier that it was investigating complaints about him. The task force asked the Justice Department’s capital-case review unit to look over its work, but the fact that it failed to prevent the execution was never publicized. In Maryland, John Norman Huffington’s attorneys say they were never notified of the findings of the review in his case, leaving them in a battle over the law’s unsettled requirements for prosecutors to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence and over whether lawyers and courts can properly interpret scientific findings. In Alaska, Newton P. Lambert’s defenders have been left to seek DNA testing of remaining biological evidence, if any exists, while he serves a life sentence for a 1982 murder. Prosecutors for both Huffington and Lambert claim they disclosed findings at some point to other lawyers but failed to document doing so. In Lambert’s case, The Post found that the purported notification went to a lawyer who had died. Senior public defenders in both states say they received no such word, which they say would be highly unlikely if it in fact came. Malone, 66, said he was simply using the best science available at the time. “We did the best we could with what we had,” he said. Even the harshest critics acknowledge that the Justice Department worked hard to identify potentially tainted convictions. Many of the cases identified by the task force involved serious crimes, and several defendants confessed or were guilty of related charges. Courts also have upheld several convictions even after agents’ roles were discovered. Because of the focus on Malone, many questionable cases were never reviewed. But as in the Tribble and Odom cases, thousands of defendants nationwide have been implicated by other FBI agents, as well as state and local hair examiners, who relied on the same flawed techniques. In 2002, the FBI found after it analyzed DNA in 80 selected hair cases that its agents had reported false matches more than 11 percent of the time. “I don’t believe forensic science truly understood the significance of microscopic hair comparison, and it wasn’t until [DNA] that we learned that 11 percent of the time, two hairs can be microscopically similar yet come from different people,” said Dwight E. Adams, who directed the FBI lab from 2002 to 2006. Yet a Post review of the small fraction of cases in which an appeals court opinion describes FBI hair testimony shows that several FBI agents gave improper testimony, asserting the remote odds of a false match or invoking bogus statistics in the absence of data. For example, in testimony in a Minnesota bank robbery case, also in 1978, Hilverda, the agent who worked on Tribble’s case, reiterated that he had been unable to distinguish among different people’s hair “only on a couple of occasions” out of more than 2,000 cases he had analyzed. In a 1980 Indiana robbery case, an agent told jurors that he had failed to tell different people’s hair apart just once in 1,500 cases. After a slaying in Tennessee that year, another agent testified in a capital case that there was only one chance out of 4,500 or 5,000 that a hair came from someone other than the suspect. “Those statements are chilling to read,” Bromwich said of the exaggerated FBI claims at trial. Todd, the FBI spokeswoman, said bureau lab reports for more than 30 years have qualified their findings by saying that hair comparisons are not a means of absolute positive identification. She requested a list of cases in which agents departed from guidelines in court. The Post provided nine cases. Todd declined to say whether the bureau considered taking steps to determine whether other agents intentionally or unintentionally misled jurors. “Only Michael Malone’s conduct was questioned in the area of hair comparisons,” Todd said. “The [inspector general] did not question the merits of microscopic hair comparisons as a scientific discipline.” Experts say the difference between laboratory standards and examiners’ testimony in court can be important, especially if no one is reading or watching what agents say. “It seemingly has never been routine for crime labs to do supervision based on trial testimony,” said University of Virginia School of Law professor Brandon L. Garrett. “You can have cautious standards, but if no one is supervising their implementation, it’s predictable that analysts may cross the line.” A review of the task force documents, as well as Post interviews, found that the Justice Department struggled to balance its roles as a law enforcer defending convictions, a minister of justice protecting the innocent, and a patron and practitioner of forensic science. By excluding defense lawyers from the process and leaving it to prosecutors to decide case by case what to disclose, authorities waded into a legal and ethical morass that left some prisoners locked away for years longer than necessary. By adopting a secret process that limited accountability, documents show, the task force left the scope and nature of scientific problems unreported, obscuring issues from further study and permitting similar breakdowns. “The government has hidden behind the veil of secrecy to shield these abuses despite official assurances that justice would be done,” said David Colapinto, general counsel of the National Whistleblowers Center. The American Bar Association and others have proposed stronger ethics rules for prosecutors to act on information that casts doubt on convictions; opening laboratory and other files to the defense; clearer reporting and evidence retention; greater involvement by scientists in setting rules for testimony at criminal trials; and more scientific training for lawyers and judges. Other experts propose more oversight by standing state forensic-science commissions and funding for research into forensic techniques and experts for indigent defendants. A common theme among reform-minded lawyers and experts is taking the oversight of the forensic labs away from police and prosecutors. “It’s human to make mistakes,” said Steven D. Benjamin, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It’s wrong not to learn from them.” More specifically, the D.C. Public Defender Service, Benjamin’s group and others said justice would be served by retesting hair evidence in convictions nationwide from 1996 and earlier. “If microscopic hair analysis was a key piece of evidence in a conviction, and it was one of only a limited amount of evidence in a case, would it be worthwhile to retest that using mitochondrial DNA? I would say absolutely,” said Adams, the former FBI lab director. The promised review by federal prosecutors of hair convictions in the District would not include cases before 1985, when FBI records were computerized, and would not disclose any defendant’s name. That approach would have missed Gates, Odom and Tribble, who were convicted earlier. Representatives for Machen, the FBI and the Justice Department also declined to say why the review should be limited to D.C. cases. The Post found that 95 percent of the troubled cases identified by the task force were outside the District. Avis E. Buchanan, director of the D.C. Public Defender Service, said her agency must be “a full participant” in the review, which it has sought for two years, and that it should extend nationwide. “Surely the District of Columbia is not the only place where such flawed evidence was used to convict the innocent,” she said. **Read more fromThe Washington Post:** Shuttle Discovery heads to D.C. area Changes made in discipline polices evident in Fairfax Coffee battle brews at farmers markets For homeless dad, nothing is easy

Forensic errors trigger reviews of D.C. crime lab ballistics unit, prosecutors say

District crime lab officials are reviewing more than 150 firearm examinations for accuracy after the lab discovered errors by three D.C. forensic analysts who incorrectly matched bullets or shell casings recovered at crime scenes to individual weapons. The examinations date to at least August 2015, according to federal prosecutors in Washington and the three former ballistics examiners. The errors and retesting by the Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) were disclosed in Feb. 17 and March 17 letters to defense attorneys by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the District, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Post. The department said that of 44 cases reviewed so far, two contained errors and that the errors were not in high-priority cases and had not led to an arrest, charge or conviction, as far as lab officials know. Federal prosecutors declined to comment on whether the identified mistakes had led to arrests or prosecutions and would not say how many defendants have been notified that work done by the three examiners was part of their cases. Prosecutors wrote in the letters that they would no longer sponsor one of the examiners as an expert witness, and the other two are no longer employed by the department. The Firearms Examination Unit at the D.C. Consolidated Forensic Laboratory is the second-busiest unit of the lab, ranking behind only the fingerprint section, and had 10 examiners as of December 2015 — three of them full time, a department spokeswoman said. The unit conducted 559 examinations from December 2015 to December 2016 and had a backlog of 156 cases. The review for mismatches is the latest setback for the $220 million lab that opened in 2012 and underwent a management overhaul in 2015 after prosecutors found numerous errors in the lab’s DNA testing. The shake-up also led to questions about the independence of the lab, which suspended DNA forensic work for 10 months until March 2016. Last month, department officials also announced that federal regulators were auditing the lab’s public health operations after testing for the Zika virus in hundreds of residents was mishandled for months. At least nine pregnant women who had been exposed to the virus were wrongly told they were negative for the infection, which can cause serious defects in developing fetuses. The ballistics errors also come at a time of high tension — with firearms examiners and their supporters in law enforcement on one side, and many scientists, legal defense organizations and law professors on the other — over the scientific validity of ballistics tracing evidence. In a 2014 opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in and noted the importance of defendants obtaining independent ballistics testing. The court opinion was in a case that granted a retrial to an Alabama death row inmate who was then exonerated after 30 years when new firearms experts disagreed with the original examiners’ findings that sent him to prison. Janet E. Mitchell, special counsel to the D.C. Public Defender Service, praised the forensic department for launching the inquiry but said all firearms tracing results “should be viewed with skepticism” because of the subjectivity of comparisons and lack of research into how often marks made by different weapons may look alike. Some national studies, she noted, estimated examiner error rates as high as 1 in 20. “While we are pleased that DFS is undertaking this review, these errors are likely not unique to these examiners or to these cases,” Mitchell said. “To the extent that this type of evidence continues to be admitted in court, judges and juries should be made fully aware of the error rates uncovered in the single appropriately designed study to date.” U.S. attorney’s office spokesman Bill Miller said the office is working closely with the forensics department and awaiting the outcomes of reviews by the lab on accuracy, as well as reviews by prosecutors about any effects on cases. “To ensure that every criminal defendant receives a fair trial, the U.S. attorney’s office has made disclosures to defense counsel, and we will continue to share results of the findings,” Miller said. The lab’s internal quality controls detected the problems, said LaShon Beamon, a spokeswoman for the forensic sciences department. The lab then reported the errors to prosecutors and others, she said. “This incident demonstrates some of the critical changes made” at the forensics department, which Beamon said “is undergoing a tremendous reform.” The current review of lab matching by the three examiners was triggered when veteran firearms examiner Daniel Barrett failed an annual proficiency test in August 2016, according to details in the letter sent by prosecutors. The letter from Michael T. Ambrosino, special counsel for DNA and forensics for the U.S. attorney, went to Betty Ballester, chief of the D.C. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association, and to the federal and D.C. public defenders. Barrett’s failed skills test prompted the lab to check a sample of his recent work in criminal cases, where officials uncovered a serious error in which he incorrectly linked shell casings to a weapon. Lab officials then expanded the re-examination to all 120 cases Barrett has handled since August 2015 — when he last passed a skills test — and that bigger, ongoing sweep turned up a second mistake, prosecutors said in a March 17 letter. The two cases in which Barrett reached the wrong conclusions had each been confirmed by another colleague as part of a routine verification system used in the lab — meaning three examiners are part of the errors. Cases by all three are now being investigated, although how the review is being conducted and which cases are being examined is not clear. Prosecutors and the District’s lab would not say exactly how many cases are being studied or whether the review of the three examiners is limited only to cases in which each was the first to report a result. Reached at his Virginia home, Barrett, 65, confirmed prosecutors’ account of his errors and said, “I was wrong, I don’t want to embarrass the unit.” A certified firearms examiner for more than 40 years, Barrett said he joined the D.C. police in 2007 as a civilian analyst and moved to the forensic sciences department in 2012. Most of his reviewed lab work involved homicides and police shootings, he said, and he was a senior examiner who trained others. Once prosecutors barred him from being used as an expert witness, Barrett said, he decided to retire, which takes effect in the summer, and is no longer working on cases. “It’s very painful for me. I had quite a reputation. And then this happened. I lost everything,” he said with a sigh. “Maybe I’m a dinosaur. I lost confidence in myself, and I feel I let my co-workers down.” The two examiners who confirmed Barrett’s erroneous cases were Luciano Morales and Kevin Webster, longtime D.C. police officers and firearms examiners who also moved to the city’s forensic sciences lab in 2012. Morales, 50, defended himself and Barrett, saying their error was the result of an administrative mix-up. He blamed managers for poor record-keeping and reporting, saying, “I think the issue here is management at DFS. I don’t believe that things were done right within [the] firearms” unit. Morales worked 27 years as a D.C. officer, was certified as a firearms examiner in 1998 and later detailed to the forensic department. He worked there until last year, then became a contractor until September. Prosecutors did not specify which of his cases are being reviewed, but Morales said he conducted only about 24 examinations in recent years. Webster, 55, spent 25 years as a D.C. police officer and was a firearms examiner for two years before returning under a contract in 2015. He rejoined the police department in February as a senior police officer teaching cadets. Webster said he learned only in the past week that his cases for the District lab since August 2016 — the last time he passed a proficiency test — were being scrutinized. He estimated he had worked on ballistics matches in about 25 cases since then and said he was notified that his results were being investigated because one of his cases was going to trial. “As far as my abilities, I was trained by Morales, and Morales is an excellent, excellent trainer, and he’s an excellent examiner,” Webster said. Ballester, the trial lawyer association chief, called the lab errors “disheartening,” particularly because the unit’s process of having a second examiner verify test results proved fallible. Ballester said that because of the cost and because requests require court approval, defense attorneys often do not order their own forensic firearms testing. As a result, defendants often rely on DFS examinations. “They are supposed to be independent. We are supposed to trust in their results,” Ballester said. The review of the D.C. lab results comes months after a White House scientific advisory panel renewed scientists’ challenge to whether firearms testing and other forensic techniques should be admitted as scientific evidence, reinforcing criticism by the National Research Council that matched bullets, hair or tire treads to a single source are overstated. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology said that the one valid study, funded by the Pentagon in 2014, established a likely error rate in firearms testing at no more than 1 in 46. Two less rigorous recent studies found a 1 in 20 error rate, the White House panel said. “Expressions of consensus among practitioners … [are] no substitute for error rates,” the council said. A leading standard-setting group of firearms analysis practitioners sponsored by the National Institute for Standards and Technology “fundamentally disagreed,” saying the council disregarded less rigorous studies that more accurately reflect casework as well as methods and training developed over hundreds of years, in favor of a “purely statistical” approach.

D.C. mayor orders audit of crime lab amid dispute over DNA testing

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser has commissioned an audit of the city’s new crime lab after forensic experts hired by the U.S. Attorney’s Office said they discovered errors in some of the lab’s DNA analyses, the mayor’s office said Friday. Bowser (D) has contacted the national governing board for DNA laboratories, theANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board, to investigate allegations by the U.S. Attorney’s Office that the lab has misstated the likelihood that a particular person’s DNA was left at a crime scene. Lab officials have defended their work. The dispute between federal prosecutors and the city’s Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) was first reported Friday by The Washington Post. The audit is scheduled to begin Monday. “We share the same goal as the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is to have a quality lab that does work that everyone has confidence in,” said Kevin Donahue, the District’s acting deputy mayor for public safety. “This is inherently a debate about science, and I want independent scientists to add clarity to help us resolve it,” Donahue said. “They will be in a position, at the end of the audit, to either corroborate that there are areas for improvement, or they will agree that there is reasonable area for disagreement.” Since January, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District has stopped using the lab to evaluate evidence and has instead sent cases to outside labs and hired independent DNA experts to review some 116 cases previously examined by the city-run lab. DFS Director Max Houck said he “welcomed” the audit by the mayor’s office. “It will be good to have proper auditors come through,” he said. Houck noted that the FBI also oversaw an audit last year to ensure that the lab was qualified to have access to FBI databases. Houck has said that the D.C. lab, which is in a $220 million facility in Southwest that opened in 2012, follows the same protocols in place at many city and state labs across the country and that experts may disagree on how to interpret evidence. Prosecutors say the problems with the analyses have not led to any exonerations or any charges being dismissed. Attorneys say the dispute could trigger appeals or civil lawsuits, but the impact ultimately will depend on how important DNA evidence was in each case. DFS officials had already been scheduled to attend a hearing Thursday before the D.C. Council’s Judiciary Committee, and committee members said the DNA dispute is sure to be a topic of conversation. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said he has been briefed on the issue repeatedly since January and sat in on a meeting last week between the U.S. attorney and the head of the crime lab where the topic was discussed, at what he said was his urging. “I’m the one who had to bring it up,” Mendelson said. “It was on the agenda, but it was being dealt with in a very superficial way.” Mendelson, who once chaired the Judiciary Committee, said he is very concerned about the implication from the U.S. Attorney’s Office that there could be errors in cases. Prosecutors have said they have worked closely with the mayor about their concerns with the lab during the past several months. Last month, the mayor’s office informed prosecutors that it would do its own audit. “To date, the Mayor’s Office has been very responsive in trying to address our concerns regarding DFS, and we assume that the audit is another step in that direction,” Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said Friday. In addition to the review of cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office also is conducting its own audit. The issue involves the analyses of combinations of genetic material from more than one person — such as samples collected from weapons, cars or a victim’s body. The scientists try to tease out who left the DNA. Although TV dramas such as “CSI” make DNA testing look simple, experts said, such disputes are not uncommon, and the industry does not have a single accepted method for interpreting DNA mixtures. Prosecutors said they first became concerned in September, when they asked an outside expert to look over DNA evidence in a burglary and sexual assault case. They said that person identified problems in the analysis. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who oversees the Judiciary Committee, said he hopes that the scientific community will set a standard methodology in analyzing DNA mixtures. “That could help prevent these types of disputes,” he said. “There needs to be a standard that everyone agrees with.” **Read more:**   Federal review stalled after finding forensic errors by FBI   How the courts trap people who were convicted by bad forensics   How accurate is forensic analysis?   Justice Dept. admits flaws in forensic testimony

D.C.’s inadequate crime lab

“INSUFFICIENT AND inadequate.” That biting assessment of the District’s crime lab by independent auditors puts to rest any suggestion that federal prosecutors overreacted when they stopped sending DNA evidence to the facility on the grounds that it was making serious mistakes. The finding also raises the questions of why officials in charge of the lab were so dismissive of prosecutors’ concerns and what that says about their ability to remedy the problems. A national accreditation board commissioned by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to assess complaints raised by the U.S. Attorney’s Office ordered the Consolidated Forensic Laboratory to immediately halt all DNA casework after concluding that analysts “were not competent and were using inadequate procedures.” The findings of the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board were in keeping with results of a separate review by forensic experts brought in by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Lab officials, given 30 days to address the concerns about training, procedures and quality control, said they take the reviews “seriously” and will work “diligently” to make the necessary fixes. But the U.S. Attorney’s Office had alerted officials in the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences to the issues last fall (the audit said problems had been flagged even earlier, in 2013) but they refused to even acknowledge the errors, much less make reforms. Indeed, forensics officials staunchly defended their work; Max M. Houck, director of the department, attributed any differences to the normal disagreements of interpretation that occur between scientific experts. Defenders of the lab even insinuated that prosecutors had an ulterior motive of wanting to impinge on the independence of the lab. The work of this lab has a direct bearing on the fair administration of justice — who goes to jail and who goes free. Having invested a quarter-billion dollars in a state-of-the-art crime lab, District residents shouldn’t have to wonder about the competence of the work or the accuracy of the analysis. As Ms. Bowser said, the work must be “beyond reproach.” She has tapped Deputy City Administrator Kevin Donahue to oversee a top-to-bottom review; D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), chairman of the judiciary committee, has called for an emergency meeting of all stakeholders. Among the questions that need to be answered: why it was federal prosecutors, and not city officials, who recognized the problems — and what would have happened if the feds hadn’t noticed. **Read more:** The Post’s View: D.C.’s new crime lab goes under the microscope

District expected to name new head of embattled DNA lab, officials say

District officials on Friday plan to announce a new director of the city’s troubled forensic lab, three months after the previous director was removed following a scathing review by a national accreditation body, which ultimately ordered the lab to suspend all of its DNA testing. According to two city officials, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) is expected to name Jenifer Smith as director of the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences, which houses the DNA lab. Smith is a retired FBI special agent and a former head of the FBI’s DNA laboratory, as well as a former head of the CIA’s biological technology center. The lab opened in 2012 as part of a $220 million facility in Southwest Washington. In April, the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board determined in its audit that analysts at the lab were “not competent and were using inadequate procedures.” The authors of the audit, which District officials ordered, gave the lab 30 days to address the concerns. Weeks after the report was released, Max M. Houck, the lab’s founding director, resigned. Houck was previously an FBI supervisor. Most recently, Smith, who holds a doctorate in physiological chemistry, was contracted by the District as a consultant to oversee the implementation of new rules and procedures at the DNA lab as part of the efforts to be allowed to resume DNA testing. For more than three months, prosecutors, police and others who use the lab have been sending evidence to private labs for DNA analysis, a substantial financial burden to taxpayers who paid for the District’s first independent forensic science department. DNA analysis makes up 21 percent of the lab’s operations, the third-largest percentage of work for the lab, behind firearm and fingerprint analysis. In March, The Washington Post reported that District prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office alerted city officials to what they described as many errors with the DNA analysis performed at the lab, specifically involving DNA mixture cases, those in which more than one person’s DNA is present in the evidence. William Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said prosecutors reviewed more than 125 cases in which the lab performed DNA analysis. He said prosecutors did not identify any cases that resulted in wrongful convictions or unjust criminal charges.

A setback for forensic science

_The writer is a professor of criminology and law at the University of California at Irvine, a member of the Human Factors Subcommittee of the National Commission on Forensic Science and vice chair of the Human Factors Committee of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees, a federal body charged with promulgating standards and guidelines on forensic science._ The top managers of the District’s highly regarded crime laboratory were forced to resign or terminated last month after a dispute between the crime lab and the U.S. Attorney’s Office over interpretation and reporting of DNA evidence. News reports suggested it was simply a matter of incompetence. Outside experts hired by the U.S. Attorney’s Office issued a highly critical report. Their criticisms were supported by an audit performed on behalf of the mayor’s office by a national accrediting agency. The mayor and other city officials undoubtedly assumed that, if the lab could not figure out the right way to do DNA testing, the managers should be replaced. But that simple-minded analysis reflects a serious misunderstanding about the details of the matter and the larger issues at stake. A key issue is whether the crime laboratory will remain independent from law enforcement. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that crime labs be separated from law enforcement control. The academy concluded that many of the problems that plague forensic science — inadequately validated methods, bias, overstatement of findings — are partly attributable to excessive influence by police and prosecutors, who rely heavily on forensic science evidence to obtain convictions. The District followed the academy’s recommendation. In 2011, the D.C. Council established the Department of Forensic Sciences as an independent agency. Max M. Houck, a highly regarded forensic scientist, was appointed director. The laboratory began operation in October 2012 and quickly obtained accreditation, drawing nationwide attention from those interested in reform and improvement of forensic science. Houck worked to ensure the independence and transparency of the laboratory. With the help of the lab’s legal counsel, he developed new lines of communication between the laboratory and the groups it served — including police, prosecutors and defense lawyers. The laboratory ended a policy that had allowed prosecutors to have preferential access to laboratory information and to control what defense lawyers were allowed to see. Under the new administration, prosecutors and defense lawyers were given equal access. That the lab’s legal counsel was among those sacked suggests that the firings were about more than interpretation of DNA tests. If misinterpretation is the real problem, why was firing the laboratory’s legal counsel the solution? Were the complaints about DNA interpretation an excuse to strike back at a laboratory management that had denied them some of the prerogatives that laboratories have traditionally granted to prosecutors — a way to bring an independent laboratory back under law enforcement control? The complaints concerned the lab’s interpretation of DNA tests in a special class of cases that are notoriously difficult to interpret — those in which the quantity of DNA recovered is too small to yield a complete genetic profile. To draw conclusions from such evidence, analysts must make subjective judgments about matters that cannot be determined with certainty, such as the exact number of contributors and the probability that the test failed to detect certain genetic characteristics of certain contributors. Reasonable experts have long been divided over the best way to analyze such evidence and how to report the results. While the method used by the D.C. lab is open to criticism, a 2013 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology suggests that a majority of DNA laboratories in the United States follow the same method. The audit team pointed to several cases in which it deemed the lab’s interpretations to be problematic, but one could find similar examples in the casework of accredited crime laboratories nationwide. These problems have never caused an accrediting agency to demand suspension of testing in a DNA laboratory. Why was that step taken now? It is noteworthy that the audit agency met privately with representatives of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and experts they hired before the audit. A request by the Public Defender Service to have a representative at the meeting was denied. Observers will be watching very closely to see whether the new management of the laboratory maintains the policies of openness and independence ushered in by Houck, or whether the laboratory returns to a more traditional model in which prosecutors have preferential access and influence. In any event, this sends a strong message to laboratory directors nationwide who come into conflict with local prosecutors. The message is be afraid, be very afraid. That, in itself, is a serious setback for efforts to protect the scientific independence of crime laboratories. **Read more about this issue:** The Post’s View: D.C.’s inadequate crime lab The Post’s View: D.C.’s crime lab goes under the microscope

FBI lab failures should lead to reform

KIRK L.ODOM was incarcerated for 20 years and Donald E. Gates for nearly 30 for crimes they did not commit. Santae A. Tribble spent 28 years behind bars, even though DNA evidence now shows he almost undoubtedly was not the culprit. All of the men were erroneously convicted in the District, in part, on the basis of forensic evidence analyzed by the FBI. Problems within the FBI lab, particularly with hair-sample analysis, were well known to the agency and the Justice Department; a task force spent some nine years reviewing cases after a whistleblower revealed possible shortcomings. In a series of articles, The Post’s Spencer S. Hsu and a team of reporters documented how the Justice Department failed to notify lawyers representing prisoners whose fate hinged on the FBI analysis. Some prisoners spent years behind bars before becoming aware of the lab issues. The problem continues to this day. The full results of the Justice Department task force’s investigation have not been made public. Even when the task force discovered flaws in a case, the information was turned over only to prosecutors, who were then left to decide whether the results needed to be brought to the attention of defense lawyers. In addition, the task force reviewed only cases involving one FBI analyst whose work was called into question; The Post identified cases where other analysts’ work resulted in convictions of innocent defendants. The FBI argues that hair-sample analysis — in which samples from a suspect are analyzed microscopically and compared with samples found on a victim or crime scene — is a vital and legitimate tool. Advances in DNA testing, which allows for genetic analysis of evidence, “should not be perceived as diminishing the value of prior practices and testimonies,” according to an FBI statement. Administration law enforcement officials say that all hair samples collected after 1996 have been subjected to DNA testing, when possible; they point out that such testing is sometimes off limits because of the size or condition of the sample. “In cases where microscopic hair exams conducted by the FBI resulted in a conviction, the FBI is evaluating whether additional review is warranted,” the statement said. This does not go far enough. The agency should not be considering “whether additional review is warranted” but how such a review should be conducted; members of the defense bar should be part of these discussions. Any review should, as a start, include DNA testing of hair samples in all cases that ended in conviction — regardless of which analyst performed the work — for which the defendant is still imprisoned or on parole. The Justice Department should make its task force results public; if such broad disclosure presents privacy or security problems, the department should at least make all FBI forensic analysis and task force material available to defense lawyers. The failings documented by The Post point to the need for better scientific standards in forensic testing and a more open process for the disclosure of evidence and information in criminal proceedings. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is weighing legislation to expand the role of the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to set such standards. Congress also should change the law regarding discovery. Prosecutors should not be deciding which pieces of evidence seem exculpatory and must be turned over to the defense. They should be required to open their files to defense lawyers, with exceptions for witness protection or national security. ****

Santae Tribble cleared in 1978 murder based on DNA hair test

A District man who spent 28 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit was formally declared innocent by a Superior Court judge Friday, ending his long fight for exoneration. Santae A. Tribble, 51, was convicted in the killing of a Southeast Washington taxi driver in 1978 after an FBI examiner said he microscopically matched Tribble’s hair to one in a stocking found near the crime scene. The killer was wearing a stocking mask. Tribble always maintained his innocence, and after he served his sentence, DNA tests on the hair this year excluded him as the source. In a five-page order, Judge Laura A. Cordero granted Tribble’s request for a certificate of innocence. “In light of the parties’ concession that new DNA evidence conclusively shows that the hair found in the stocking cap was not Mr. Tribble’s, the Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that he did not commit the crimes he was convicted of at trial,” Cordero wrote. With the ruling, Tribble became the second D.C. man this year and the third since 2009 to be exonerated after serving a lengthy prison term based on false hair matches by different examiners in the FBI Laboratory. Their cases, which were featured in a series of articles in The Washington Post, helped focus national attention on flaws in the U.S. forensic science system. In response, the Justice Department in July announced a nationwide review of all cases handled by the FBI Laboratory’s hair and fibers unit before 2000 — more than 21,000 cases in all — for instances in which improper lab reports or testimony may have contributed to a conviction. The lab began DNA testing of hair in 1996. This summer, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced Tribble and Kirk L. Odom, whom a D.C. judge cleared this year of a 1981 rape, at a committee hearing about legislation that would overhaul standards for forensic science practitioners and researchers. “It has long been clear that action is necessary to ensure improved support for forensic science and meaningful national standards and oversight,” Leahy said after shaking hands with the D.C. men. In addition to Tribble and Odom, Donald E. Gates was cleared in 2009 of a 1981 murder in Rock Creek Park after DNA testing showed that only another man could have committed the crime. A hair match also was critical evidence at his trial. Tribble declined to comment Friday. In a letter to Superior Court Chief Judge Lee F. Satterfield this month urging a quick decision, Sandra K. Levick, the attorney who helped clear all three D.C. men, said that Tribble “is destitute. He has no job, no possessions other than a few items of clothing and personal effects, no savings, no source of income and no prospects for employment.” The Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic testimony and false matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people. Hair analysis was subjective and lacked scientific research into how often hairs of different people might appear to match, and the FBI lab lacked protocols to ensure that agent testimony was scientifically accurate. But Justice Department managers limited their review of hair cases to the work of one agent, even as they learned that many examiners’ matches were often wrong and that numerous examiners overstated the significance of matches in federal, state and local cases, using bogus statistics or exaggerated claims, The Post found. In many cases that the agency did review and found problems with, prosecutors never notified defendants or their attorneys of the issues uncovered. In Tribble’s case, the FBI agent testified at trial that the hair from the stocking matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.” In closing arguments, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further: “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair.” In January, court-ordered DNA testing by a private lab confirmed that none of the 13 hairs retrieved from the stocking shared Tribble’s genetic profile or that of his alleged accomplice, Cleveland Wright. The lab also found that the 13 hairs came from three human sources, each of African origin, except for one — which came from a dog — facts over which the FBI-trained examiners disagreed or missed outright. Cordero tossed out Tribble’s conviction at the request of prosecutors in May, saying he could not be tried again. The government later notified Cordero that it would not contest Tribble’s effort to be declared innocent, although prosecutors declined to join his motion. “Because the hair evidence that implicated defendant now has been thoroughly discredited, and because the hair evidence was a key component of the government’s case at trial, the United States does not oppose the Court’s granting defendant’s request for a Certificate of Innocence,” U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. explained. Under the D.C. Innocence Protection Act, the judge’s ruling allows Tribble to obtain compensation from the government for his wrongful imprisonment. Including Tribble, 301 people in the United States have been exonerated by post-conviction DNA testing since 1989. The daughter of John McCormick, the slain cabdriver, said her late mother would have wanted police to find the real killer. “I lost a father many years ago to murder. Now I learn that the wrong man spent years in prison for the crime,” Carolyn McCormick, 65, a high school chemistry and anatomy teacher in Austin, wrote Cordero in an affidavit in October. “I will do anything to help to see that justice is done.”

Santae Tribble’s 1980 murder conviction overturned by D.C. judge

A D.C. Superior Court judge has overturned the conviction of a District man who wrongly served 28 years in prison for the killing of a taxi driver. Santae A. Tribble, 51, has maintained his innocence since the crime in 1978. In a telephone interview Tuesday morning, Tribble said: “I’m overjoyed. I always felt like it would happen, but it took so long I started to wonder.” Although the judge threw out Tribble’s 1980 conviction and said he could not be tried on the charge again, the ruling does not exonerate him. An attorney for Tribble requested time to file papers and, if necessary, have a hearing next month to determine innocence. DNA evidence and information from police files that was not disclosed at trial clear Tribble, his attorneys said. “Mr. Tribble’s struggle for justice is not yet over. He will now seek a certificate of innocence from the court,” said Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service. In a one-page court order signed Friday, filed Monday and received by Tribble’s attorneys late Tuesday, Judge Laura Cordero vacated his conviction and dismissed the underlying charges. She did not give an opinion on the case. U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr., citing DNA evidence, agreed last month to drop the murder charge against Tribble and not to try him again. Tribble was found guilty of murdering a District cabdriver in an early morning robbery July 26, 1978. In April, The Washington Post featured Tribble’s case in a series of articles that reported that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people. In addition, The Post reported that the Justice Department reviewed a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite indications that problems were far more widespread and might affect thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts. As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide who remain in prison or on parole might merit exoneration or a retrial because FBI experts mistakenly linked them to hair or fiber evidence that should be reexamined, including up-to-date DNA testing. In Tribble’s case, prosecutors and the FBI laboratory incorrectly linked a hair found near the murder scene to Tribble, according to recent DNA test results and The Post’s inquiry. Machen’s office declined to comment, referring to its April 27 filing. In that filing, prosecutors said the DNA results raise substantial doubt about the defendant’s guilt. But they stopped short of joining his bid for exoneration. Tribble has asked the court for full exoneration under the D.C. Innocence Protection Act. He said that the judge’s order lifted a weight from his shoulders but that life has been a “day-to-day struggle” since his release from prison. Tribble was arrested at 17 and, before the judge’s ruling, spent his entire adult life in prison or on parole. Tribble served 25 years in prison for the killing and three more years for failing to meet the conditions of his parole. After leaving a halfway house in the fall, he is homeless and staying with friends as he looks for work. He has worked odd jobs for a friend’s bus company and has tended to a man who is disabled, but he is seeking a full-time job. “It’s hard to put this behind me,” Tribble said. “I stay with friends, but that could change from day to day at any time,” Tribble said. “I haven’t been able to land any permanent employment. Most of the work I have done has been in laboring, construction and landscaping. That’s probably what I’m qualified to do.” Still, he said, he spent Wednesday “rejoicing” with relatives, including his son, Santae Tribble Jr., 20, who traveled from Waldorf to spend time with him. “My living conditions, there’s a lot of things I have to work on, but I’m happy this part of it is over,” Tribble said. “I don’t have to report to a parole officer. The conviction is gone.”

30 years after woman’s slaying in District, DNA match on evidence from scene leads to arrest

She was found dead in her third-floor apartment in Congress Heights, naked from the waist down and with her hands tied behind her back. Police said that Rachel Cox, 43, had been sexually assaulted and stabbed several times. The day was Jan. 1, 1984, the same year scientists developed a technique to use DNA to identify people but long before unique genetic sequences became as common as fingerprints in criminal investigations. At the crime scene, authorities collected bodily fluid and a cigarette butt discarded under a table and stored them for another day. That day finally came. In January, nearly 30 years after Cox was killed, detectives submitted the fluid and cigarette butt for DNA testing and got hits on both. D.C. police said Tuesday that modern-day testing revealed that genetic material from the fluid matched a profile from a sex offender who had raped a 10-year-old girl months after Cox was killed and just blocks from where she was attacked. It was the first break in the unsolved, apparently random killing. On Tuesday, police arrested a warehouse laborer in Woodbridge, Va., and charged him with felony murder. Joe Anthony Barber, 55, is being held until his next court hearing, on Nov. 15. Cases like this have become common in recent years, with DNA used to arrest and convict people in what had once seemed impossible-to-solve crimes as well as to exonerate others sent to prison on what had appeared to be airtight evidence. Collectively, DNA databases in Maryland, Virginia and the District hold more than 600,000 genetic codes, most taken from convicted felons. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5 to 4 decision in June, allowed Maryland to take DNA samples from some arrestees, ruling the procedure no different than fingerprinting someone being booked on criminal charges but not yet convicted. Maryland’s DNA database, for example, has 107,000 samples, nearly 2,600 added this year alone. Last year, authorities reported 45 matches between crime scene evidence and someone in the database. That led to nine arrests and six convictions. The number of people in the District’s database could not be learned Thursday. Samples are taken from felons before they’re sent to federal prisons across the United States. D.C. officials said there have been 73 DNA hits this year but could not say how many have led to arrests. Max Houck, director of the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences, said that making an arrest in a 30-year-old case remains fairly noteworthy, although he pointed to reports last month that scientists had mapped the genome of a 4-year-old who died in Russia 24,000 years ago. “Solving a 30-year-old homicide probably shouldn’t amaze us,” he said. Houck said it wasn’t too long ago that a DNA sample “had to be the size of a quarter to get a reading. Now we’re able to test amounts we can’t even see — down to 10 or 12 skin cells.” The DNA samples obtained at the scene of Cox’s killing were tested by an outside firm, using federal grant money, before the new lab was opened. Cox’s daughter said earlier this week that relatives were excited by news of an arrest but did not want to speak publicly. D.C. police said the attack on Cox, which occurred before 6:30 a.m. New Year’s Day 1984, appeared to be random. Detectives at the time had little evidence, and the cigarette butt and swabs taken from the victim were virtually useless with the technology available at the time. But the items were saved, and on Jan. 16, they were submitted to Bode Technology Group of Virginia. A genetic profile from the swabs matched a profile of the suspect, who was on the Virginia State Police’s sex-offense registry. The butt belonged to someone else, according to court documents. Police obtained another, more current DNA sample from the suspect, and that also was a match, according to the court documents.

Kirk Odom, who served 20 years for 1981 D.C. rape, is innocent, prosecutors say

Federal prosecutors agreed Tuesday that a Washington man imprisoned for 20 years for rape is innocent and they acknowledged scientific errors in his case after DNA evidence proved that another man committed the crime. Kirk L. Odom will become the second District man in two months and the third in three years to have his conviction for rape or murder overturned because of erroneous hair matches claimed in court by FBI forensic experts. Odom’s case was featured in a series of articles in April in which The Washington Post reported that Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people. Odom, 49, served his sentence and was released from prison in 2003. He was convicted of raping, sodomizing and robbing a 27-year-old woman before dawn in her Capitol Hill apartment in 1981. However, court-ordered DNA testing revealed in January that the hair fragment in his case could not have come from Odom. Further DNA testing of stains on a pillowcase and robe indicated that only another man, not Odom, could have committed the crime. “More than 30 years after Mr. Odom’s conviction, DNA testing reveals that he suffered a terrible injustice,” U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. wrote in a two-page filing in D.C. Superior Court. “The United States expresses its profound regret for the harm suffered by Mr. Odom, and requests that this Court immediately vacate Mr. Odom’s convictions and dismiss the indictments against him with prejudice,” Machen wrote. ****Odom, who was identified in court as the attacker by the victim, was thrilled by the news. “Oh my goodness, the storm is over, yes yes!” he said from the office of his attorney, Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the District Public Defender Service. “There’s no more dark clouds, and the sun is beginning to shine very bright,” said Odom, who lives in Southeast Washington with his wife, Harriet, a medical counselor. Asked if he would say anything to police or prosecutors, or to the victim, Odom responded, “There’s nothing much to say except, ‘God bless you.’ ” The Post generally does not name victims of sexual assaults without their permission. The man whose DNA matched the stains is a convicted sex offender. He will not be charged, because the statute of limitations has expired on the crime, Machen said. In a written statement, Machen endorsed eliminating the statute of limitations on sex crimes. “Though we can never give him back the years that he lost, we can give Mr. Odom back his unfairly tarnished reputation,” Machen wrote. “Three decades ago, law enforcement got it wrong: Mr. Odom did not commit this crime. . . . It is never too late to secure justice — even if that means correcting a grave injustice from decades earlier.” Odom would become the 293rd ****person cleared by post-conviction DNA testing in the United States, after the judge rules on what is now a joint motion between the prosecution and defense. Odom would be released from lifelong parole and no longer would have to register as a sex offender. He also would be allowed to seek financial compensation for damages sustained during his 20-year incarceration. Prosecutors also said they would agree to seal his arrest and conviction record. In May, a Superior Court judge dismissed the murder conviction against Santae A. Tribble, 51, after DNA tests disproved testimony at his trial from an FBI hair expert linking him to the 1978 killing of a District taxi driver. In December 2009, Donald E. Gates was exonerated of a 1981 rape and murder in Rock Creek Park — again after DNA tests ruled out a hair match claimed by the FBI. “We salute Mr. Odom for having the courage and fortitude to withstand more than 31 years convicted of terrible crimes for which he was absolutely innocent,” Levick said. “We salute the United States Attorney’s Office for joining us today to remedy this tragic injustice. And we salute the Department of Justice and the FBI for agreeing to a review of all cases involving hair evidence of the kind used to convict Mr. Odom, Mr. Tribble and Mr. Gates.”

Federal review stalled after finding forensic errors by FBI lab unit spanned two decades

Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said. The findings troubled the bureau, and it stopped the review of convictions last August. Case reviews resumed this month at the order of the Justice Department, the officials said. U.S. officials began the inquiry after The Washington Post reported two years ago that flawed forensic evidence involving microscopic hair matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people. Most of those defendants never were told of the problems in their cases. The inquiry includes 2,600 convictions and 45 death-row cases from the 1980s and 1990s in which the FBI’s hair and fiber unit reported a match to a crime-scene sample before DNA testing of hair became common. The FBI had reviewed about 160 cases before it stopped, officials said. _(Related:‘Irreversible harm’ when FBI didn’t reveal flawed lab work in death-row cases)_ The investigation resumed after the Justice Department’s inspector general excoriated the department and the FBI for unacceptable delays and inadequate investigation in a separate inquiry from the mid-1990s. The inspector general found in that probe that three defendants were executed and a fourth died on death row in the five years it took officials to reexamine 60 death-row convictions that were potentially tainted by agent misconduct, mostly involving the same FBI hair and fiber analysis unit now under scrutiny. “I don’t know whether history is repeating itself, but clearly the [latest] report doesn’t give anyone a sense of confidence that the work of the examiners whose conduct was first publicly questioned in 1997 was reviewed as diligently and promptly as it needed to be,” said Michael R. Bromwich, who was inspector general from 1994 to 1999 and is now a partner at the Goodwin Procter law firm. Bromwich would not discuss any aspect of the current review because he is a pro bono adviser to the Innocence Project, which along with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is assisting the government effort under an agreement not to talk about the review. Still, he added, “Now we are left 18 years [later] with a very unhappy, unsatisfying and disquieting situation, which is far harder to remedy than if the problems had been addressed promptly.” Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole this month ordered that reviews resume under the original terms, officials said. _(Related:U.S. reviewing 27 death penalty convictions for FBI forensic testimony errors)_ According to the FBI, the delay resulted, in part, “from a vigorous debate that occurred within the FBI and DOJ about the appropriate scientific standards we should apply when reviewing FBI lab examiner testimony — many years after the fact.” “Working closely with DOJ, we have resolved those issues and are moving forward with the transcript review for the remaining cases,” the FBI said. Emily Pierce, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said: “The Department of Justice never signed off on the FBI’s decision to change the way they reviewed the hair analysis. We are pleased that the review has resumed and that notification letters will be going out in the next few weeks.” During the review’s 11-month hiatus, Florida’s Supreme Court denied an appeal by a death-row inmate who challenged his 1988 conviction based on an FBI hair match. James Aren Duckett’s results were caught up in the delay, and his legal options are now more limited. Revelations that the government’s largest post-conviction review of forensic evidence has found widespread problems counter earlier FBI claims that a single rogue examiner was at fault. Instead, they feed a growing debate over how the U.S. justice system addresses systematic weaknesses in past forensic testimony and methods. “I see this as a tip-of-the-iceberg problem,” said Erin Murphy, a New York University law professor and expert on modern scientific evidence. “It’s not as though this is one bad apple or even that this is one bad-apple discipline,” she said. “There is a long list of disciplines that have exhibited problems, where if you opened up cases you’d see the same kinds of overstated claims and unfounded statements.” Worries about the limitations and presentation of scientific evidence are “coming out of the dark shadows of the legal system,” said David H. Kaye, a law professor at Penn State who helped lead a Justice Department-funded study of fingerprint analysis and testimony in 2012. “The question is: What can you do about it?” Courts and law enforcement authorities have been reluctant to allow defendants to retroactively challenge old evidence using newer, more accurate scientific methods. The Justice Department and FBI inquiry, which examines convictions before 2000, could provide a way for defendants to make that challenge. Because the government is dropping procedural objections to appeals and offering new DNA testing in flawed cases if sought by a judge or prosecutor, results could provide a measure of the frequency of wrongful convictions. Responding to the FBI review, the accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors last year recommended that labs determine whether they needed to conduct similar reviews, and New York, North Carolina and Texas are doing so. According to a Justice Department spokesman, officials last August completed reviews and notified a first wave of defendants in 23 cases, including 14 death-penalty cases, that FBI examiners “exceeded the limits of science” when they linked hair to crime-scene evidence. However, concerned that errors were found in the “vast majority” of cases, the FBI restarted the review, grinding the process to a halt, said a government official who was briefed on the process. The Justice Department objected in January, but a standoff went unresolved until this month. After more than two years, the review will have addressed about 10 percent of the 2,600 questioned convictions and perhaps two-thirds of questioned death-row cases. The department is notifying defendants about errors in two more death-penalty cases and in 134 non-capital cases over the next month, and will complete evaluations of 98 other cases by early October, including 14 more death-penalty cases. No crime lab performed more hair examinations for federal and state agencies than the 10-member FBI unit, which testified in cases nationwide involving murder, rape and other violent felonies. Although FBI policy has stated since at least the 1970s that a hair association cannot be used as positive identification, like fingerprints, agents regularly testified to the near-certainty of matches. In reality, there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same. The FBI now uses visual hair comparison to rule out someone as a possible source of hair or as a screening step before more accurate DNA testing. This month, the inspector general reported that inattention and foot-dragging by the Justice Department and the FBI led them to ignore warnings 15 years ago that scientifically unsupported and misleading testimony could have come from more than a single hair examiner among agents discredited in a 1997 inspector general’s report on misconduct at the FBI lab. The report said that as of 1999, Justice Department officials had enough information to review all hair unit cases — not just those of former agent Michael P. Malone, who was identified as the agent making the most frequent exaggerated testimony. By 2002, Maureen Killion, then director of enforcement operations, had alerted senior criminal division officials to “the specter that the other examiners in the unit” were as sloppy as Malone, the inspector general said. “This issue has been raised with the FBI but not resolved to date,” Killion wrote to then-Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff and his principal deputy, John C. Keeney, in July 2002, the report said. Twelve years later, the Florida case shows the continued inadequacy of officials’ response. ****Duckett, then a rookie police officer in Mascotte, Fla., was convicted of raping and strangling Teresa McAbee, 11, and dumping her into a lake in 1987. After a state police examiner was unable to match pubic hair found in the victim’s underwear, prosecutors went to Malone, who testified at trial that there was a “high degree of probability” that the hair came from Duckett. Such testimony is scientifically invalid, according to the parameters of the current FBI review, because it claims to associate a hair with a single person “to the exclusion of all others.” The Florida court denied Duckett’s request for a new hearing on Malone’s hair match. The court noted that there was other evidence of Duckett’s guilt and that the FBI had not entirely abandoned visual hair comparison. Duckett attorney Mary Elizabeth Wells confirmed this week that Duckett’s case was under the FBI’s review. Both Wells and Whitney Ray, a spokeswoman for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, said Thursday that parties had not been notified of results, but they otherwise declined to comment. Duckett’s case was eligible for the 1996 review as a Malone case but was omitted, even though the inspector general stated that “it was important to the integrity of the justice system” that all of Malone’s death-penalty cases be immediately reviewed. The Justice Department declined to comment on the omission. Get updates on your area delivered via e-mail

Pr. George’s police investigating DNA lab operations, suspended employee

Prince George’s County police suspended an employee and are conducting a review of the department’s DNA lab after learning that the employee accredited work at a Texas facility that later had to be shut down. The ongoing county review uncovered neglected DNA profiles that should have been entered into a national database, lags in notifying investigators of DNA profile matches and the use of outdated methods to calculate the individuality of profiles. As of late last week, the lapses identified did not appear to have affected any prosecutions or convictions, county Police Chief Hank Stawinski said. Stawinski ordered the review of county lab operations in November and said the department suspended an employee within a day of launching the probe. The county employee also serves as a national accreditor in lab audits. Stawinski said he has alerted six other law enforcement agencies audited by the employee to scrutinize their lab operations. “We realized we had an issue and we took action” in the county, Stawinski said. “At this point, we have no instance where these administrative failings have led to a place where we could have prevented violent crime from occurring, and we don’t have anyone innocent locked up in jail.” Police would not name the suspended lab employee, citing Maryland state personnel law. Individuals familiar with the inquiry identified her as Lynnett Redhead, who has been in charge of the DNA lab since 2007. Her attorney confirmed she is on paid administrative leave. “My client maintains that she did everything that was appropriate, up to the standard of care and up to the industry standards,” said James Ellison, Redhead’s attorney. **** Ellison said he and Redhead have not been told by the police department what the department’s specific concerns are and could not respond to them directly. Police said the main administrative problems they found — after bringing in state and FBI officials — so far affect 19 of about 4,200 cases. The lab remains in operation after outside inspections. In the course of its inquiry, the department also found unprocessed evidence that might generate new DNA profiles and benefit homicide cases dating to 2005, Stawinski said. The comprehensive review comes as a national commission on forensic science grapples with quality assurance and with court testimony in the wake of DNA exonerations and police lab closures. The shutdown of the Austin Police Department’s DNA lab last year prompted the investigation in Prince George’s after the county learned its employee gave the Austin lab passing marks while serving as auditor for the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board, Stawinski said. A state accrediting body for Texas later discovered employees in Austin were using outdated statistical and scientific methods to analyze DNA, had contaminated evidence and lacked proper training, according to local news reports. Austin police closed the lab in June. Ellison said Redhead was not the only person involved in accrediting the lab in Austin. “It’s a process that involves multiple people,” Ellison said of his client. “She was very minimal in that accreditation process.” Officials with the accreditation board were not available for comment Friday, according to a woman who answered the organization’s phone. During the first 150 days of the internal investigation in Prince George’s, the department has found three primary concerns. DNA profiles collected in at least four homicide cases weren’t entered into a national database designed to identify links to other investigations. In other instances, DNA profiles were entered into the national database and generated potential suspects in 12 burglary, sexual assault and homicide cases. But there was a lag in telling police investigators that a match had been spotted — a problem that federal auditors had told the lab to fix in a 2010 audit. Instead of notifying investigations within the 30-day time frame that the federal government advises, the most recent tardy notifications discovered went out between several months to eight years after matches were flagged. Analysts also have been found to be using outdated calculations to determine how likely it was that DNA collected from a scene could have come from someone other than a suspect. The outdated calculations were present in three cases that have gone through court, Stawinski said, all sexual assault cases that resulted in two convictions and one plea. In all three cases, the older calculations still generated statistically sound results, and using the new formula would not have changed the identifications, Stawinski said. John Erzen, a spokesman for the Prince George’s County State’s Attorney’s Office, said the police department alerted prosecutors of the investigation into the lab. As of Friday, prosecutors have not had to notify any defense attorney of new evidence that would be favorable to a defendant. “We have not received the results or the conclusions of the investigation,” Erzen said. “We have not had to notify anyone of anyone of any issues.” It’s unclear when the review of the lab’s work will be complete, but Stawinski said the administrative concerns have been fixed. “We discovered these shortcomings because we chose to look for them,” Stawinski said. The chief also said the department’s “science is sound” and stressed that the problems uncovered have been administrative. “I’m troubled that this occurred, but I promise the public and the community that these problems have been fixed and we will make sure they don’t repeat themselves in the future.” The county’s lab has been previously rebuked for at least one of the same administrative weaknesses occurring now. In 2010, the U.S. Justice Department Office of the Inspector General released results of a routine audit that found the Prince George’s lab, while generally in compliance with industry standards, had some problems. The audit report said the lab was storing DNA evidence in an unlocked freezer, leaving material susceptible to tampering, a practice that also had been called out by a 2008 audit. The 2010 audit also found that 19 of 100 DNA profiles inspectors reviewed should not have been entered into the national database for various reasons. The lab also failed to confirm three DNA matches within the standard 30-day period and in three cases did not notify investigators of matches in a timely manner. “We believe that the Laboratory’s delay in its confirmation of the matches are in violation of NDIS procedures, and we are concerned that its delay in notifying investigators in a timely manner could potentially lead to the suspected perpetrator committing additional crimes,” the 2010 inspector general’s report stated. The problems flagged in the federal audit were fixed, according to the report and a letter from the county responding to the audit. Lawrence Kobilinsky, professor of forensic science and science department chairman at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said that managing a lab that is efficient and thorough is just as important as ensuring analysts produce scientifically sound and accurate results. “If you don’t do things in a timely way, you slow things down and you give people a chance to evade police detection,” Kobilinsky said. “Burglars especially. They’re the king of recidivists. One may be the reason for 20 and 30 cases. You take one off the street, and all the sudden the burglary rate goes down.”

Md. high court will not reverse DNA ruling; AG plans Supreme Court challenge

Maryland’s highest court will not overturn — or even temporarily suspend — its ruling last month that prohibits DNA collection from those charged but not yet convicted in violent crimes and burglaries, authorities said Friday. The Court of Appeals clerk’s office confirmed that judges had denied Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler’s motion to stay and reconsider the Alonzo Jay King Jr. v. State of Maryland decision, which found that swabbing criminal suspects for DNA samples after they are charged is a violation of the suspects’ constitutional rights. A Gansler spokesman said the attorney general plans to challenge the court’s ruling with the U.S. Supreme Court. “The next step is that . . . we’re going to petition the Supreme Court,” said David Paulson, the Gansler spokesman, noting that those in the attorney general’s office had yet to see the Court of Appeals’ latest ruling. That Gansler’s motion was denied is no surprise; the attorney general was essentially asking the Court of Appeals to reverse itself only weeks after it issued a decision. Still, it means police will not be able to collect DNA from charged suspects while they await further court action. Gansler has said he intends to ask the Supreme Court to temporarily suspend the state court’s ruling and, eventually, overturn it. The case centers on Maryland legislation, which, starting in 2009, allowed police to collect DNA from suspects after they were charged with violent crimes or burglaries. Before then, police had been able to collect DNA only from convicted criminals. Alonzo Jay King Jr. challenged the law after he was arrested in Wicomico County in April 2009 on first- and second-degree assault charges. Prosecutors used a DNA swab stemming from that case to connect him to a 2003 rape. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape. But in a 5 to 2 ruling, the Maryland Court of Appeals sent King’s case back to the Wicomico County Circuit Court and threw out the DNA evidence against him, saying investigators violated his Fourth Amendment rights in taking his genetic material and comparing it with old crime scene samples. Gansler had asked the same judges who ruled in that case to halt and reconsider their decision, which was publicly criticized by police and prosecutors across the state.

District could spend nearly $1 million for outside lab to test DNA evidence

The District may have to pay as much as $1 million to an outside laboratory to test DNA evidence after two audits found that the city’s own testing procedures were inadequate, two city officials said Tuesday. District officials are scrambling to identify a DNA forensic lab that can review older cases as well as handle new cases. Last week, the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board, one of the national organizations that govern DNA labs, ordered the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences crime lab to immediately suspend all DNA casework. The board concluded that the lab’s procedures were “insufficient and inadequate.” The audit, which was published Friday, criticized the lab’s practices and said it was not in compliance with FBI standards. It ordered “at a minimum” the revalidation of test procedures, new interpretation guidelines for DNA mixture cases, additional training and competency testing of staff. Authors of the audit gave the D.C. lab authorities 30 days to address their concerns. District officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were finalizing negotiations with alternative labs, said the city could expect to pay between $800,000 and $1 million for using the new lab. The officials said the costs would include handling new cases, reviewing past cases and using the alternative lab to revamp and revise existing practices. It is unclear how long city officials would use the new lab. The expense comes just three years after the lab opened in a $220 million facility in Southwest Washington. In March, The Washington Post reported about alleged problems that prosecutors said they found in some of the lab’s DNA analyses. The lab’s director, Max Houck, has repeatedly defended the lab, even after prosecutors said they found flaws with the analyses. Houck argued that his lab technicians followed the same protocols that many city and state labs across the country used in interpreting evidence. But because of concerns among prosecutors, District officials ordered its own investigation of the lab’s practices. The city-ordered audit was delivered the same week as the separate audit ordered by the U.S. attorney’s office. Forensic experts, commissioned by the U.S. attorney’s office, found similar problems. District officials said another part of the expense for using an alternative lab will include defraying the costs the U.S. attorney’s office assumed in using another lab to review past cases. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office said the office has ordered outside reviews of 182 cases, which cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” It remains unclear how many cases have been affected by the alleged errors performed by the District’s lab, but prosecutors have said the errors have not resulted in the dismissal of any cases or exonerations.

For now, Md. police can take DNA from charged criminals, Supreme Court says

Police in Maryland can resume collecting DNA from suspects charged — but not yet convicted — in violent crimes, and the U.S. Supreme Court might be inclined to let them do so permanently. U.S. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued an opinion Monday saying there is a “fair prospect” the court will overturn the Maryland Court of Appeals controversial Alonzo Jay King Jr. v State of Maryland decision, which prohibited DNA collection from suspects charged — but not yet convicted — in violent crimes and burglaries. And until the nation’s highest court can more thoroughly consider the issue, Roberts put the King decision on hold — meaning police in Maryland can resume collecting DNA. “This stay will allow Maryland the uninterrupted use of this critical modern law enforcement tool that helps police and prosecutors solve some of Maryland’s most serious violent crimes,” Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler said in a statement. The Supreme Court’s opinion is the latest development in an ongoing debate over whether — and when — it is legal to collect DNA from criminal suspects. Federal and state courts across the country have issued mixed opinions. The governor’s office says 26 states have legislation similar to Maryland’s. It is precisely because of that debate that the Supreme Court intervened. In his opinion, Roberts wrote that the Maryland Court of Appeals decision conflicts with decisions by two other federal appellate courts, as well as a decision by Virginia’s Supreme Court. Roberts wrote that “given the considered analysis of the courts on the other side of the split, there is a fair prospect that this Court will reverse” the King decision. Stephen Mercer, the chief attorney for the Maryland Office of the Public Defender’s Forensics Division, said the opinion is merely a “preliminary round” in an ongoing legal fight. “We continue to believe the court, in the end, will vindicate the Fourth Amendment rights of Mr. King and all Marylanders in their right to genetic privacy,” Mercer said. The case centers on a Maryland law, which, starting in 2009, allowed police to collect DNA from suspects after they were charged with violent crimes or burglaries. Before then, police had been able to collect DNA only from convicted criminals. Alonzo Jay King Jr. challenged the law after he was arrested in April 2009 on assault charges. Prosecutors used a DNA swab from that case to connect him to a 2003 rape. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape. The Maryland Court of Appeals sent King’s case back to the circuit court and threw out the DNA evidence, saying investigators violated his Fourth Amendment rights in taking his genetic material and comparing it with old crime scene samples. The ruling was condemned by prosecutors and police chiefs, who said it would hamper detectives’ ability to solve cold cases and jeopardize the convictions of 34 robbers, burglars and rapists whose genetic samples were taken after they were charged in separate cases. On the advice of the attorney general’s office, police suspended DNA collection in the wake of the ruling. Now, it seems, they will be able to start collecting again. In his opinion, Roberts wrote that the Maryland Court of Appeals ruling creates “an ongoing and concrete harm to Maryland’s law enforcement and public safety interests” — even if it is only in effect for a matter of months. Without a stay, “Maryland would be disabled from employing a valuable law enforcement tool for several months — a tool used widely throughout the country and one that has been upheld by two Courts of Appeals and another state high court,” Roberts wrote. The Supreme Court had already  temporarily stayed the decision while it waited for input from the Maryland Public Defender’s Office. In its filing opposing the stay, the public defender’s office argued that the King ruling was not causing any immediate harm, noting that Maryland’s attorney general had waited nearly eight weeks to ask for a stay. Maryland authorities must file a petition for certiorari to have the Supreme Court consider whether to overturn the King ruling. In his statement, Gansler said he intends to do that next month.

Unintended result: Investigation into serial killer Gacy clears 11 unrelated cold cases

CHICAGO — His task was to solve a cruel mystery decades after a serial killer’s death. Sgt. Jason Moran’s work began in a graveyard, his first stop in his quest to identify the eight unknown victims of John Wayne Gacy. More than 30 years had passed since Gacy had murdered 33 young men and boys. (He was executed in 1994.) Investigators now had more-sophisticated crime-solving tools, notably DNA, so the Cook County, Ill., sheriff’s detective was assigned to find out who was buried in eight anonymous graves. Moran quickly helped a family confirm that Gacy had killed their brother. Since then, though, his search has led him down an unexpected path: He has cleared 11 unrelated cold cases across America. After eliminating the missing young men as Gacy victims, he pored over DNA results and medical and Social Security records; enlisted anthropologists, lab technicians and police in Utah, Colorado, New Jersey and other states; and cracked missing-persons cases that had been dormant for decades. Most recently, Moran identified a 16-year-old homicide victim in San Francisco who had been buried 36 years ago. He has brought comfort to some by proving, through science and dogged research, that their missing loved ones are dead. He has brought joy to others, finding long-lost brothers and sons still alive. Marveling at this remarkable detour from the ghastly Gacy trail, Moran says he recently told his boss: “Is it possible that an evil serial killer has done some good?” Moran’s work began four years ago after Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart publicly urged anyone who thought a relative was an unidentified Gacy victim to submit to a DNA test. Moran prioritized about 170 tips from more than 20 states, representing about 80 missing young men. He focused on those similar in age (14 to 24) and background to Gacy’s victims: Many had troubled families or substance-abuse problems. Some were gay. Others had worked on construction jobs for Gacy, a building contractor. Authorities had long ago removed the jawbones and teeth of the eight unknown victims, hoping for eventual identification. Decades later, they were buried, only to be exhumed in 2011. Moran took them to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, where lab workers developed solid DNA profiles for four victims. For the other four, the entire remains had to be exhumed. Within weeks, Moran cracked one case. William Bundy’s mother had suspected that Gacy killed her son, but the case was stymied because his dentist had destroyed his patients’ records after retiring. Three decades later, Bundy’s mother was dead, but his sister and brother provided DNA, resulting in a match to the unknown victim. It wasn’t enough for a firm identification. Moran then studied the man’s dental records, noticing empty spaces where his upper canine teeth had been removed. Bundy had those same teeth removed, saved them — and his sister kept them all those years. Case cleared. Bundy is the only Gacy victim Moran has identified. But he has helped other families who feared their loved ones died at Gacy’s hands. In every case involving DNA, Moran told families the results would be entered in CODIS, the federal Combined DNA Index System. If a genetic link emerged, he’d call. It took almost four years for Willa Wertheimer to get that life-changing call. In 2011, she had told Moran about her half brother, Andre Drath. Their mother died when both were very young. When the grief-stricken little boy began getting in trouble, his stepfather turned him over to the state. Drath was abused in foster homes. Then one day he disappeared. “I used to fantasize about finding him,” Wertheimer says. “I just wanted to hold him and tell him I love him and say I’m sorry about everything that had happened.” Her DNA eliminated any link to Gacy victims, but last fall a Texas lab worker notified Moran that it was associated with an unidentified body found in San Francisco in 1979. That DNA hadn’t been submitted to CODIS until late 2014. Moran reviewed the San Francisco police and medical examiner’s reports, which showed the man had been shot multiple times. It also disclosed an all-important detail: a tattoo on his right shoulder. Moran found more evidence in files from the Illinois agency that supervised Drath as a state ward — including dental records matching those of the teen buried on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. It was bittersweet news for Wertheimer. “I was relieved that he wasn’t hurting,” she says, “but knowing how he died . . . I felt awful.” San Francisco police have reactivated their investigation. Moran hopes to soon have Drath’s remains exhumed from a California cemetery. “I brought her to this point,” he says, “now I’d like to help bring him home.” Jason Moran cradled an urn as he arrived at the Chicago home. It had been 36 years since Edward Beaudion left that house, a 22-year-old heading to a wedding. Now, the detective was delivering his cremated remains to his sister, Ruth Rodriguez, and elderly father, Louis. DNA and old-fashioned police work brought this mystery to a frustrating end. The case had a suspect: A petty criminal named Jerry Jackson told police in 1978 that he had fought with Beaudion in downtown Chicago, dragged his body into a car, then dumped him in a suburban forest preserve, according to Moran. Jackson was arrested in Caruthersville, Mo., with the car Beaudion had been driving. It belonged to his sister; she found a bullet inside. A search of the woods, though, turned up no body. Jackson was convicted only of stealing the car and items inside. Decades later, Moran started investigating. “I really felt the sadness and desperation in their voices,” he says. Last year, their DNA was linked to skeletal remains that had recently arrived at the Texas lab. Some kids had spotted a leg bone in the woods where Jackson said he had dumped Beaudion’s body. That discovery was in 2008. Unfortunately, the remains sat in the Cook County medical examiner’s office for five years before being sent to be tested. Studying the autopsy report, Moran noticed the leg bone contained a surgical screw in one knee. Beaudion had one, too. That was enough to confirm his identity — yet that five-year delay thwarted Moran’s bigger plan: While preparing to go to Missouri to arrest Jackson in Beaudion’s death, he discovered: Jackson had recently died. Still, Moran sensed the family was relieved. “His father told me when he dies, he’ll have Edward’s ashes in his casket and said, ‘All of three of us will be together in perpetuity.’ ” Thousands of miles away, a 75-year-old Army vet had his own lingering questions. Ron Soden contacted Moran about his younger half brother Steven, who had vanished in 1972. He had run away during a camping trip organized by the New Jersey orphanage where he lived with his sister, April. Their mother had placed them there. Steven’s father lived in Chicago. Could he have traveled there looking for him? Moran thought it possible, and teamed with New Jersey State Police to work the case. April’s DNA was ultimately linked with skeletal remains found at New Jersey’s Bass River State Forest, about a mile from where Steven was last seen. That discovery was in 2000, but it wasn’t until 2013 — and more DNA tests from another half brother — that Steven was identified. Hypothermia is suspected as the cause of death. “We always held out that hope . . . then all of sudden you find out and it’s not there anymore,” says Ron Soden, who lives in Tacoma, Wash. “To realize he probably died at 17 . . . it’s just a shame his life had to be that way through no fault of his own.” These poignant stories, Moran says, motivate him. “You’ve got these young kids who struggle through their short lives,” he says. “Now they’re anonymous. They don’t have a headstone saying they were ever on this Earth. I want them to have some dignity and respect so the world knows they once lived. “I mean, everybody deserves a name.” There are happy endings in Moran’s work. Amazingly, he has located five living men who had vanished in the 1970s. “I scold them and say, ‘Why would you do this to a loving family?’ ” In 2013, Moran reunited Edyth and Robert Hutton — after 41 years. Edyth had made numerous attempts to find her brother, including mailing about 300 postcards to various Robert, Rob, Bob and Bobby Huttons nationwide. A relative who is a private investigator thought he had located Hutton in Colorado. But when Edyth and her father wrote letters to that address, they were returned as undeliverable. In a last-ditch effort she searched NamUs, a website featuring missing and unidentified people, narrowing her list to seven. She contacted the respective law enforcement agencies. One person replied: Jason Moran. Using Hutton’s vital statistics, Moran thought he had tracked him to Colorado but when police arrived, the man was gone. Moran waited several months and when the sheriff’s analysts checked updated databases they found a match in Montana. “Your brother is alive,” Moran told Hutton’s sister. The siblings reconnected the next day. “I felt like a hole in my heart had been filled,” she says. Her brother, she says, told her he had gotten involved with drugs, straightened out and returned to the family’s home town in California — but everyone had moved. He declined to be interviewed for this article. Robert Hutton recently moved to Nevada to live near his sister. “We see each other almost daily,” she says, “and we love it.” ** — Associated Press  **

D.C. police crime lab technicians ordered transferred; to be replaced by civilians

District police on Friday revamped their entire mobile crime lab division, telling more than 80 officers responsible for collecting, marking and analyzing evidence that they are being transferred to patrol. The move is a step toward replacing sworn law enforcement officers with civilians ahead of the scheduled Oct. 1 opening of the new $220 million Consolidated Forensic Laboratory that will be run independently of police and prosecutors. Authorities announced the shakeup in an internal police teletype obtained by The Washington Post. About 20 officers will be transferred Sunday, the memo said. An additional 60 will continue to work in the lab temporarily, a move a deputy mayor said would ensure adequate staffing and allow the officers to train their successors. As word of the transfers spread, some officers and prosecutors privately raised concerns over the loss of experienced technicians who handle the most sensitive of cases, including burglaries, rapes and murder. Kristopher Baumann, the head of the police union, called the move an affront and said that it reneges on assurances from the city that the crime lab officers were safe in their jobs during the transition to the new facility. “We invested an enormous amount of resources to train these officer technicians,” Baumann said. “These are our experts in evidence, and the idea that we’re going to summarily move them out of their positions without vetting or setting up replacements would not be a good idea.” Gwendolyn Crump, chief spokeswoman for the D.C. police, declined to comment. Deputy D.C. Mayor Paul A. Quander Jr. said hiring civilians with college degrees is cheaper and more efficient than using sworn officers in evidence collection. “We’re removing officers from their desks and other ancillary types of jobs,” Quander said Friday night, “and we’re putting their badges on the street.” In a letter to Baumann, Quander said the “transition will be gradual to ensure that newly hired civilian technicians are properly certified and trained.” Many other departments across the region use civilians in some capacity to gather and analyze evidence, in what has become a technical, scientific field. The District’s new state-of-the-art crime lab at E Street SW, between the Federal Center and L’Enfant Plaza Metro stops in Southwest will put disparate forensic divisions in a central location and will expand the department’s ability to run tests and scrutinize evidence. City Council members authorized the lab and removed administrative authority from police and prosecutors, in part to try and avoid problems involving faulty and contaminated test results that have beset other labs across the country. The civilian director answers to the mayor. But officers in the District’s forensics division said their experience is invaluable, and they think their training and time as a sworn officer helps them understand investigations and guard against the dangers of working in high-crime areas. Some prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office say they worry about losing officers who are seasoned in testifying at trials, translating complex science to jurors and withstanding cross-examination. “This could hurt us and make it more difficult to persuade jurors concerning the quality and professionalism of the organization,” said a prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly. ****

Md. high court bans DNA swabs of charged suspects; police, prosecutors seek appeal

Maryland’s top law enforcement officials are pushing back against a recent Court of Appeals decision that prohibits DNA collection from suspects charged — but not yet convicted — of violent crimes, saying the ruling will allow dangerous criminals to go undetected by authorities. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and police chiefs and prosecutors from the D.C. suburbs to Baltimore County are urging the state’s attorney general to challenge last week’s Alonzo Jay King Jr. v. State of Maryland decision, which found that swabbing criminal suspects for DNA samples after they are charged is a violation of the suspects’ constitutional rights. The ruling, police and prosecutors say, could jeopardize the convictions of 34 robbers, burglars and rapists whose genetic samples were taken after they were charged in separate cases. They also said it will hamper detectives’ ability to solve cold cases. “It really sets Maryland back in the crime fight,” said Col. Marcus L. Brown, superintendent of the Maryland State Police. The case puts Maryland at the center of a brewing national debate that raises the age-old question of how to balance privacy rights and public safety. Federal and state courts across the country have issued mixed opinions on when DNA collection is legal. The governor’s office says 26 states have legislation similar to Maryland’s. The issue seems destined, legal experts say, to be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court. “It’s like another precinct reporting,” said David H. Kaye, a Penn State University law professor who has tracked similar cases nationwide. “We don’t know what the final outcome of this is going to be, but now there’s another election return in.” State authorities and officials in Prince George’s, Montgomery and Baltimore counties said they plan to stop collecting DNA from charged suspects while they await further court action. They said they are urging Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler to apply for a writ of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping it will hear and overturn the state court’s ruling. David Paulson, a Gansler spokesman, said attorneys in his office were still studying the opinion and surveying the national legal landscape. He said the attorneys “strongly agree” with a dissenting opinion in the Maryland case and are “strongly considering an appeal.” In Virginia, law enforcement officials take DNA samples after arrest in violent felonies and burglaries, and in the District, officials take samples after conviction, authorities said. Maryland’s DNA bill was a leading priority for O’Malley during the 2008 legislative session, helping him to bolster the tough-on-crime credentials he earned during his days as Baltimore’s mayor. The bill that emerged was the product of a compromise between O’Malley and members of the Legislative Black Caucus, who argued that the governor’s original proposal was overreaching. One African American senator said the bill attempted “to use technology to ensnare people.” O’Malley has since highlighted the number of “hits” generated by the expanded database. He is among those urging Gansler to appeal the court ruling, saying in a statement that the concept is “simple”: “We take more criminals off the streets more quickly and put them in jail for a longer period of time so that they cannot murder, rape or harm other citizens among us.” At the heart of the debate in Maryland is that legislation, which, starting in 2009, allowed police to collect DNA from suspects after they were charged with violent crimes or burglaries. Before then, police had been able to collect DNA only from convicted criminals. A man named Alonzo Jay King Jr. challenged the law after he was arrested in Wicomico County in April 2009 on first- and second-degree assault charges. Prosecutors used a DNA swab stemming from that case to connect him to a 2003 rape. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape. But in a 5 to 2 ruling, the Maryland Court of Appeals sent King’s case back to the Wicomico County Circuit Court and threw out the DNA evidence against him, saying investigators violated his Fourth Amendment rights in taking his genetic material and comparing it with old crime scene samples. “Although we have recognized (and no one can reasonably deny) that solving cold cases is a legitimate government interest, a warrantless, suspicionless search can not be upheld by a ‘generalized interest’ in solving crimes,” the court wrote. King’s public defender declined to comment, and the state’s attorney involved in the case did not return a phone message seeking comment. Prince George’s Police Chief Mark Magaw said the decision takes away a “tremendous tool” that police use to remove criminals from the streets and to exonerate the innocent. Montgomery County Assistant Police Chief Russ Hamill said he worried that collecting DNA only from convicts would allow more criminals to “fall through the cracks.” “Violent predators are going to be loose in our community due to this decision, and without this decision, they wouldn’t have been loose in our community,” Hamill said. David Rocah, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, said that while DNA collection before conviction might be a useful law enforcement tool, its effectiveness in fighting crime does not make it constitutional. “There’s lots of things that police might want to do that will help them catch criminals, but that’s not what we do to judge the propriety of police actions,” Rocah said. Since 2009, the DNA database of charged — but not convicted — offenders has produced 190 hits, resulting in 65 arrests and 34 convictions for burglaries, rapes and robberies, according to data provided by the governor’s office. Twenty cases are still considered active investigations, and 12 cases are making their way through the court system, according to the data. Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said the DNA swab is “less intrusive” than a fingerprint and a reasonable search, considering its effectiveness. “You have numbers that say it works, and it works for very serious crimes,” McCarthy said. McCarthy and other prosecutors said they would review their pending cases in light of the court’s ruling, and they expected some defendants might move that their convictions be overturned. In recent days, police and prosecutors across the region have highlighted several cases that demonstrate the benefits of cold case DNA hits. Perhaps none, though, is more relevant than King’s. In September 2003, according to court records, King broke into the home of a 53-year-old Salisbury woman, held a gun to her head and raped her. He was not a suspect until 2009, when DNA taken after the unrelated assault charge was matched to DNA from the rape, court records show. That match would not have been possible before the 2009 legislation, authorities said. King was eventually convicted of misdemeanor second-degree assault in the 2009 case — a charge not serious enough to warrant his inclusion in the DNA database for convicted offenders, authorities said. “We would never have had his DNA,” said Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Schellenberger, “but for the arrestee database.” Staff writer John Wagner contributed to this report **Read more fromThe Washington Post:** Future of Silver Line is in doubt Post-scandal, candidates try to reassure Ward 5 voters Questions raised about Kensington mayor’s ethics A ‘Night of Hope’ at Nats Park

Man exonerated in 1982 D.C. killing; DNA reveals FBI error in conviction

A D.C. Superior Court judge concluded Monday that DNA evidence exonerates a man who spent 26 years in prison in the 1982 killing of a Washington woman. Kevin Martin’s case marks the fifth time in as many years that federal prosecutors in the District have acknowledged that errors by an elite FBI forensic unit had led to a conviction that should be overturned. U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. joined defense calls to vacate Martin’s conviction and declare him innocent of the attack on Ursula C. Brown. Machen cited DNA evidence that contradicts a previous finding by forensic experts linking Martin to a hair collected at the crime scene. Martin, who had long professed his innocence in the killing, left the D.C. courthouse with his name cleared. He was paroled in 2009 and lives in San Francisco. “I am free at last. I am humbled. I never gave up,” Martin said, hugging and high-fiving his attorneys. Martin’s younger sister, his fiancee, his 6-year-old niece and other family members gathered around. “I just want to live,” said Martin, 50. The hearing came as Machen’s office nears the end of a 21 / 2-year review of all local convictions involving FBI hair matches that was launched after demands by the D.C. Public Defender Service. Since 2009, the service has cleared four other men convicted by such matches. And the troubling problems exposed in the FBI lab’s methods have led the FBI and Justice Department to undertake a nationwide review of more than 2,100 convictions in the 1980s and 1990s. Martin’s is the first wrongful conviction uncovered by prosecutors in the District review, and they said it is the only problem case they have found. The public defender’s office praised the effort to exonerate Martin but criticized the U.S. attorney’s office’s review as secretive and the disclosure of the results as incomplete and overdue. Brown, 19, was abducted Nov. 1, 1982, after her car was struck from behind on the Anacostia Freeway during a rash of what authorities called “bump-and-rob” assaults. Her partially clothed body was later found near a dumpster next to an elementary school in Southeast Washington. She had been sexually assaulted, shot in the head and stabbed. Martin, then a 17-year-old PCP addict, was arrested and pleaded guilty to a series of similar armed robberies that occurred one week later, but, from the start, maintained that he knew nothing about Brown’s death. As they built a case, prosecutors told the defense that an FBI examiner was prepared to testify that a pubic hair found on Brown’s sneaker was a match to Martin. In March 1984, Martin, who faced multiple life sentences if the case went to trial, entered an Alford plea to manslaughter. Under such a plea, a defendant acknowledges that prosecutors have sufficient evidence for a conviction but does not admit guilt. Martin was sentenced in 1984 to 35 years to life in prison for manslaughter and robbery. He wrote letters to the judge and defense attorneys claiming his innocence in the slaying. Lawyer Bernard Grimm, and later the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, began to look into the case. Martin sought DNA tests in 2001, but D.C. police said evidence in his case had been lost. Police subsequently moved evidence into a new facility, and boxes from the investigation into Brown’s killing turned up last November, according to court papers. While the hair was not located, other genetic evidence was. In March, as first reported by WTTG (Channel 5), Martin learned that new DNA testing excluded him as a source of biological evidence collected from the victim. Prosecutors said the DNA matched William D. Davidson, who is serving a sentence of 65 years to life for multiple offenses related to “bump-and-rape” cases, including the killing of Brown, in which he said he was only the lookout. In court papers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael T. Ambrosino and Grimm wrote that “DNA testing conducted at the expense of the government along with other factors . . . conclusively establish that Kevin Martin is innocent of the rape and murder of Ursula Brown.” The first of the D.C. exonerations occurred in December 2009, when Superior Court Judge Fred B. Ugast ordered the release of Donald E. Gates, then 60, after DNA results cleared him of a rape-murder for which he had spent 28 years in prison. The D.C. Public Defender Service, which represented Gates, also found that prosecutors failed for many years to disclose that the Justice Department’s inspector general had identified problems with work done by the FBI agent who linked Gates’s hair to the crime. Ugast ordered Machen’s office to review all cases handled by the agent, Michael P. Malone. In 2012, facing continued demands by the public defenders, Machen ordered a review of all convictions that relied on FBI hair analysis. Since then, Superior Court judges have exonerated two more public defender clients — Santae A. Tribble of murder and Kirk L. Odom of rape — after DNA tests contradicted claims by FBI hair examiners. The murder conviction of a third client, Cleveland Wright, was vacated, and he continues to ask the court to declare him innocent. The three men collectively spent nearly 80 years in prison. Their cases were featured in The Washington Post, and the FBI and Justice Department in 2012 announced they would review FBI testimony in all convictions involving FBI hair matches in the 1980s and 1990s. Machen’s office said its inquiry identified 122 District convictions before 2000 that included an FBI hair match, completed reviewing 106 of them and found only one case, Martin’s, in which prosecutors believed the conviction depended on the FBI finding or in which DNA testing would yield a “viable” claim for innocence, Machen spokesman Bill Miller said. Grimm praised Machen’s office, saying, “Had the U.S. attorney’s office not reviewed these cases, Kevin Martin never would have found out that evidence could be retested, and he still would be on parole for rape and homicide.” Miller said prosecutors will begin notifying defendants’ last counsel in the 106 cases — it started Monday with the Public Defender Service — and notify the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project for defendants with other counsel, in case those lawyers had retired, moved or died. The Public Defender Service said prosecutors’ approach may not have led to the reversal of Gates, Tribble or Wright’s convictions because public defenders were not their last counsel. They said that for more than four years, prosecutors refused repeated requests to release the names of all defendants whose convictions relied on FBI hair evidence to the public defender’s office and the standards for their review or to disclose cases as reviews were completed. On Wednesday, a new report by the Justice Department inspector general’s office criticized the department and FBI for failing to give proper and timely notice to defendants in cases affected by problems with hair evidence. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office appears to have learned very little from the errors devastatingly portrayed in [the] OIG report. This report shows that delay is inexcusable and that it can have tragic consequences,” said Sandra Levick, chief of special litigation for the Public Defender Service. Machen’s office said that it did not have all of the names four years ago and that it took great effort to identify cases based on FBI lab reports. The office devoted thousands of hours to the review and asked leaders of the local defense bar, including public defenders, to alert the office to post-conviction innocence claims, Miller said. At the close of the Monday hearing, Superior Court Judge Robert I. Richter wished Martin well. “Take care, Mr. Martin,” he said. “You look like a happy man.” Get updates on your area delivered via e-mail

Supreme Court upholds Maryland law, says police may take DNA samples from arrestees

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that police may take DNA samples when booking those arrested for serious crimes, narrowly upholding a Maryland law and opening the door to more widespread collection of DNA by law enforcement. The court ruled 5 to 4 that government has a legitimate interest in collecting DNA from arrestees, just as it takes photographs and collects fingerprints. Rejecting the view that the practice constitutes an unlawful search, the majority said it was justified to establish the identity of the person in custody. “DNA identification represents an important advance in the techniques used by law enforcement to serve legitimate police concerns for as long as there have been arrests,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. The decision will reinstate Alonzo Jay King Jr.’s conviction in a 2003 rape in Salisbury on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He was connected to the crime after a DNA sample was taken following an unrelated 2009 arrest for assault. Law enforcement has found DNA to be a powerful tool in solving cold cases, and the federal government and 28 states allow the practice. As with other recent court decisions involving the Fourth Amendment’s “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” the justices split in an unusual fashion. The dissenters were three of the court’s liberals plus conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who amplified his displeasure by reading a summary of his dissent from the bench. “The court has cast aside a bedrock rule of our Fourth Amendment law: that the government may not search its citizens for evidence of crime unless there is a reasonable cause to believe that such evidence will be found,” Scalia said from the bench. In his dissent, Scalia wrote that the majority’s attempts to justify the use of DNA as an identification tool “taxes the credulity of the credulous.” He added, “Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.” Scalia was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Kennedy wrote that the decision was more limited than that, noting that DNA can be taken only from those suspected of “serious” crimes. He said that police have a legitimate interest in identifying the person taken into custody and that the DNA samples could make sure that a dangerous criminal is not released on bail. “By comparison to this substantial government interest and the unique effectiveness of DNA identification, the intrusion of a cheek swab to obtain a DNA sample is a minimal one,” Kennedy wrote. Justice Stephen G. Breyer — who most often votes with Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan — joined the opinion, as did Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. At the oral argument in the case in February, Alito called it “perhaps the most important criminal procedure case that this court has heard in decades.” Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler (D) said he was happy the court agreed that “taking a DNA swab is no more invasive than taking someone’s fingerprints — and that DNA is an important tool in both identifying the guilty and exonerating the wrongly accused.” But Steven R. Shapiro, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union said the decision “creates a gaping new exception to the Fourth Amendment” and violates a long-established understanding that “police cannot search for evidence of a crime . . . without individualized suspicion.” The jurisdictions that allow DNA samples have differing rules. In Virginia, for instance, law enforcement officials take DNA samples after making an arrest in violent felonies and burglaries, while officials in the District take samples only after a conviction, authorities said. Still, all 50 states, the District and the Obama administration backed Maryland in defending its law. Kennedy said Maryland’s law is limited. He noted that the sample is destroyed if the arrestee is not convicted and that the DNA tests did not violate the privacy of the person by revealing genetic traits or medical information. Besides that, Kennedy said, DNA identification provides critical information about the potential danger posed by an arrestee, whether he should be eligible for bond or whether he would be likely to flee because he had committed a crime more serious than the one for which he was arrested. But Scalia said those justifications did not apply to King. It took months for his DNA to be tested, and his sample was not compared to a database that would confirm his identity but to one with samples from cold cases in which the identity of the DNA was unknown. “Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches,” Scalia wrote. He concluded with a nod to the Framers of the Constitution: “I doubt that the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.” Gansler, in an interview after the ruling, acknowledged that “the real reason for the law is solving crime,” but he said the use of DNA was no different from “comparing fingerprints left at the scene of the crime” or a mug shot “to a photograph captured by a surveillance camera.” The decision was evidence of how the court’s ideological differences blur on Fourth Amendment cases. Earlier this term, Scalia and Thomas joined Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan to rule that bringing a police dog to a suspected drug dealer’s door without a warrant amounted to an unlawful search. And Scalia joined Sotomayor’s broad ruling in another case that held police officers generally must try to get a warrant before forcing uncooperative drunken-driving suspects to submit to a blood test. Scalia joked during a speech last fall in Wyoming that he “ought to be the pinup of the criminal defense bar.” Monday’s decision came in _Maryland v. King._

The Kevin Martin case points to the need to reform the discovery process

THERE WAS an air of celebration at D.C. Superior Court this week when a judge exonerated Kevin Martin of the 1982 killing of a D.C. woman — but the joy could not mask the injustice done to Mr. Martin. While federal prosecutors deserve credit for helping to clear Mr. Martin of a crime he didn’t commit, they also should be asking whether the mistakes of the case should have been detected earlier. “Take care, Mr. Martin. You look like a happy man,” Superior Court Judge Robert I. Richter said Monday after ruling that new DNA evidence was conclusive proof of Mr. Martin’s innocence in the sexual assault and murder of Ursula C. Brown on Nov. 1, 1982. Mr. Martin, then 19, had admitted his guilt in a series of armed robberies similar to the events in Ms. Brown’s case but said he knew nothing about her death and was not involved. Only when presented with forensic evidence purportedly linking his hair to the crime scene did he agree to the plea that saw him imprisoned for 26 years. He was paroled in 2009; if not for the manslaughter conviction in Ms. Brown’s death, he would have been freed roughly 12 years earlier. Mr. Martin, as The Post’s Spencer S. Hsu has catalogued in a series of articles, is the fifth man that federal prosecutors in the District acknowledged was wrongly convicted due to faulty FBI forensics that relied on the supposed legitimacy of hair-sample analysis. The four others — Kirk Odom, Donald Gates, Santae Tribble and Cleveland Wright — collectively spent more than 100 years in prison. They represent only the local cases; it’s estimated that thousands of cases involved flawed FBI forensics work, which was first detected in the early 1990s. Just as troubling as the bad lab work has been the response by authorities. Days before Mr. Martin’s day in court, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General issued a report faulting the department and the FBI for delays in reviewing affected cases and notifying defendants or their attorneys. In some cases, the reviews came too late, with defendants put to death before their cases could be examined to determine whether their convictions should be overturned. Only now, decades after a whistleblower reported the forensic problems, are the names of defendants whose convictions involved FBI hair analysis being released. Prosecutors in Mr. Martin’s case eventually did the right thing, and it’s to their credit that new evidence was developed that cleared him. But a system that essentially gives carte blanche to authorities to reexamine their own mistakes on their own timetable is fundamentally flawed. It’s yet another reason to reform the discovery process for evidence. Instead of prosecutors deciding what might be exculpatory, they should not be allowed — absent a compelling reason of witness safety or national security — to hold anything back from the defense. That could prevent shameful cases like that of Mr. Martin. **Read more on this issue:** The Post’s View: The dark side of forensic science

D.C. police to resume breaking crime alerts on Twitter

D.C. police on Tuesday said that breaking crime news will soon return to the department’s official Twitter account, reversing a decision to use a separate city notification system to alert residents about violence in their neighborhoods. The resumption comes days after police confirmed that the department was no longer tweeting reports of robberies, shootings and other crimes shortly after they occurred. Police planned instead to use Twitter largely as a public-relations and crime-solving tool by posting photos of guns seized, images of wanted suspects and fliers about missing people. Although the crime alerts continued to be available through a city-run Internet site that requires registration, some critics said that the decision to stop posting the news on Twitter reflected a lack of transparency just as violent crime was edging upward. Dustin Sternbeck, the D.C. police department’s chief spokesman, said crime alerts would resume “as soon as possible.” The policy reversal was announced on Twitter: “After hearing from a # of community members & followers concerning our twitter, we will continue to tweet crime info.” In discussing the Twitter change last week, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier and her top spokesman had said they wanted to use each of the agency’s social-media platforms for different types of news to avoid duplication. The AlertDC notification system — hsema.dc.gov/page/alertdc — has long been used to provide a list of crimes as they happened. Residents can sign up for the type of information they want to receive by text or email, including alerts on crimes, power outages and road closures. AlertDC has nearly 165,000 people registered, with nearly 21,000 getting crime alerts. Many police departments in the area and around the country use Twitter for a variety of news, including breaking crime alerts, with some using the platform more frequently and in greater detail than others.

FBI crime lab cuts down backlog of cases, report says

The FBI’s crime lab has reduced its backlog of forensic DNA cases by 87 percent over the course of two years, according to a report released Tuesday by the Justice Department’s inspector general. In his 38-page report, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz attributed the “significant” reduction to an increase in staffing and more automation. The FBI lab in Quantico conducts DNA testing on biological evidence taken from crime scenes and items of evidence, including envelopes, clothing and drinking glasses. In an August 2010 audit report, the Justice Department watchdog said the lab had a large backlog of cases in both its nuclear DNA unit, which mostly analyzes biological fluids, such as blood and semen, and in its mitochondrial DNA unit, which examines evidence, such as naturally shed hairs, hair fragments, bones and teeth. In his report, Horowitz found that the nuclear unit had effectively eliminated its backlog, reducing the number of its cases from 2,722 in March 2010 to 110 as of March 2012. The remaining cases are a “monthly work-in-progress,” the report concluded. But the mitochondrial DNA unit continues to have a backlog, Horowitz said. The unit reduced the number of its cases from 489 in March 2010 to 293 as of March 2012, but Horowitz said the reduction could not be attributed to the number of completed cases. Rather, he said, it was mostly due to a change in the way the unit calculates its backlog and other policy changes. The new report also noted that the FBI lab is working with the FBI Office of General Counsel, the Justice Department and the Innocence Project, a New York-based advocacy group for people seeking exoneration through DNA testing, to prepare a plan for the review of historical mitochondrial DNA cases involving microscopic hair examinations. “The plan is not yet finalized, but should DNA examinations be requested and certain conditions are met, the FBI has stated that it is available to provide mitochondrial DNA testing on the relevant hair evidence,” the report said. In July, the Justice Department and the FBI launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence. The undertaking, the largest post-conviction review ever done by the FBI, comes after The Washington Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people but had not performed a thorough review of the cases. In addition, prosecutors did not notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled. The inspector general’s report said that the FBI lab still lacks a system capable of electronically managing laboratory operations, despite having spent at least $14 million since 2003 in two unsuccessful attempts to develop such a system. The lab is in the beginning stages of developing a new system, the report said.

Gansler asks Maryland high court to overturn or suspend DNA swab ruling

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler asked the state’s highest court to overturn — or at least suspend — last week’s ruling that prohibits DNA collection from suspects charged but not yet convicted in violent crimes, saying he plans to challenge the decision with the U.S. Supreme Court if the state judges do not reverse themselves. On Tuesday, Gansler (D) filed a motion asking the Court of Appeals to reconsider its _Alonzo Jay King Jr. v. State of Maryland _ decision, which found that swabbing criminal suspects for DNA samples after they are charged is a violation of their constitutional rights. That means the same judges who said investigators violated King’s Fourth Amendment rights in taking his genetic material and comparing it with old crime scene samples must decide whether to change their minds. “We live in the 21st century. We have DNA evidence,” Gansler said in an interview. “Practically every other court that’s looked at this has upheld it as not violative of the Fourth Amendment.” King was arrested in Wicomico County in April 2009 on assault charges. Prosecutors used a DNA swab stemming from that case to connect him to a 2003 rape. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the rape. In a 5 to 2 ruling, the Maryland Court of Appeals sent King’s rape case back to the circuit court and threw out the DNA evidence. Police chiefs and prosecutors criticized the ruling, saying it would hamper their ability to solve cold cases and could jeopardize the convictions of 34 robbers, burglars and rapists whose genetic samples were taken after they were charged in separate cases. Stephen Mercer, the chief attorney for the Office of the Maryland Public Defender’s Forensics Division, said those criticisms overstate the usefulness of the database of DNA samples from charged criminals, which has produced dozens of convictions based on thousands of samples. Law enforcement officials across the state said they planned to stop collecting DNA from charged suspects while they awaited further court action, and they would evaluate cases that stemmed from DNA in the charged offender database. In his motion, Gansler argues that the Court of Appeals decision runs counter to what other courts nationwide have held. The motion urges judges not to forget that DNA helped win a conviction against King in a “heinous crime against a real, life-and-blood victim.” Mercer said the emotional plea ignores that investigators are placing presumably innocent people under “genetic surveillance” and using their DNA to investigate them for “past and future crimes” without evidence linking them to those crimes. “Really what’s at stake here is that informational intrusion,” Mercer said. “If all we’re going to talk about is catching the bad guy and efficiency in law enforcement, then that’s the end of the discussion, because we could be like China, we could be like Russia, we could be like Iran, we could be like any country where the police do not need a reasonable basis to search the person.” Since 2009, the DNA database of charged — but not convicted — offenders has produced 190 hits, resulting in 65 arrests and 34 convictions for burglaries, rapes and robberies, according to data provided by the governor’s office.

The FBI’s flawed justice

THE STUNNING admission by federal law enforcement officials of flawed testimony by forensic experts in hundreds of criminal cases has focused attention on the dubious use of hair analysis. Add this to a list of factors that has played a role in securing the conviction of people who later proved their innocence, including mistaken eyewitness identifications, bad informants and police or prosecutorial misconduct. Forensic technologies must be reassessed, but other parts of the system also need scrutiny if the chances of wrongful convictions are to be reduced. The Justice Department and FBI, as The Post’s Spencer S. Hsu reported, have acknowledged widespread instances of scientifically indefensible testimony involving microscopic hair comparison by members of an elite FBI forensic unit. A review of cases over two decades before 2000 concluded that nearly every examiner — 26 of 28 — gave flawed testimony in ways that favored the prosecution. Of the cases, 32 defendants were sentenced to death. Fourteen of those have been executed or have died in prison. The FBI errors do not necessarily mean defendants were innocent. But the confirmation of long-held suspicions about hair analysis, the inability of courts to keep junk science out of courtrooms (and hair analysis is not the only suspect technique) and the questionable reliability of other evidence provide reason to worry about how many innocent people are being convicted. Consider, for example, the three defendants from the Washington area — Kirk L. Odom, Santae A. Tribble and Donald E. Gates — whose exonerations in separate cases were pivotal in prompting the hair analysis review. Examiners had testified in each case that hair found at the crime scenes matched that of the suspects, analysis later undermined by DNA results that exonerated the three men. In each case, improper forensics combined with other failings to produce wrongful convictions. Mr. Odom, who spent 22½ years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit, was mistakenly identified by the victim after a questionable police lineup. For the other two, testimony from police informants with something to gain was a factor. Mr. Tribble spent 27 years and 10 months in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Mr. Gates spent 28 years for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. In other cases, confessions came from susceptible people, or information that would have been helpful to the defense was withheld by the government. With the exception of the rare bad apple, police and prosecutors don’t set out to convict the wrong person, but even the most well-meaning people can be affected by contextual or cognitive bias, particularly in a system with crushing caseloads and intense pressure. Better protections are needed. Steps in the right direction are improvements by D.C. police in procedures for eyewitness identification and the creation of a conviction integrity unit by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District. But more needs to be done, including, as we’ve argued before, requiring the prosecution to share information with the defense more thoroughly and consistently. We hope the Justice Department undertakes an analysis not only of the breakdown in hair forensics but also of other vulnerabilities in the system. **Read more about this topic:** Radley Balko: The flawed ‘science’ of bite mark analysis

Kirk L. Odom officially exonerated; DNA retesting cleared him in D.C. rape, robbery

A D.C. Superior Court judge on Friday officially exonerated Kirk L. Odom, wrongfully imprisoned for more than 22 years in the rape and robbery of a woman in her Capitol Hill apartment in 1981. “Mr. Odom has been the victim of a grave miscarriage of justice. He is actually innocent of the crimes for which he was convicted,” Judge Herbert B. Dixon wrote in a three-page order that vacated Odom’s convictions on the basis of new DNA testing that proved he was not the perpetrator. Odom completed his prison term in 2003. But the order frees him from having to register as a sex offender and from remaining on parole until 2047, and it allows him to seek compensation from the government. “Oh my God, that is a very beautiful birthday gift,” Odom, who turned 50 Friday, said in a statement released by his attorney, Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service. Odom maintained his innocence since before his 1982 trial and sought new DNA tests in February 2011. The Washington Post has reported that Odom is the third D.C. man convicted of rape or murder to have his charges vacated since 2009 based on erroneous forensics and testimony by FBI hair experts. Odom was also identified by the victim, and the D.C. Public Defender Service called his case “a cautionary tale of the perils of eyewitness identification evidence.” In its statement, the defender service called on the District to adopt legislation that would prohibit the administration of photo arrays by people familiar with a case or suspect. Lawmakers have mandated or police have voluntarily adopted such measures in several states, but similar proposals have died before the D.C. Council twice since 2008.

Justice Department frames expanded review of FBI forensic testimony

The Justice Department on Monday proposed expanding its review of forensic testimony by the FBI Laboratory beyond hair matching to widely used techniques such as fingerprint examinations and bullet-tracing. Officials also said that if the initial review finds systemic problems in a forensic discipline, expert testimony could be reviewed from laboratories beyond the FBI that do analysis for DOJ. “The authority afforded to scientific experts is second to none, and we must make sure that our statements are clearly supported by sound science,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said. Yates and Jonathan Wroblewski, head of the Justice Department’s office of legal policy, gave a framework for reviewing samples of closed criminal cases nationwide at the start of a two-day meeting of the National Commission on Forensic Science, whose members are appointed by the attorney general. Yates announced plans last month to audit samples of testimony that came from FBI units handling pattern-based evidence, without saying which forensic techniques would be reviewed. Such techniques include tracing the impressions that guns leave on bullets, shoe treads, fibers, soil and other crime-scene evidence. The FBI and other crime labs nationwide conduct more than 100,000 such examinations each year. Yates linked the expanded review to an FBI and department finding last year that nearly all FBI hair examiners overstated testimony about hair matches incriminating defendants during the two decades before 2000. Yates reiterated that a quality-assurance review would determine whether “the same kind of ‘testimonial overstatement’ . . . could have crept into other disciplines.” Wroblewski’s office will present a more detailed plan to the commission June 20 after a 30-day public comment period, Yates said. Wroblewski on Monday proposed beginning with techniques including fingerprints, ballistics, handwriting, shoe and tire treads, fibers, glass and soil, among others. Cases in which FBI experts testified would be sampled regardless of whether a defendant was convicted, he suggested. Justice Department officials continued to leave open questions of how many cases would be reviewed, what standards would be used and over what time period, whether and how convicted defendants or the public would be notified if isolated errors are found, and what degree of problems would trigger more exhaustive review and notification. Wroblewski asked for input on who will review sample cases, and said that the department hoped to begin executing reviews this year. “It’s both a very important project, and I think it’s going to be a very, very difficult project,” he said. To assist the effort, Yates’s office has recruited Victor W. Weedn, outgoing president of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists and chairman of the George Washington University Department of Forensic Sciences, officials said. Officials said the review does not necessarily mean that there were problems with the science of the underlying techniques, but they said it indicates that the department is committed to establishing best practices to identify and address problems — possibly through ongoing, periodic tests of various disciplines and labs. Yates’s proposal is among the broadest responses to a National Academy of Sciences panel report in February 2009 that questioned subjective comparisons of evidence by experts. The panel concluded that although examiners had long claimed to be able to match pattern evidence to a source with “absolute” or “scientific” certainty, only DNA analysis had been validated through statistical research. Commission members praised the initiative, and focused on the role of scientists and statisticians to put questioned techniques on firmer footing. Commissioner Stephen Feinberg, a professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University said he saw “the prospect to fundamentally change the nature of testimony moving from forensic labs into . . . the courtroom.” “What has crept into the forensic field are forensic sciences that are not sciences, and that is one of the basic problems,” said commission member Vincent Di Maio, presiding officer of the Texas Forensic Science Commission and editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology.

After more than 20 years in prison, a long road to freedom for 2 D.C. men

It was the strangest thing for Keith Mitchell. Weeks after his recent release from 21 years and 129 days in prison, Mitchell stood in front of a sink in a public restroom, bewildered. Mitchell didn’t realize that the sinks were operated by motion sensors. He had the same problem with toilets. And the automatic self-checkout stands at the grocery stores required some hand-holding from a nearby cashier. “Everything has changed so much,” the 40-year-old Mitchell said. His childhood friend, Gary Gathers, 39, spent more than two decades in prison for the same crime. Sitting next to Mitchell at his mother’s apartment, he laughed in agreement. He feels the same way. “These tiny cellphones, automated toilets — man, everything is different, ” Gathers said. Indeed, the world has changed since 1993, when the two men were arrested, found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to a minimum of 35 years to life in prison for the fatal shooting of a D.C. man, a death in which the men always said they were not involved. In April, six months after the D.C. Court of Appeals overturned their convictions and ordered a new trial in the case, prosecutors told a D.C. Superior Court judge that they were dismissing the case. Prosecutors still say that the men are guilty but that after 20 years they no longer have enough evidence to secure a conviction in a second trial. Although not as publicized, overturned convictions in cases that do not rely on DNA evidence — like those of Gathers and Mitchell — occur more frequently than cases reliant on DNA, according to the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions. Since 2010, the group has helped free 11 people that attorneys thought were innocent in the Washington region. Of those cases, six did not involve DNA, four had DNA as evidence, and one used both DNA and witness testimony. The cases involving DNA evidence more often result in exonerations, said the group’s executive director, Shawn Armbrust. Cases without DNA evidence are often more difficult to prove in court, Armbrust says, largely because they are circumstantial: Prosecutors and judges have to be convinced that new evidence and witness testimony is truthful and relevant to warrant an exoneration or dismissal. Those cases that have DNA evidence can use science to overturn a wrongful conviction. Although Gathers and Mitchell were not exonerated, Armbrust said she still considers their overturned murder convictions a “victory.” In the Gathers and Mitchell case, Armbrust said she believed the men were innocent because of problems with the first trial and because another suspect should have been identified as the shooter. “That weak case has crumbled, and the evidence pointing to another perpetrator proves their innocence,” Armbrust said. Exoneration or not, the men and their attorneys, consider the dismissal a justified win. Gathers and Mitchell, who now spend their days working for landscaping companies, had maintained their innocence during their entire prison stay, researching the law and fining avenues where they could get their pleas heard. “My mother knows I didn’t do it. My girlfriend knows I didn’t do. I’m good,” Gathers said. “We don’t have to prove anything to anybody,” Mitchell added. Prior to their arrests in the case, both men had brushes with the criminal justice system when they were teenagers. Gathers, as a youth, was arrested and spent some time in a juvenile shelter. But Mitchell had been charged in a murder case just two years earlier when he was 17. That case ended up being dismissed because the judge overseeing the trial did not find any evidence linking Mitchell to the death. “I’m not saying I was an angel growing up, but I didn’t do these crimes they put on me,” Mitchell said, adding that he was not involved in the man’s death. “In my neighborhood then, when something happened, the police came and grabbed everybody up.” A year after prosecutors dismissed the case, Mitchell was arrested again, along with Gathers, in the 1993 murder of Wayne Ballard, 23. “I couldn’t believe this happened again,” he said. At the trial in 1994, prosecutors argued that Gathers and Mitchell had learned that Ballard was going to be a witness in another case. The prosecutor and a lead detective said that Ballard’s name was mentioned in court as a cooperating witness, leaving Gathers and Mitchell with the opportunity to target him. In October, the appellate judges ruled that the primary motive, which prosecutors said was behind Gathers’s and Mitchell’s motivation to kill Ballard, never occurred. The judges determined that Ballard’s name was never mentioned in open court and that the prosecutor and lead detective mistakenly relayed that information to the jury as the primary motive for the two men in Ballard’s killing. So in an unusual decision, the court ruled that the two men were convicted on “false evidence” and ordered a new trial. Even before the appellate judges’ ruling, the men petitioned for a new trial after learning that the lead witness in the case, who identified the men as the shooters, had later recanted his story. The men also learned that prosecutors at the time failed to turn over a key piece of information: that Ballard’s life had been threatened by members of his own gang because Ballard had seen them participate in an unrelated shooting. Members of Ballard’s family did not return repeated calls seeking comment about the dismissal. “I am sorry for their loss,” Gathers said. “But I didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Ballard being murdered.” While behind bars, life outside continued. Mitchell’s daughter was an infant when he was locked up, but now she’s an adult. Gathers never got a chance to have children, but he missed out on the funeral of his grandmother, who helped raise him. Both men, who have been friends since childhood, found their own path to surviving in prison. Mitchell, who was raised as a Christian, converted to the Muslim faith, which he said offered him a sense of security. Gathers focused on his education. He earned his GED and spent days poring through legal books in prison libraries. Gathers learned about filing appeals and began writing hundreds of letters to defense lawyers and law schools. “I targeted everyone I could to get out,” Gathers said. He rarely received a reply, and when he did, the lawyers said only that they could not take the case. Eventually, one attorney took the case and then handed it to the Innocence Project, which identified lawyers, who after reviewing the details of the case, volunteered to take it over. In all, seven lawyers worked on the appeal. Gathers’s attorney, Seth Rosenthal, said that the men never gave up hope and were encouraged to keep fighting. “We ran into a lot of hurdles along the way, but they never lost their optimism, and that encouraged us,” Rosenthal said. “It takes a lot of faith and confidence to continue to fight and never let setbacks bring them down,” added Andrew Wise, Mitchell’s attorney. Mitchell, who has struggled with a learning disability, plans on getting his GED and later starting a nonprofit that works with youths. Gathers would like a job driving for Metro. “I am just so grateful to be home,” Mitchell says. He and Gathers shower their attorneys with praise for believing in them. Court records now show the case as closed. The men say that they hope to one day be exonerated. But the people most important to them know they are innocent, and for now, that’s good enough.

D.C. plans changes in police lineups, informants to stop errors

Courts and police in the nation’s capital will change how they conduct lineups of suspects, when they notify defendants about informants and how long they retain criminal trial records, all in response to errors that have put innocent people in prison. A task force created by D.C. Superior Court Chief Judge Lee F. Satterfield recommended that police use computers and staff not associated with a particular case to administer photo lineups to prevent influencing potential witnesses. The court acknowledged that DNA often has cleared defendants long after their convictions, so officials will by March begin keeping trial records permanently rather than destroying them after 10 years. Local courts also will begin giving criminal defendants earlier notice of any information that might impeach police informants — such as their criminal record and whether they have been paid, won a plea deal or other inducement, or cooperated with police or prosecutors in the past. Such information will be turned over at least two weeks before trial if it does not endanger witnesses, officials said. Previously, defendants got that information a few hours or days before trial. “The Superior Court strives to attain exemplary standards of practice in the criminal justice system,” Satterfield wrote in a letter Tuesday thanking the panel. The changes place District authorities on a path undertaken by many state legislatures, police agencies and court systems in response to wrongful convictions discovered in recent years. Eyewitness misidentifications have played a role in more than 70 percent of 301 DNA exonerations since 1989, a reminder that despite their persuasive power for juries, witness recollections are not always accurate. Erroneous testimony by jailhouse informants also has been a well-known problem. Measures to correct the problem have not always kept pace. For instance, the D.C. Superior Court has not reviewed its records retention policy since 1984, before DNA testing in criminal cases. Meanwhile, the District has seen a spate of recent mistakes. Satterfield formed the committee in response to requests by the D.C. Public Defender Service after the December 2009 exoneration of Donald Eugene Gates. DNA tests showed that Gates spent 28 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. His conviction was based in part on the testimony of a paid police informant and an FBI agent’s mistaken forensic testimony that he found Gates’s hair on the victim. Since then, two other District men, Santae A. Tribble and Kirk L. Odom, were exonerated through DNA tests last year after spending a combined 50 years in prison. Mistaken FBI forensic hair matches helped convict both men. Tribble’s prosecutors additionally relied on an informant who received a plea deal, and police in Odom’s case used a victim’s testimony after she was shown Odom’s photograph several times. U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. welcomed the recommendations, adding that his office is reviewing hundreds of cases for any similar forensic testimony errors but has found none. “In addition to remedying past wrongs, we understand the importance of establishing best practices that will protect the integrity of our criminal justice system,” Machen’s office said in a statement. Barry J. Pollack, president of the board of directors for the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, called the moves “a good step,” adding, “I applaud the effort.” The 14-member committee was led by Superior Court Judge Russell F. Canan, former presiding judge of the criminal division, and included judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, police, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), aides to the deputy mayor for public safety and Pollack’s group. Panel members generally agreed that the D.C. Innocence Protection Act, which took effect in 2002, is working well. However, the panel will continue to meet twice a year and review issues, acting as an ongoing, ad hoc “innocence commission.” The panel stopped short of recommending more wide-ranging changes, such as expanding access to DNA testing or altering police evidence retention policies, saying they were not needed. However, they urged police to respond to research showing that new techniques can reduce mistaken identifications. D.C. police said they will launch a pilot study in robbery cases of having photos presented “blind,” or by someone who does not know which suspect is being shown to a witness. However, the panel said more study is needed before recommending that photos be shown one by one, or sequentially, to witnesses rather than simultaneously in a lineup. Lawmakers in North Carolina and Ohio have mandated the use of blind sequential identification statewide, and police have voluntarily adopted similar measures in Dallas, Virginia Beach, Northampton, Mass., Winston-Salem, N.C., Burlington, N.C., and Wisconsin. Twice since 2008, the District’s elected council has declined to mandate such a step, although Mendelson reintroduced the measure in his first act as chairman last year. D.C. police say sequential identification is an option for detectives, but public defenders say the practice has not been observed in the field. “More work needs to be done, but we regard this as a good beginning” in addressing two leading causes of wrongful convictions, said Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service.

D.C. Marriage Bureau would close in a shutdown

Even though the federal government shut down, District residents will still be able to apply for city permits and serve on a jury. But they won’t be able to tie the knot in D.C. Superior Court. Court officials have deemed the majority of its operations as essential. That means all trials, hearings and mediations would continue as planned — although there would be fewer staff than usual in the building. But those seeking to marry at the courthouse or apply for a marriage license would have to postpone their plans at least until after the shutdown ends. While D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) said all city services would continue to operate during a shutdown, the judicial branch of the government operates separately. Court officials said there is a plan to furlough 397 of its 1, 275 employees if the shutdown proceeds. While most services would continue with fewer staffers, the court said in addition to cutbacks at the marriage bureau it would close the law libraries, bar admissions office and a child care center used by adult court visitors. If the court closes its wedding chapels, it would come amid a recent surge in demand. Last month, the courthouse added new employees and opened a second chapel to handle an influx of couples applying for licenses or seeking a court marriage ceremony. The court had been receiving between 300 and 400 licenses applications a month, but requests more than doubled in July and August to more than 900 each month. Court officials cited the heightened demand to the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that struck down a law that denied benefits to legally same-sex couples. Now, the court is forced, at least temporarily, to put a damper on all the budding “I do’s.” Employees within the court’s marriage bureau were busy Monday calling engaged couples scheduled to be married in the courthouse Tuesday and alerting them that they may have to reschedule. Officials said couples who already have submitted an application for a marriage license would still be able to pick it up.

George R. Wilson, D.C. police official

George R. Wilson, a retired detective sergeant with the D.C. police department who as a civilian played a critical role investigating unsolved homicide cases as the founder and chief of the D.C. police firearms identification section, died Sept. 13 at a hospice in Westminster, Md. He was 82. He had complications from dementia, said his son, Michael Wilson. After he retired in 1974, Detective Sgt. Wilson created the D.C. police firearms unit based on techniques pioneered by the FBI ballistics lab and other police firearms sections nationally. He built the laboratory into a respected firearms identification unit whose staff helped analyze bullets seized from crime scenes. As shootings and gun-related homicides increased in the late 1980s, Detective Sgt. Wilson told The Washington Post in 1989 that the department was not adequately staffing the section. Salaries were uncompetitive compared with federal and state labs, and it took years to properly train personnel, he said. The result was a backlog of 600 cases that would take at least two years to comb through, The Post reported. “You’re in the room where we could close many unsolved homicide cases. We’re sitting on vital information,” he told The Post. “But we don’t know what we’ve got. God, we’re in trouble. We need help.” A solution arrived later that year. A joint venture of the D.C. police, the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office used money and other assets recovered from drug busts to hire retired firearms experts to help work through the backlog. George Roy Wilson was born in Manhattan. He spent six years in the Navy before joining the D.C. police department in 1953. He was a patrolman and later a detective with the robbery squad. He retired a second time from the department in 1994. He was a past president of the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners. He was among the forensic experts who in the late 1970s participated in the inquiry led by the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations to investigate the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He was a resident of Davidsonville, in Anne Arundel County. Survivors include his wife of 59 years, Frances Henry Wilson of Davidsonville; two children, Dianna Smoot of Laurel and Michael Wilson of Ashburn; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. **— Adam Bernstein**

Prosecutors agree: Murder conviction of D.C. man should be overturned

Federal prosecutors on Friday acknowledged errors in the scientific evidence that helped send a Washington man to prison for 28 years for murder and took the extraordinary step of agreeing to have his conviction overturned. U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. cited DNA evidence in also agreeing to drop the murder charge against Santae A. Tribble and never try him again. But even as the prosecutor said the evidence that convicted Tribble was flawed, Machen stopped short of declaring him innocent. Tribble, 51, was found guilty of murdering a District taxi driver in an early morning robbery on July 26, 1978. His case was featured in articles last week in which The Washington Post reported that Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to convictions of potentially innocent people. In Tribble’s case, prosecutors and the FBI laboratory were incorrect in linking a hair found near the murder scene to Tribble, according to recent DNA test results. As the U.S. attorney’s office filed court papers late Friday, three former senior FBI lab experts and a national civil liberties group joined calls for the bureau and the Justice Department to review testimony in all convictions nationwide that depended on FBI hair evidence before 1996. Such a review would determine whether the evidence should be retested using DNA. The Post reported last week that the Justice Department never reviewed thousands of cases that relied on potentially flawed hair comparisons, resulting in men like Tribble staying in prison. In many of the cases that the agency did review and found to have problems, prosecutors never notified defendants or their lawyers of the issues uncovered. Machen has agreed to review all District convictions obtained with hair evidence and will ask the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project to assess whether any old evidence should be retested with modern DNA techniques. Justice Department and FBI officials said they still were considering a similar review nationwide. Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) this week urged the Justice Department to review its handling of about 250 questionable convictions identified by The Post, most of which relied on hair comparisons. “It is hard to quantify the hardship that those who have been wrongfully convicted have suffered,” Wolf wrote to Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz on Thursday. “A justice system that fully protects the constitutional rights of criminal defendants is essential to the integrity of our republic. I urge you to move quickly on this review,” said Wolf, who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee that funds the Justice Department. Even with Friday’s moves by prosecutors, Tribble’s fight to clear his name is not over. He has asked a court for full exoneration. Tribble would become the 290th person cleared by post-conviction DNA testing in the United States if a D.C. Superior Court judge grants his motion under the D.C. Innocence Protection Act. “The government’s motion stops well short of acknowledging that Mr. Tribble is actually innocent,” Sandra K. Levick, head of special litigation for the District’s Public Defender’s Service and Tribble’s lawyer. “If the United States will not agree to join him in his request for a declaration that he is innocent . . . then Mr. Tribble will insist on his right to present the compelling evidence of his actual innocence to the court,” she said. Machen’s office declined to comment. But in a court filing Friday, prosecutors said the DNA results raise “substantial doubt about the defendant’s guilt.” The Public Defender’s Service has pushed for the nationwide review of convictions that relied on hair comparisons before 1996, when the FBI lab stopped declaring matches based on visual comparisons alone. In separate interviews, Bruce Budowle, a scientist who developed the FBI’s DNA testing standards; Mark R. Wilson, an agent who led the FBI’s adoption of DNA testing for hair; and Myron T. Scholberg, the chief of the lab’s hair and fiber unit until 1985, said FBI testimony should be reviewed in all hair convictions. If the testimony was scientifically invalid and hair evidence was key to convictions, the evidence should be retested using DNA, they said. “If you know errors may have been egregious . . . and you were a law enforcement agency doing the right thing, I would think you’d want to do it,” said Budowle, who retired from the FBI in 2009 after 26 years and now directs the University of North Texas Health Science Center’s Institute of Investigative Genetics. One former FBI lab director called for an even wider review, to include cases when testimony was proper. The FBI learned through DNA testing in 2002 that hair matches were wrong 11 percent of the time, regardless of whether the testimony was flawed, said Dwight E. Adams, director of the FBI lab from 2002 to 2006. The Constitution Project, a bipartisan legal group, urged a nationwide review of hair convictions. “Obviously, if there are problems in D.C., there are problems across the country,” said Virginia Sloan, president of the project. “To think this kind of testimony or potentially flawed evidence is limited to a particular location makes no sense.” In a statement, the Justice Department said it “is evaluating the potential for future . . . reviews” in cases where FBI hair exams resulted in convictions. “If there is evidence that such a review is warranted, we will work closely with the FBI to ensure that necessary steps are taken, but it would be premature at this time to speculate,” the statement continued. The FBI declined to estimate how many convictions might be involved. The FBI lab’s hair and fiber unit handled tens of thousands of examinations per year in the 1970s and 1980s, most of them for state and local cases. Even if only a fraction resulted in positive findings and convictions, the cases could reach the thousands. There is a precedent for a such a review. In 2007, two years after scientific criticism forced the FBI to abandon the forensic practice of tracing bullets to a specific manufacturer’s batch by analyzing their chemical composition, the bureau agreed to release an estimated 2,500 bullet-lead case files to the Innocence Project and to review testimony so that prosecutors might alert courts and defendants of problems.

Justice Dept. to expand review of FBI forensic techniques beyond hair unit

The Justice Department will expand its review of forensic testimony by the FBI Laboratory in closed criminal cases nationwide to ensure it has not overstated evidence against defendants, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced. In March, the department will lay out a framework for auditing samples of testimony that came from FBI units handling pattern-based evidence, such as tracing the impressions that guns leave on bullets, shoe treads, fibers, soil and other crime-scene evidence, department officials said this week. The FBI and other crime labs nationwide conduct more than 100,000 such examinations each year. Justice Department officials left open questions of which techniques and how many cases would be reviewed, using what standard over what time period, and whether convicted defendants would be notified if any errors are found. Yates linked the move to an FBI and department finding last year that nearly all FBI hair examiners overstated testimony about hair matches incriminating defendants during the two decades before 2000. “We are undertaking this quality-assurance review because we think it is good operating procedure — and not because of specific concerns with other disciplines,” Yates said Wednesday in an address to the American Academy of Forensic Scientists’ annual meeting in Las Vegas. Hundreds of convicted defendants in hair-match cases have been notified of the testimony errors, and the bureau and the department are offering them new DNA testing and lowering barriers to appeals. Determining “whether the same kind of ‘testimonial overstatement’ . . . could have crept into other disciplines” would help “ensure the public’s ongoing confidence in the work we do,” Yates said. A spokesman for the FBI Laboratory declined to comment. In a statement, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, applauded the Justice Department “for taking responsibility and launching a full review so that the public can learn exactly what went wrong and how we can prevent this from ever happening again.” Yates’s proposal is among the broadest responses yet to a National Academy of Sciences panel report in February 2009 that questioned subjective comparisons of evidence by experts. The panel concluded that although examiners had long claimed to be able to match pattern evidence to a source with “absolute” or “scientific certainty,” only DNA analysis had been validated through statistical research. The Obama White House in 2013 appointed a National Commission on Forensic Science to respond to the National Academy of Sciences’ call to strengthen standards for research, labs and examiners. Yates said the department plans to submit a suggested framework for the testimony review at the commission’s March 21 meeting. The commission would help define the scope of the audit and respond to any errors found, Yates said. Despite criticism from academics, courts have continued to allow the other types of forensic evidence. Yates acknowledged disagreement among practitioners over how to make complex scientific concepts more understandable for judges and juries, without either exaggerating or understating the value of findings. “We recognize this is no simple task, and we want to make sure we do this review in a deliberate, thoughtful and transparent way,” Yates said. Victor W. Weedn, outgoing AAFS president and chairman of the George Washington University department of forensic sciences, said, “To critique old cases, to see the limitations of old techniques we used because of advances in technology is a matter of transparency and accountability, and to not sweep it under the rug, that is a breath of fresh air.” The department and FBI’s partners in the hair review praised Yates’s decision. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers was “pleased” that the department had committed to “involve outside experts and the scientific community” in the development of standards, senior resource counsel Vanessa Antoun said in a statement. Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic, also commended Yates’s decision, saying an essential element “will be to recruit independent and external experts in the fields of statistics and probability.”

Review of FBI forensics does not extend to federally trained state, local examiners

Thousands of criminal cases at the state and local level may have relied on exaggerated testimony or false forensic evidence to convict defendants of murder, rape and other felonies. The forensic experts in these cases were trained by the same elite FBI team whose members gave misleading court testimony about hair matches and later taught the local examiners to follow the same suspect practices, according to interviews and documents. In July, the Justice Department announced a nationwide review of all cases handled by the FBI Laboratory’s hair and fibers unit before 2000 — at least 21,000 cases — to determine whether improper lab reports or testimony might have contributed to wrongful convictions. But about three dozen FBI agents trained 600 to 1,000 state and local examiners to apply the same standards that have proved problematic. None of the local cases is included in the federal review. As a result, legal experts say, although the federal inquiry is laudable, the number of flawed cases at the state and local levels could be even higher, and those are going uncorrected. The FBI review was prompted by a series of articles in The Washington Post about errors at the bureau’s renowned crime lab involving microscopic hair comparisons. The articles highlighted the cases of two District men who each spent more than 20 years in prison based on false hair matches by FBI experts. Since The Post’s articles, the men have been declared innocent by D.C. Superior Court judges. Two high-profile local-level cases illustrate how far the FBI training problems spread. In 2004, former Montana crime lab director Arnold Melnikoff was fired and more than 700 cases questioned because of what reviewers called egregious scientific errors involving the accuracy of hair matches dating to the 1970s. His defense was that he was taught by the FBI and that many FBI-trained colleagues testified in similar ways, according to previously undisclosed court records. In 2001, Oklahoma City police crime lab supervisor Joyce Gilchrist lost her job and more than 1,400 of her cases were questioned after an FBI reviewer found that she made claims about her matches that were “beyond the acceptable limits of science.” Court filings show that Gilchrist received her only in- depth instruction in hair comparison from the FBI in 1981 and that she, like many practitioners, went largely unsupervised. Federal officials, asked about state and local problems, said the FBI has committed significant resources to speed the federal review but that state and local police and prosecutors would have to decide whether to undertake comparable efforts. FBI spokeswoman Ann Todd defended the training of local examiners as “continuing education” intended to supplement formal training provided by other labs. The FBI did not qualify examiners, a responsibility shared by individual labs and certification bodies, she said. Michael Wright, president of the National District Attorneys Association, said local prosecutors cannot simply order labs to audit all or even a sample of cases handled by FBI-trained examiners, because such an undertaking might be time- and cost-prohibitive for smaller agencies. The chairman of the laboratory accreditation board of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors said it is gathering information to guide members. “It is something we take seriously, and we are going to address it accordingly,” said Pamela Bordner, the chairman. The announcement in July of the Justice Department review of federal cases marked a turnabout from the mid-1990s, when an inquiry looked at a limited number of cases and, in the area of hair comparison, focused on the work of one examiner at the FBI lab. In its April investigation, The Post found that Justice Department officials failed to tell many defendants or their attorneys of questionable evidence and that the results of the review remained largely secret. In addition, Justice Department officials have for years blamed errors on isolated failures by rogue examiners, careless prosecutors or inept defense lawyers. But former chiefs of the FBI lab’s hair and fiber unit now acknowledge that the problems were more widespread. Some federal examiners, testifying in cases across the country, overstated the importance of hair evidence and responded to questions about the scientific accuracy of hair matches by citing amorphous statistics drawn from their experience. Moreover, they said, examiners should have been trained to accurately portray their findings in court. When local lab examiners went to the FBI for training, they received the same inadequate instruction. Myron T. “Mike” Scholberg, hair unit chief from 1978 to 1985, and Alan T. “Al” Robillard, chief from 1988 to 1990, said that in hindsight, they were not properly trained to answer a crucial question for jurors: How often might the hairs of different people appear to match? The truth is that there was no scientific way to know. Instead of simply acknowledging the uncertainty, agents at times drew statistics from their cases without explaining why that was an incomplete or even misleading answer, Scholberg and Robillard said. Harold A. “Hal” Deadman Jr., a top hair unit scientist who trained more than 600 examiners from 1972 to 1987, said he always explained to jurors why his case experience gave an incomplete picture of the accuracy of hair comparisons. But Deadman said DNA testing should be done in all convictions that were based mainly on visual hair comparison, because of weaknesses in trial testimony and examiner results. Interviews with the former unit chiefs, as well as more than 20 practitioners, scientists and legal experts, and a review of court records, training notes and transcripts of meetings indicate that some FBI lab examiners tried to skirt the limitations of their scientific findings in testimony and that they were encouraged to do so by their trainers. As warnings about the problems mounted — through DNA exonerations, whistleblower complaints, court rulings — bureau managers implemented stronger protocols, but they limited disclosure of the problems they found. More forthcoming disclosure could have jeopardized convictions. “If the FBI is going to be a role model, we need to see this federal audit lead to wider audits of labs across the country,” said Myrna S. Raeder, a Southwestern University law professor who is leading an American Bar Association effort to improve forensic evidence. “If you had even the elite FBI analysts out there crossing the line and exaggerating the forensics, that sent a terrible message that ‘anything goes.’ ” In a letter this month to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department acknowledged that FBI examiners “may have exceeded the limits of the science by overstating . . . conclusions” in some cases. “The Department and the Bureau believe it is necessary and appropriate that defense counsel and defendants are informed of any inappropriate testimony by FBI Laboratory examiners,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Judith C. Appelbaum wrote. Before DNA profiling, testimony of a hair match was a powerful way for prosecutors to boil down an ambiguous case to a single, incriminating piece of physical evidence left at the scene of a crime. No other agency in the United States performed as many hair examinations or believed as much in the technique as the FBI lab’s 10-member unit of hair examiners. But The Post’s investigation earlier this year showed how agents, prosecutors or both sometimes exaggerated the significance of the evidence they had. For example, in a 1980 Indiana robbery case, one agent told jurors that he was unable to distinguish between the hair of different people just once in 1,500 cases he had analyzed. In one of the District cases, federal prosecutors claimed that the agent had been unable to tell hair samples apart only “eight or 10 times in the past 10 years, while performing thousands of analyses.” In another, the prosecutor said in closing arguments, “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair.” That defendant was declared innocent this year. The problem is, as an expert peer review panel wrote in Melnikoff’s case, “There is not — and never was — a well established probability theory for hair comparison.” As noted in 2009 by the chief of the FBI hair team, the proper answer to the question of how often hairs from different people might match is, “We do not know.” Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, said hair analysis practitioners should end their resistance to putting scientists in charge of setting clear, consistent standards for lab reports and testimony. “When the stakes involve life and liberty, those scientific parameters and standards should be set by scientists, not by law enforcement,” said Neufeld, whose organization advocates for people trying to prove their innocence through DNA testing. The Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers were consulted by the FBI on the national review. The FBI has known for decades that hair found at a crime scene is a valuable piece of evidence. Before DNA testing, agents would use a microscope to compare the evidence with a sample of hair from a suspect. A visual analysis can tell animal hairs from human hairs; human hairs by race and body part; whether hairs were dyed or otherwise treated; and how hairs were removed from the body. Visual comparison, at its best, also can accurately narrow the pool of criminal suspects to a class or group or definitively rule out a person as a possible source. But it was not possible to declare an absolute match. So the FBI had a problem. Hair comparisons could yield good evidence. But agents struggled to explain to a jury how good. Morris Samuel “Sam” Clark was the head of the FBI’s hair unit when it began training state and local analysts in 1973. He said he long believed that examiners could trace hairs from a crime scene to a particular person with a high degree of probability — even though there is no scientific proof that is possible. But Clark, who did graduate work in biology at Harvard and retired in 1979, said laboratory experience should not be discounted. He did “hundreds and hundreds of comparisons” over nearly 20 years, and he believes that he was a qualified court expert, he said in an interview from his home in Spotsylvania County. The FBI’s training regimen, which required agents to compare hairs side-by-side under high-powered microscopes for a year before working on live cases, gave lab veterans confidence that they could tell the difference between individuals’ hairs just as an ordinary person could distinguish between their faces. They embraced a set of vague standards. In written lab reports, FBI agents would include the caveat that hair examination was not a basis for positive identification. In court, however, they could suggest that it would be highly unlikely for an examiner’s match to be wrong. The bureau left it up to individual labs and examiners to explain matters to jurors. Agents were trained to say that in their “personal experience” they had rarely seen hairs from different people that looked alike. That evolved into jurors’ hearing numbers that had a huge impact even if they lacked scientific grounding. After a slaying in Tennessee in 1980, an FBI agent testified in a capital case that there was one chance in 4,500 or 5,000 that a hair came from someone other than the suspect. But as experts from around the world would later note, the FBI-taught answer was misleading. In reality, FBI examiners did not compare every hair to every other hair they had ever examined. They simply compared crime-scene hairs and hair samples from individuals relevant in each case. Examiners kept no “database” of samples, which went back to police evidence files. And differences between hairs are so fine that a person can generally keep only a handful of hairs in mind at any time. “The claim you could keep all those hairs in your head and sort them in your mind, that would be hard to do,” said Mark R. Wilson, a 23-year FBI veteran who helped develop DNA testing for hair in 1996. “After about three or four [hairs], it gets confusing.” The claim was called into question at an international conference hosted by the FBI in 1985, but the training was not overhauled for at least a dozen more years. “It was not promoted, put it that way,” to give juries a more accurate picture of the limits of the technique, said John W. Hicks, who spent about five years in the hair unit in the 1970s and who directed the FBI lab from 1989 to 1994. Robillard, the former hair unit chief, said that he always waited for a defense attorney to challenge his claims about the accuracy of hair analysis but that neither they nor judges usually caught the logical sleight of hand. “You would expect a defense attorney to say, ‘Wait — are you, Robillard, saying you compared every person’s hair to every other one?’ That’s the screaming question for cross-examination,” Robillard said. “I can’t off the top of my head remember ever having a defense attorney say that.” Like the other agents interviewed, Robillard, now a private expert who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, said FBI experts were not trying to mislead but to convey in layman’s terms why they were confident in their hair associations. Not all former chiefs agreed that examiners should have testified differently. Edward L. “Ed” Burwitz, who led the unit from 1985 to 1988, called that “a legal question that I don’t feel confident to answer.” Like others, Burwitz said he never got complaints about examiners’ testimony. He called the recent criticism a matter of “Monday morning quarterbacking.” Clark also defended his work, including the FBI training. “This was not fly-by-night stuff, not idle conclusions on our part. I think we made a very significant contribution to the criminal justice system,” Clark said. “If [examiners] made a mistake, it’s a personal mistake, and it’s not a matter of [our] training them . . .  nor the whole science of microscopic hair exams, because we did our best.” The FBI lab began training state and local hair examiners in 1973, as the bureau worked with the nation’s crime lab directors to expand forensic methods. Deadman said he trained about 600 examiners from outside the FBI between 1973 and 1987, and others estimated that an additional 450 examiners were trained over the next dozen years. No one knows how many cases local and state hair examiners handled. Estimates of their collective caseload vary from 20 percent to more than half of all hair exams during the period under review. Most of the rest were federal cases. Yet, FBI agents and others say they doubt the quality of the training, even as they acknowledge that it was a valued credential for state and local labs. Instead of working with hairs for an entire year before starting trial work, some local trainees spent a week at the FBI Academy at Quantico and then went back to labs where they were one of one or two designated “criminalists,” analyzing everything from hair to paint chips to glass, Robillard said. They might handle a handful of hair cases a year, using substandard equipment while under constant pressure from investigators. With 200-plus crime labs serving 18,000 police agencies in the early 1990s, DeForest said, “There was no monitoring of people. . . . That whole thing for something this complex was ill-conceived, and maybe [the FBI] should have recognized that.” In 2004, Melnikoff lost his crime lab job in Washington because of errors whose discovery led to three overturned convictions in Montana. One of those cases was the child rape conviction of Jimmy Ray Bromgard, who served more than 15 years in prison before DNA tests showed he didn’t commit the crime. At Bromgard’s 1987 trial, Melnikoff said he found head and pubic hairs “microscopically indistinguishable” from Bromgard’s, and he told the jury that there was less than one chance in 10,000 of a coincidence. He based this assertion on his case experience, multiplying by 100 the 1 in 100 frequency with which he claimed to have seen head and pubic hairs he could not tell apart. After Bromgard was exonerated in 2002, a five-member panel that included Deadman said Melnikoff made “egregious misstatements not only of the science of forensic hair examinations but also of genetics and statistics.” Melnikoff’s defense in a civil suit brought by Bromgard was that he simply acted as he was trained. Michael A. Howard, a 24-year Oregon State Police veteran who also took the Quantico course, noted that Melnikoff’s examination and lab report followed FBI practices. “I took the [FBI] class in 1982 and was not advised to avoid the use of probabilities. . . . We were taught that our own experience was most important, and that is what Mr. Melnikoff was doing,” Howard told a federal court in Montana in 2007. In an interview, Howard elaborated. “They didn’t say, ‘Use it,’ and they didn’t say, ‘Don’t use it,’ ” he said. Instead, he said, the FBI’s position was, “You’re going to have to decide for yourself, based on your experience, how strong you can state it.” Gilchrist also was accused of misidentifications, misleading testimony and withholding or destroying evidence. In 2001, she was fired from the Oklahoma City Police Department, and authorities set out to reexamine more than 1,400 assigned cases, including a dozen death row cases. In one case, David Johns Bryson spent 16 years in prison for a 1982 rape, but he was freed in 1999 after DNA results showed another man committed the crime. Gilchrist testified that she found four hairs that were like Bryson’s and that she never saw hairs from different people with the same characteristics. She said, “I would think it would be impossible not to be able to distinguish hairs from two different individuals.” But in April 2001, Douglas W. Deedrick, then head of the FBI unit, found that Gilchrist’s matches were wrong and that by implying hairs were “unique,” Gilchrist “misrepresent[ed] the science.” Again, Gilchrist took her cue from bureau training. In her files, she kept a certificate of completion from her January 1981 class, including a session on “Discussion of the significance of hair comparisons, testimony matters and pertinent literature.” In her notes, she copied the FBI caveat that one cannot conclusively determine the source or origin of a hair. But, the notes also showed that instructors were teaching their students how to sidestep the limits of the science — by pointing out their experience. “Can conclude source — point out however in my experience, have rarely seen hairs from diff. people exhibiting the same microscopic characteristics,” the notes say. FBI veterans pointed out that the hair unit gave up members who helped the agency pioneer forensic nuclear and mitochondrial DNA testing. As DNA testing became more common, the limits of microscopic hair comparison became clearer. Max Houck, who was the unit’s first civilian, non-agent examiner, said he changed the way he testified in the late 1990s after consulting an old statistics textbook. Training of examiners also shifted away from citing numbers, probabilities or statistics by 2001, Houck said, as the lab gained outside accreditation and replaced agents with civilian scientists. Asked why it took until now to correct errors, Houck, the head of the new D.C. Department of Forensic Science, cited a variety of reasons: The “conservatism” of forensic science, the legal system’s dependence on precedence and, finally, government bureaucracy and the FBI’s proud culture. “Could it have happened sooner? Yes,” he said. “Would it have cost more money? Yes. Would it have been more disruptive? Probably. Would we have gotten a better answer? I don’t know.” To his list, Houck added one more question. “Does that mean justice was served? Not necessarily.”

Maryland high court rules police can use volunteered DNA in other cases

Maryland’s high court has thrust the state into a national debate over how police collect and use DNA evidence, issuing its third decision in as many years governing when law enforcement practices cross the line to unconstitutional invasions of privacy. In a 5-to-2 opinion, the state’s Court of Appeals ruled this past week that police can take a DNA sample from a voluntary donor in an investigation and use the resulting profile to investigate other crimes without a court order, as long as the donor did not expressly limit his or her consent. Dissenting judges said the decision will have a chilling effect on victims, relatives or others who volunteer their DNA to help police, leaving them with fewer legal protections over the use of their genetic material than those enjoyed by people convicted of a serious crime. The opinion follows a string of state decisions that have probed the legality of expanding DNA collection beyond convicted offenders, the growing power of technology to test tiny amounts of DNA naturally shed by people without a body search, and whether unrestricted testing of lawfully obtained DNA amounts to a form of lifetime genetic surveillance. “In the physical world, you know what you’re consenting to if police say, ‘Can I search your car?’ ” said George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and expert on criminal procedure and technology. “With DNA and with computers, people might not know what consent means, how much information is contained there and what can be done with it.” Kerr added, “The real question is, are there any limits on government’s ability to scrape DNA from whatever you touch, test it and run it in a database at any time?” The latest decision involved George Varriale, a homeless man who lived in a wooded area of Glen Burnie, who in 2012 agreed to let Anne Arundel County police take a cheek swab for DNA to investigate a rape. Varriale was cleared in that case. But on her own initiative, the county crime lab’s DNA administrator uploaded his genetic profile into state and county databases with the DNA of arrestees and offenders. The databases conduct automated weekly searches. Varriale was matched to a 2008 burglary, entered a conditional guilty plea and appealed. In a 28-page opinion, Court of Appeals Judge Clayton Greene Jr. said DNA information used by police comes from “junk DNA” segments that do not reveal genetic traits and do not present a privacy threat. “DNA profiles are like fingerprints, which police routinely catalog and compare in the course of criminal investigations,” Greene wrote. “Absent an express limitation placed on the use or storage of the DNA evidence by Varriale, the State, or by law, we cannot conclude that it was unreasonable for the State to maintain and utilize Varriale’s DNA for subsequent unrelated investigation.” In a dissent, Judges Glenn Harrell and Sally D. Adkins warned that the decision will discourage consenting DNA donors and that “the time may be nigh” for new regulations or legislation to protect them. That is because when the General Assembly passed Maryland’s DNA Collection Act in 1994, the rules for collecting, retaining and in some cases expunging DNA applied to certain convicts and — as amended in 2008 — arrestees, but not to anyone else, the judges said. Voluntary donors “will face a certain knowledge that, even if not suspected or convicted of a crime, the police can, and will, hold on to their DNA profile forever, and may compare it at any time for any or no articulable reason,” Harrell wrote. Harrell, now retired, also criticized the court’s majority for concluding that an ordinary person could easily understand a police form to prohibit the use of his or her DNA to investigate other crimes. “This is beyond the ken of a typical lay person, even one who is not a homeless person living in the woods,” Harrell wrote, adding that the majority is “a hop, skip and a jump” away from endorsing police fishing expeditions of victims, because DNA databases are used not only like fingerprints to identify people, but to investigate them for crimes. The Varriale case is the latest in Maryland interpreting DNA collection under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on illegal searches. In 2014, the Supreme Court in a 5-to-4 vote upheld the constitutionality of Maryland’s DNA collection law for arrestees, overturning the state high court’s prohibition a year earlier. Separately, the Supreme Court in March declined to take up the appeal of a 2014 decision by the Maryland high court, which upheld the constitutionality of the warrantless collection of DNA from a man not under arrest without his consent. In that case, Glenn J. Raynor came to a police station to answer questions in a 2006 rape in Harford County. Raynor offered to give a DNA sample if police agreed to destroy it after the investigation, but police declined. After he left, police obtained his DNA from sweat left on his chair. Raynor was convicted and sentenced to 100 years in prison. On appeal, Maryland’s court ruled 4 to 3 that Raynor “abandoned” his DNA and had no expectation of privacy. Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit civil liberties group based in San Francisco, said the Raynor and Varriale decisions pose a “Catch-22” situation. The Varriale opinion says that if someone volunteers to give police a genetic sample from a cheek swab in one investigation but doesn’t want it used in other cases, he or she must expressly seek to limit its use, Lynch said. But according to the Raynor case, if that happens, then police can reject those terms and acquire the DNA on their own because people constantly shed microscopic quantities of DNA in blood, sweat, saliva and skin cells, Lynch said. “It really puts us in a terrible position because we have no ability to control what happens to our DNA,” Lynch said. “We can’t live in a hazmat suit.” Jennifer L. Mnookin, dean of the UCLA School of Law, said the Varriale case also presents a powerful example of DNA “database creep.” Since 1994, Maryland law has required that sex offenders submit a DNA sample to the state database. That was later expanded to include anyone convicted of felonies and some theft-related offenses and, in 2009, anyone arrested or charged with violent crimes or burglary, regardless of the outcome of the case. State police say they have 116,330 convicted offender profiles in Maryland’s DNA database and 28,828 samples from people who have been arrested or charged with offenses. But Maryland State Police spokesman Gregory M. Shipley said state and local police also keep a “suspect” database of individuals who have not been arrested or charged, including 3,378 profiles in the State Police system and 5,511 in the system held by police in Baltimore and in Montgomery, Prince George’s, Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties, for a total of 8,889. Such profiles from victims, relatives, excluded suspects and other consent-based samples cannot be uploaded to the national FBI database, which includes more than 11 million offender profiles and 1.9 million arrestee profiles. But they present a case study of “a shadow system” of lightly regulated state and local databases around the country whose number and size have mushroomed, said Stephen B. Mercer, chief attorney of the forensics division of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender and Varriale’s lawyer. “This is the next wave of DNA database expansion,” Mercer said in a paper he co-wrote in 2014 for New York University’s Annual Survey of American Law. He added, “Unfortunately . . . [the] consequences could very well endanger public confidence in the core mission of the regulated national DNA databank.” Shipley said DNA evidence and analysis remain invaluable for police to help identify the guilty and exonerate the innocent, adding that Maryland’s DNA database scored its 4,000th match in May.

U.S. reviewing 27 death penalty convictions for FBI forensic testimony errors

****An unprecedented federal review of old criminal cases has uncovered as many as 27 death penalty convictions in which FBI forensic experts may have mistakenly linked defendants to crimes with exaggerated scientific testimony, U.S. officials said. The review led to an 11th-hour stay of execution in Mississippi in May. It is not known how many of the cases involve errors, how many led to wrongful convictions or how many mistakes may now jeopardize valid convictions. Those questions will be explored as the review continues. The discovery of the more than two dozen capital cases promises that the examination could become a factor in the debate over the death penalty. Some opponents have long held that the execution of a person confirmed to be innocent would crystallize doubts about capital punishment. But if DNA or other testing confirms all convictions, it would strengthen proponents’ arguments that the system works. ****FBI officials discussed the review’s scope as they prepare to disclose its first results later this summer. The death row cases are among the first 120 convictions identified as potentially problematic among more than 21,700 FBI Laboratory files being examined. The review wasannounced last July by the FBI and the Justice Department, in consultation with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). The unusual collaboration came after The Washington Post reported last year that authorities had known for years that flawed forensic work by FBI hair examiners may have led to convictions of potentially innocent people, but officials had not aggressively investigated problems or notified defendants. At issue is a once-widespread practice by which some FBI experts exaggerated the significance of “matches” drawn from microscopic analysis of hair found at crime scenes. Since at least the 1970s, written FBI Laboratory reports typically stated that a hair association could not be used as positive identification. However, on the witness stand, several agents for years went beyond the science and testified that their hair analysis was a near-certain match. The new review listed examples of scientifically invalid testimony, including claiming to associate a hair with a single person “to the exclusion of all others,” or to state or suggest a probability for such a match from past casework. Whatever the findings of the review, the initiative is pushing state and local labs to take similar measures. For instance, the Texas Forensic Science Commission on Friday directed all labs under its jurisdiction to take the first step to scrutinize hair cases, in a state that has executed more defendants than any other since 1982. Separately, FBI officials said their intention is to review and disclose problems in capital cases even after a defendant has been executed. “We didn’t do this to be a model for anyone — other than when there’s a problem, you have to face it, and you have to figure how to fix it, move forward and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann said. “That tone and approach is set from the very top of this building,” he said, referring to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. David Christian “Chris” Hassell, director of the FBI Laboratory, said the review will be used to improve lab training, testimony, audit systems and research, as it has done when previous breakdowns were uncovered. The lab overhauled scientific practices when whistleblowers revealed problems in 1996 and again after an FBI fingerprint misidentification in a high-profile 2003 terrorism case, he said. “One of the things good scientists do is question their assumptions. No matter what the field, what the discipline, those questions should be up for debate,” Hassell said. “That’s as true in forensics as anything else.” Advocates for defendants and the wrongly convicted called the undertaking a watershed moment in police and prosecutorial agencies’ willingness to re-open old cases because of scientific errors uncovered by DNA testing. Peter J. Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which supports inmates who seek exoneration through DNA testing, applauded the FBI, calling the review historic and a “major step forward to improve the criminal justice system and the rigor of forensic science in the United States.” Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the NACDL, also praised the effort, predicting that it would have “an enormous impact on the states” and calling on the defense bar to represent indigent convicts. “That’s going to be a very big job as this unfolds,” said Reimer, whose group has spent 1,500 hours identifying cases for the second round of review. Under terms finalized with the groups last month, the Justice Department will notify prosecutors and convicted defendants or defense attorneys if an internal review panel or the two external groups find that FBI examiners “exceeded the limits of science” when they claimed to link crime scene hair to defendants in reports or testimony. If so, the department will assist the class of prisoners in unprecedented ways, including waiving statutes of limitations and other federal rules that since 1996 have restricted post-conviction appeals. The FBI also will test DNA evidence if sought by a judge or prosecutor. The review will prioritize capital cases, then cases in which defendants are imprisoned. Unlike DNA analysis, there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same. The federal inquiry came after the Public Defender Service helped exonerate three D.C. men through DNA testing that showed that three FBI hair examiners contributed to their wrongful convictions for rape or murder in the early 1980s. The response has been notable for the department and the FBI, which in the past has been accused of overprotecting its agents. Twice since 1996, authorities conducted case reviews largely in secret after the scientific integrity of the FBI Lab was faulted. Weissmann said that although earlier reviews lawfully gave prosecutors discretion to decide when to turn over potentially exculpatory material to the defense, greater transparency will “lessen skepticism” about the government’s motives. It also will be cheaper, faster and more effective because private parties can help track down decades-old cases. Scientific errors “are not owned by one side,” he said. “This gives the same information to both sides, and they can litigate it.” The review terms could have wide repercussions. The FBI is examining more than 21,000 federal and state cases referred to the FBI Lab’s hair unit from 1982 through 1999 — by which time DNA testing of hair was routine — and the bureau has asked for help in finding cases before lab files were computerized in 1985. Of 15,000 files reviewed to date, the FBI said a hair association was declared in about 2,100 cases. Investigators have contacted police and prosecutors in more than 1,200 of those cases to find out whether hair evidence was used in a conviction, in which case trial transcripts will be sought. However, 400 of those cases have been closed because prosecutors did not respond. On May 7, Mississippi’s Supreme Court stayed the execution of Willie Jerome Manning for a 1992 double homicide hours before he was set to die by lethal injection. FBI cases may represent only the tip of the problem. While the FBI employed 27 hair examiners during the period under review, FBI officials confirmed for the first time this week that records indicate that about 500 people attended one-week hair comparison classes given by FBI examiners between 1979 and 2009. Nearly all of them came from state and local labs. State and local prosecutors handle more than 95 percent of violent crimes. In April, the accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors declined to order state and local labs to conduct reviews, but issued a public notice recommending that each laboratory evaluate the impact of improper statements on past convictions, reminding them of their ethical obligation to act in case of a potential miscarriage of justice. FBI Lab officials say they have not been contacted by other labs about their review or who completed the FBI classes.

Montgomery police search for alternative funds as state, federal grants decline

As the nation grapples with recovering from the Great Recession, federal and state grants are rapidly drying up, leaving previously well-funded county police units, such as Montgomery’s successful cold case squad, to fend for themselves. The two-person cold case unit closed at least three high-profile rape cases — all dating back to the early 1980s — in the past four months by reexamining DNA. But a pair of federal grants secured for such efforts in 2006 and 2008 expired last year and will not be renewed, cold case detective Joe Mudano said in a hearing before the County Council’s Public Safety Committee on July 23. The grants, which totaled $400,000, were used to pay for both the unit’s costly DNA tests and its officer salaries since the unit was formed in 2005, Mudano said. “We’ve applied for [the grants] through the same funding, through the National Institute of Justice, but their resources, along with everyone else’s budgets, is getting cut,” Mudano said after the hearing. On the upside, an increase in the department’s crime lab staff and new laboratory space set aside on the top floors of the new public safety headquarters building will allow county technicians to take on the cold case unit’s DNA needs. The lab’s DNA analysis staff has grown from one analyst in 2002 to six members today, said Ray Wickenheiser, director of the department’s Forensic Services Section. Cold cases typically were contracted out to independent labs to allow the county’s lab technicians to prioritize breaking cases and maintain a quick turnaround for evidence needed in court cases, Wickenheiser said. “But as we build capacity — and, as you’ve seen in the new lab, we have that capacity — we will be able to do more and more cold cases and to expand the capabilities we have,” Wickenheiser told the council that Monday. Case backlog at the lab has dropped from more than 400 in 2002 to an average of 50 or 60 cases today, Wickenheiser said. Grants in general have dried up as federal budget deficits continue to trickle down to state and local governments, said County Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville), representing the 3rd District, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee. A $2.7 million U.S. Department of Justice grant funding a joint Montgomery and Prince George’s counties gang task force was not renewed for this year, and a more recent state grant from the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention also has dwindled as more agencies scrambled for the remaining money. “Generally the availability of grants is tighter, and if there are the same amount of grants, they are likely to be on the smaller scale,” Andrews said, discussing the $1,898 received in June from the governor’s office for new body armor. A typical safety vest can cost the county in excess of $900, Andrews said. “Very few grants are that small — even when they’re being divided up by multiple partners, most grants the county receives are [in the] $50,000 to $500,000 range,” he said. “We’re not going to turn it down, but we’re not going to go out and ask for a grant for $15,000 if it isn’t worth the staff time to apply for it.” Montgomery County police was among 20 Maryland police agencies to receive a portion of the current grant, which totaled $49,051 for 2013, said Bill Toohey, a spokesman for the governor’s office. Seventeen agencies applied for the same grant last year, Toohey said. “The state and the federal government are seeing less income,” Toohey said. “We’re also coming off another recession year, so there’s less money to give out. It’s that basic.” In light of declining grants, the council is sure to use what grants it has left for greater impact, Andrews said, pointing out the council’s move to reallocate a $248,894 grant originally awarded to county police by the U.S. Department of Justice through its Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant in 2009. Although County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) planned to use the grant to fund a county police helicopter program in 2009, the council voted against that plan and decided instead to use the funds to build a new evidence locker in the public safety headquarters building in Gaithersburg. The council voted unanimously in favor of the redistribution of funds after a public hearing July 24 in Rockville. “Everybody needs to look at their budgets and focus on the priorities to an even greater degree,” Andrews said. “I think we do a good job of that here in Montgomery County.”

In DNA ruling, the Supreme Court makes the right call

GOVERNMENT COLLECTION of DNA is as tantalizing to law enforcement as it is terrifying to those who see it as an unwarranted intrusion on privacy. A split Supreme Court on Monday took its stand on the side of law enforcement, finding that the government can take DNA from suspects arrested under suspicion of violent crime. The five-justice majority made the right call. At issue was a Maryland law that requires people arrested for violent crime to give a DNA swab to authorities. In 2009, Maryland police took Alonzo Jay King Jr. into custody for assault; the DNA sample they collected matched DNA evidence from an unsolved rape investigation six years earlier. Mr. King went to prison for the rape, but he challenged the Maryland law under which the police took his DNA. After Maryland’s highest court threw out Mr. King’s conviction, it was up to the Supreme Court to decide if Maryland conducted a constitutional search when the state took Mr. King’s DNA — and in effect whether similar laws in states across the country are legal. The majority found that the potential of DNA to serve as the 21st-century equivalent of fingerprinting justified laws such as Maryland’s. During booking, suspects have their prints taken as a matter of course. Police can then use that information to defeat aliases that suspects might be using, to obtain information on suspects’ criminal history and even to solve cold cases in which authorities recovered fingerprints that they couldn’t identify. Since DNA is an exceptionally precise way to identify people, handing over a swab should be seen as a similarly reasonable way to identify and process arrestees, part of building a picture of who they are and the dangers they pose. This ruling will not create some sort of disturbing database in which every American’s risk of developing diabetes or cancer is just a click away from any curious cop. Several provisions in Maryland’s law make clear that it is to be used only to collect information that denotes identity and nothing else; no one’s full genome will go on file. But a spirited dissent from Justice Antonin Scalia raised a different objection. Justice Scalia argued that Maryland’s law isn’t really like fingerprinting because it is specifically geared toward solving cold cases, not identifying and processing arrestees. As in other avenues of criminal investigation, he argued, the Fourth Amendment requires that police have reason to think that a specific individual committed a specific crime before demanding DNA to prove it. But, as the majority pointed out, the rapid advance of DNA identification technology promises to make it as efficient a tool in the administration of criminal justice as fingerprinting has been, serving a variety of legitimate ends at many stages in the system, including identification. The justices were right to allow that process to continue to play out. **Read more from Opinions:** Ruth Marcus: Angelina Jolie and freeing genes from patent restrictions Jeffrey A. Rosenfeld and Christopher E. Mason: The Supreme Court should invalidate the patent on human DNA The Post’s View: Patents on human DNA need Congress’s input The Post’s View: A Maryland court’s bizarre ban on collecting DNA

An 11-year-old reported being raped twice, wound up with a conviction

Almost seven years ago, a troubled 11-year-old girl reported that she had been raped — twice — in her Northwest Washington neighborhood. Despite medical evidence of sexual assault, records show that no suspects were arrested and the cases were given only sporadic attention by the police . Instead, in the second case, the police had the girl, Danielle Hicks-Best, charged with filing a false report. After Danielle’s family agreed to what her parents say was a poorly understood plea, she was convicted and made a ward of the court. She spent the next few years in and out of detention and secure treatment centers between episodes of running away. She never finished high school, had a baby at 15 and is struggling to move forward with her life. “After 11, she lost the rest of her childhood,” said Danielle’s mother, Veronica Best, who campaigned for years with her husband, Mayo, to get the police to focus on the assaults, contacting officers all the way up the chain to D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier and her deputy, Peter Newsham. Last fall, after inquiries from The Washington Post, the department launched new investigations into the cases and the way they were handled, according to the Bests and a law enforcement officer familiar with the matter. ****Danielle and her parents have spent years urging the police to charge the suspects and seeking an explanation for the way the criminal justice system treated an already disturbed young girl who was sexually assaulted. At 11, Danielle had severe behavioral, academic and mental-health issues rooted in the drug exposure and physical abuse she suffered from her birth mother, a crack addict. The Bests, her adoptive parents, struggled to handle those issues, turning to but not always following the recommendations of the school and psychiatric communities. The couple and other supporters say the cases are complicated by Danielle’s instability. But after Danielle reported the rapes, the police interviewed her in a manner that violated guidelines for handling child sexual assault cases, records and interviews show. They delayed analyzing DNA evidence — and then analyzed only some of it. An officer misled her to get her to contradict her account, and then had her charged with lying, according to police reports. And many officers treated her with extreme skepticism; in one internal e-mail, a lieutenant called her “promiscuous” and the “sex” consensual. Yet Danielle was just 11 years old, well under the age of consent, which is 16 in the District. The suspects in the police reports obtained by the Bests were described as being in their late teens or early 20s. ****The Bests say that after The Post approached the police, Lanier telephoned the family to apologize. Lanier would not confirm either the new investigations or the phone call, citing the confidentiality practices governing cases involving juveniles. But she said, “If there is a case that has not been handled properly, I think it’s important that that victim or that family hear from the chief of police that we screwed up and we want to fix it.” She added: “Obviously we cannot turn the clock back and fix things that have happened in the past. . . . The best I can offer the hypothetical victim from six or seven years ago . . . is to make sure if there were any investigative leads that were never followed or things that should have been done that they are done. It’s never too late to try to correct things.” ****The new investigations, confirmed by the law enforcement officer who is not authorized to speak on the record, have left the Bests with mixed emotions. “I was desperate for the police to do their job six years ago and get those guys off the street and away from Danielle,” Veronica Best said. “It’s hard not to be angry when she was the one locked up and labeled. . . a delinquent.” Police documents say Danielle was charged with filing a false report because her recounting of the rapes shifted and she acknowledged lying about the identity of one of the abductors, who claimed the sex was consensual. Danielle said she cannot recall exactly what she told the police about the alleged abductor; experts say inconsistent accounts by rape victims are not uncommon but do not mean that rape did not occur. Furthermore, Danielle’s age at the time of the assaults raises the question of why, when there were two medical reports detailing the sexual injuries she suffered, the police did not at least look into statutory rape charges. The Bests’ is not the first criticism of the police department’s handling of rape cases. Last year, the D.C. Council passed the Sexual Assault Victims’ Rights Amendment Act, which gives victims the right to have a trained advocate present during police interviews and medical exams and provides for oversight of the department’s handling of sexual assault cases, among other measures. Veronica Best testified during a public hearing on the legislation, which was introduced by then-Council member Tommy Wells. The family’s story is “hard to listen to,” Wells told The Post. “It’s painful. And you think about the terror and bewilderment of the parents, who are trying to keep their child safe.” This story is based on legal, medical, police and psychiatric documents provided by Veronica and Mayo Best, police records that Danielle Hicks-Best obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and interviews with police, the Bests, and experts in child psychiatry, juvenile justice and law enforcement. Veronica, 66, and Mayo, 69, live with Danielle, her twin brother, David, and her son, Levi, in a modest rambler in Temple Hills, Md. The dining room table is surrounded by boxes of documents related to Danielle’s case, including a collage she created in therapy when she was 12 or 13. The word “water” represented when Danielle “got into hot water,” she explained to a reporter. A picture of a derelict building portrayed “how I felt about the police — as though everything was coming down on me like it was my fault.” Danielle has an engaging smile and often sports flamboyant hairstyles and long, elaborately painted nails. She displays a tattoo of a pistol and the words “Boss Lady” on her chest — warnings, she says, not to “mess with” her. “I walk through the streets with so much hatred, and I do not care anymore,” she said. “I feel like everything’s taken from me.” Danielle says she is studying for her GED and that she would like “to become a lawyer or work with social services and help victims of sexual assault.” At other times, she says she wants to leave her parents’ home with 2 1/2 -year- old Levi — but doesn’t have a coherent plan. She argues frequently with her parents, then apologizes in calmer moments — at which point they try to coax her to get back on medication for anxiety and depression and visit her therapist. Danielle hopes that speaking out will help her move forward, and others as well. “A lot of this same stuff happens to young girls and they just keep it within themselves, sometimes for a long time. But if you bottle it up, you don’t get anywhere. If you can talk about it . . . people will understand better where you’re coming from and maybe you can get some closure.” Although The Washington Post usually does not identify rape victims, Danielle has chosen to go public. “I used to be very closed off about it all,” she said, “but I’m not ashamed anymore.” The first rape took place Saturday evening, April 19, 2008, Danielle said, not far from her house in the District’s Columbia Heights neighborhood. Her parents had put her in a timeout for coming home late from a nearby playground. “I got angry,” she said, “so I went out secretly.” On the street, she ran into young men from the neighborhood hanging out, “like always.” The family estimates their ages ranged from the late teens to early 20s. One of the young men started talking to Danielle, and “I walked with him, I wasn’t forced,” Danielle said. They walked to a house several blocks away. Danielle said the young man asked her to come inside to watch TV in what seemed to be a basement apartment. “I went in and I didn’t like the vibe,” she said. “I saw how dirty it was.” Two other young men were there, and she thinks the man she walked in with left. The two who remained locked the door. She remembers a bare mattress on the floor and a gun beside it. She said both men raped her repeatedly overnight. On Sunday afternoon, another man burst in waving a flier, saying, “They are looking for her; she is missing,” and the two young men ordered her to leave, she said. Danielle walked home in a daze and arrived disheveled. D.C. police had been summoned, and a female officer and Veronica Best found blood on the 11-year-old’s underwear. Detective Kenneth Carter of the Youth Investigations Division retraced Danielle’s steps with her. She said he took her back to the exterior of the house where the attack occurred “and I was scared.” In Carter’s report, obtained by Danielle through a FOIA request, the two suspects are described as “18-19 yrs. old” and one is called a “friend of a month and a half.” Danielle recently said to a reporter that she did not recall telling the officers he was a “friend.” In the report, Danielle gives a confusing description of the sexual assault, at one point saying she was thrown over a suspect’s shoulder and carried up and down the neighborhood. Experts say that trauma often causes rape victims to give inconsistent accounts, which should not be used to determine credibility. They suggest that police investigators’ initial interviews with young victims be brief and involve only minimal facts, with follow-up interviews conducted by specialists. The D.C. police signed a best-practices memorandum to that effect in 2003. Using specialists is especially important in the case of children who have suffered prior abuse, according to Cindy Bridgman, director of clinical services at Safe Shores, the D.C. Children’s Advocacy Center. A child “who reports sexual assault and has a history of trauma should be taken as soon as possible after the incident to . . . a child-friendly setting to be interviewed by a trained forensic interviewer,” she said. ****After speaking with Carter, Danielle was taken to Children’s National Medical Center to be examined. In the medical report, a copy of which was obtained by the Best family, the doctor wrote that she had vaginal tears, cuts and scrapes. She had scars on her left leg and thigh from “burns when younger.” “Patient, raped in vagina and anus by [name] and another male last night after leaving home in anger. One held her while the other raped her. Also oral sex . . . Rape kit specimens collected.” The report includes a first name Danielle gave the doctor, but The Post is not reporting it because no one was charged. ****Over the next few days, Veronica, a retired hospital administrator, and Mayo, a retired letter carrier, waited for news of the investigation. When none was forthcoming, they said, they made calls to the Youth Investigations Division and went to the police station to try to speak to Carter, with no success. (Carter, who moved to the department’s Internal Affairs Division last July, referred requests for comment to the D.C. police’s media office, which declined to comment on a case involving a juvenile.) Danielle was an emotional mess, her parents say — often crying or withdrawn, not eating or sleeping — and they kept her home. The only exceptions were school and a visit to the District’s Children’s Advocacy Center. On Monday evening, May 12, the Bests made a decision they said was a mistake: They let Danielle visit her uncle across the street. He sent the 11-year-old to the corner store. As Danielle passed an alley, she recalled to a reporter, she was pulled into a vehicle full of young neighborhood men, including one from the first rape. She said she was driven to a parking lot, where that man raped her again, then back to the grubby basement apartment, where, she said, she was raped by both of the young men from the first incident. Later that evening she was let go, then picked up by passersby who told her they would take her home. Around 11, before reaching her house, the car was stopped by police who were searching vehicles to try to find her. This time, she was interviewed by Detective William Weeks of the Youth Investigations Division, who consulted with Carter. Weeks, who left the youth division in 2008 and as of last fall has been assigned to the Property Division, declined to comment. A copy of Weeks’s report, obtained by the Bests, said he tracked down and questioned a 21-year-old man Danielle had identified as the man who had abducted her that evening. According to the report, the 21-year-old said he hadn’t seen Danielle since a month earlier, when he had taken a flier for the missing 11-year-old to a basement apartment where “she was in the back bedroom offering to have sex with any number of a group of young men, telling them she was 16.” In the District, sex between anyone younger than 16 and someone at least four years older, whether coerced or willing, is first-degree child sexual abuse, a felony punishable by up to life in prison. Mistaking an underage victim for a 16-year-old is not accepted as a defense. Weeks went to the hospital to interview Danielle again. It was now after 5 a.m. May 13, according to his report; Danielle and her parents recalled that she had been up all night. In his report, Weeks said he “confronted the Complainant with a ruse” — he told her that he knew the man that she had identified was in a restaurant at the same time she claimed he had abducted her. Danielle admitted that the man “did not abduct and then forcibly rape her . . . she fabricated the report,” according to Weeks’s notes. When asked why, Danielle said the man was a drug dealer “headed to prison anyway,” the report said. “Over the next three-hour period, the Complainant proceeded to tell Detective Weeks a myriad of stories. . . . In the presence of her parents the Complainant continuously changed her stories whenever confronted with inconsistencies from the previous tale. It became apparent that the Complainant was determined to get any story across that she could, regardless of how incredible it might be,” Weeks’s report said. “I don’t remember giving lots of different accounts,” Danielle said recently. “What I remember was being confused, and I was exhausted, and I was still wearing the same clothes and I felt horrible.” Weeks and the Bests took Danielle to a doctor at the hospital for a forensic rape exam. Weeks’s report said that he informed the doctor “of the early morning antics of the Complainant.” That exam, like the first, determined that Danielle, who at that point was “barely comprehendable,” had been sexually assaulted, according to a copy of the medical report kept by the Best family. Weeks concluded his report, dated that same day, by noting that he had decided to ask the Office of the Attorney General for a custody order so Danielle could be charged with making a false or fictitious police report. He then marked the child sexual abuse case “closed.” Eleven days later, a supervisor signed off on the report. ****Advocates for rape victims say victims should not be challenged by the police. “The victim’s response to the trauma of a sexual assault shall not be used in any way to measure credibility,” reads the 2005 Model Policy for Investigating Sexual Assault from the International Association of Chiefs of Police, an Alexandria , Va.-based organization that develops guidelines to assist police departments in establishing their own policies. Six days after the second incident, Danielle was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Children’s Hospital as a suicide risk. Her evaluation report reads: “Pt stated that she was going to kill herself with a knife. . . . she is fearful of remaining at home b/c the boys who raped her have been watching her & threatening to harm her again.” On June 20, 2008, two months after the first reported rape, Weeks and prosecutor Joshua Henline, who had been with the Office of the Attorney General for two years, met and requested an order for Danielle’s arrest, which was issued by D.C. Superior Court Judge Anita Josey-Herring, according to a police document obtained through Danielle’s FOIA request. The report’s conclusion read: “Based on the Complainan/Respondent’s admission of lying to Detective Weeks, and her subsequent arrest for filing a false police report. It is recommended that this case be classified as ‘Unfounded’ for sexual abuse.” Henline, who left the attorney general’s office in 2012 and is the assistant general counsel at the D.C. Fire and EMS Department, said he cannot comment on a juvenile case. Spokespersons for the attorney general’s office and the Superior Court also declined to comment, citing confidentiality issues. On June 28, after the family was told by Weeks that there was a warrant for her arrest, Danielle, who had recently turned 12, went with her parents and turned herself in to police. Her mother said she felt her heart breaking as she watched her daughter shuffle into court in shackles. That was the start of Danielle’s legal problems, but her life troubles began before she was even out of the womb. Danielle and her twin, David, were born in 1996 to a crack addict named Marquise Hicks. The family believed their father was Hicks’s boyfriend, Emmanuel Brooks, Veronica Best’s brother. At 4 months old, Danielle was rushed to the hospital “suffering from second-degree burns on her buttocks, vagina, left leg and foot,” according to court records. The authorities think Hicks dunked Danielle in a scalding bath and said there had been reports of other abuse. It was Veronica and Mayo who came to the hospital to see Danielle, scoop up baby David and take him to their home. The Bests, who had two grown children, adopted the twins — although it turned out that Veronica’s brother was not the father. The twins’ biological parents have since died. A 2000 pre-adoption report by the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency, kept by the Best family, praised Mayo and Veronica’s parenting and described the twins as happy and playful. But it also concluded that Danielle had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and reactive attachment disorder, which is typically caused by abuse as a baby and inhibits normal relationships. Her emotional instability appeared to be greatly exacerbated in 2005 after an elementary school friend was fatally shot while playing in front of his house a few blocks from hers. Already in therapy, she began more intensive treatment. But by the time she was 10, she had cycled through four schools. At 11, she underwent two psychological evaluations. One report ascribed the “fragility of Danielle’s functioning” to drug exposure in utero and abuse as an infant. The other said she drifted into trances at school, became overwhelmed by anxiety, had been roughed up by peers and had no friends. Her mental abilities were evaluated as borderline to low average. The reports said Danielle displayed behavior that included being disruptive, disrespectful and combative, yelling, lying, throwing things, using profanity, throwing herself to the ground, banging her head into a locker, fighting and arguing. Both reports, issued approximately six months before the first rape, recommended full-time special education and suggested she would benefit from medication to treat ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder. The Bests did not pursue the recommendations, saying they were satisfied at the time with her therapy and with her individualized education plan at her public charter school. When Carter came to Danielle’s house to investigate the first sexual assault, Veronica Best said, she warned him that her daughter was unstable. He included Danielle’s age and key points about her mental-health history in his police report. There are no documents in the materials Danielle received through her FOIA request that detail how the police conducted the April rape investigation. “I’m not sure they ever really did much,” Veronica Best said. The family said Danielle continued to spot the young men she thought had been involved in the rapes in the neighborhood, which they reported to the police. Roger Canaff, a former prosecutor in Alexandria who has worked as an adviser to the U.S. Army on prosecuting sexual assault, said he is puzzled by the police actions. “I understand why the police may not have believed Danielle’s version of events, because it was unreliable; the account of what happened is so mixed up,” he said. “But she’s 11, and you have strong medical evidence that she has been sexually assaulted, and she has a history of mental-health problems. I don’t know if they could have prevented the second rape, but the police could have worked with Danielle to develop suspects and, if nothing else, warned them away from her while they were conducting their detailed investigation.” The decision to close the second sexual assault case and charge Danielle with filing a false report “was reckless and ill-advised,” Canaff said. “This case renders me speechless,” said Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia. “At no point should a child who said she was raped at 11 have been arrested. That is inexcusable.” Lanier said that in circumstances such as Danielle’s today, the victim would “absolutely not” be charged with lying. She said that since 2011 she has “completely revised” the department’s handling of sexual assault for adult and youth cases, improving the treatment of victims and the way files are classified, tracked and reviewed throughout the investigative process. But, “even in 2008, the process was not to arrest a victim for discrepancies in reporting,” she said. “There is no rationale for that.” Danielle faced probation or commitment to a youth rehabilitation facility if convicted. Her court-appointed lawyer, Madhavan Nair, informed her by letter in July 2008 that prosecutors had offered a plea deal: If she admitted guilt, they would not oppose probation. Danielle refused to plead guilty, she and her parents said. But her parents said her behavior deteriorated markedly. Sometimes she was withdrawn, other times she was wild and belligerent. She started running away from home. She was hospitalized several times and put on antianxiety and antidepressant medication. In the fall of 2008, Danielle initially reported another sexual assault. But, her parents wrote at the time to the police, “our daughter has been so mentally traumatized as a result of the first 2 rapes” that they had decided she could not participate in an investigation and had “reluctantly” agreed not to go forward with the charges. On Jan. 3, 2009, Danielle ran away for almost two weeks. When she was located, according to the police report, she told them that during that time she had “engaged in a sexual act with six or seven unnamed males.” She was taken to Children’s Hospital and admitted to the psychiatric wing, according to police records obtained through the FOIA request. Bridgman, of Safe Shores, said: “Research indicates that children who have been sexually assaulted have a higher rate of risky sexual behaviors, contrary to what people might expect. Especially ones who feel disbelieved or not protected. The reason why you might repeat what happened is because you don’t believe you deserve any better and you report it as a sexual assault because there is a part of you that knows it’s wrong, or you may be being coerced or threatened into participating.” Danielle’s therapists were also concerned about the risky behavior in which she was engaging. While she was missing, they sent a letter to Danielle’s probation officer requesting residential care for the 12-year-old, who by that time had also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, mixed with psychotic features. “Although Mr. and Mrs. Best have been responsible and reliable . . . they are incapable of ensuring their daughter’s safety at this time and they need the court’s urgent assistance,” the therapists wrote. “Due to Danielle’s severe impulsivity, fragile emotional functioning/mood lability, delusional thinking, non-compliance with medication, severe insomnia, traumatic flashbacks, multiple elopements, sexual promiscuity, and profound poor judgment, she is now in urgent need of residential care placement.” Other action was taken while Danielle was missing: After consulting with Court Social Services, the D.C. Family Court’s probation agency, prosecutors decided to go ahead with the false-report charge against her, citing the fact that she had violated the terms of her pretrial supervision by running away from home. One legal official familiar with the situation, who is not authorized to discuss it on the record, suggested prosecutors proceeded with the case against Danielle to “get her into the system” to obtain additional therapeutic services. “There’s not a lot of funding available for youth that are not charged,” the official said. “You have to be neglected or a juvenile delinquent.” Ted Gest, a spokesman for the Office of the Attorney General, said that although the office could not discuss specific cases, “we often bring juveniles into the juvenile justice system when they can benefit from services that the system has to offer.” That explanation baffles the Bests. “Why the heck would you want to do that when we already had things in place?” said Veronica, referring to the therapy and other treatment Danielle was receiving. On Feb. 13, Danielle passed a second evaluation of her competency to stand trial, but her parents worried that she was too unstable to endure a trial. Instead, she entered an Alford plea, according to her parents and a person who is not authorized to speak on the record. The plea meant that she would acknowledge that there was enough evidence for a conviction — in effect, consenting to the court’s finding of guilt — while maintaining that she was actually innocent. “We never really understood the plea very well,” Mayo Best said. Nair, Danielle’s attorney, has declined to comment. On Feb. 23, Danielle was declared a ward of the District by the Superior Court. The Bests were shocked. Veronica and Mayo said they wish they had pushed their attorney for more help and had been more familiar with court procedures. “I feel guilty. I do,” Veronica said. “She would say, ‘Daddy, I got raped and I got locked up,’ ” Mayo said. “I still hear her voice today saying that to me.” Danielle spent much of the next 21/2 years in residential mental-health facilities as a ward of the District. The Bests continued to try to find out from the police what had become of the physical evidence collected during the two forensic medical exams. A series of e-mails between police officers discussing the case and the evidence, which were obtained through the FOIA request, includes this from one lieutenant to another on July 27, 2009: “Danielle was convicted of lying. No other evidence, so I’d suspect therefore based on poor victim credibility all other cases she reported were suspended. . . . All sex was consexual. Parents are unable to accept the fact of this child’s promiscuous behavior caused this situation.” Only one e-mail in the documents obtained through the FOIA request noted that Danielle was a minor and sought to know how old the suspects were. No follow-up e-mail was included in the documents. In November 2009, the Bests left the District. Veronica and Mayo had lived at various addresses on the same block for 30 years but were hit by rising interest rates and fell behind on their mortgage payments. With their house under repossession and Danielle still traumatized by seeing her attackers in the neighborhood, they decided to move to a rental in Temple Hills. In May 2010, the Bests wrote to Lanier complaining about the continuing silence. They also appealed to their D.C. Council member, Jim Graham, who e-mailed Lanier — copying the Bests on the message — saying, “I am deeply concerned.” Lanier wrote back to the Bests promising answers and asked Newsham, her assistant chief, to follow up. Later that day, according to documents received through the FOIA request, Newsham got an e-mail from colleagues saying the April rape kit had been tested by a private contractor on an undisclosed date “as part of the FBI backlog project.” The swabs of Danielle’s body had not found semen, the e-mail said, while two semen stains on Danielle’s underwear had yielded DNA without sufficiently clear profiles. The May rape kit hadn’t been tested, the e-mail continued, because Danielle had been charged with filing a false report. Newsham e-mailed the Bests saying that neither rape kit had been entered into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. “There are very stringent rules regarding the entry of DNA profiles into CODIS,” he wrote. “The two cases you have inquired about were not entered for the following reasons: 1. Evidence analyzed — profiles obtained were not CODIS eligible. 2. Case was unfounded.” The e-mail confused the Bests, who remained unclear about the status of the investigations. Meanwhile, Danielle continued to run away. Her parents sent her to a residential mental-health facility in Utah for almost a year. Then, after her return to the Washington area, she became pregnant. In September 2011 the city eased its supervision of Danielle, under conditions that included obeying her guardians, avoiding drugs and keeping her appointments with her social worker. After a few months with a foster family, she was allowed home. She had her baby May 16, 2012, shortly before she turned 16. She named him Levi because, she said, “I like the jeans.” When Danielle is not out with friends, she plays with Levi and reads nonfiction, particularly young women’s stories about overcoming adversity. She spends a lot of time on the Internet, looking especially at fashion Web sites. She prefers the computer to television, although when she does watch TV her favorite shows are “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “CSI.” She has oscillated between periods of emotional calm and turbulence. Since the summer, her worried parents said, Danielle has settled into more regular hours and is studying for her GED, but she still isn’t in therapy or on medication. “I think she ties it in with when she had no choice, when they stand over you while you take your pills and you have to attend therapy, and now she is free she’s making a choice not to; it’s part of her empowerment,” Veronica said. “But I wish she would.” Danielle and her family said she has had some meetings with the police. But she is worried about the emotional effect the new investigations will have on her. “I’ve held it in for so long,” she said. “I walk around seeming like I’m strong, but deep down inside I still feel helpless.” Walters is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Guardian, the Observer and Marie Claire, among other outlets. Follow her on Twitter at @joannawalters13.

Confusion over numbers for award-winning D.C. Detective Milton Norris

When Milton Norris was nominated for D.C. Homicide Detective of the Year in 2011, officials said it was because of his impeccable record of solving cases the year before — a closure rate of 300 percent to be exact. Officials described the veteran detective as a “standout” in the homicide unit who had closed all of his 2010 cases. “During the year Detective Norris has repeatedly proven himself as a determined investigator who works tirelessly to bring closure to his cases as evidenced by solving and closing the most egregious of crimes, Homicide,” says the recommendation letter posted on the D.C. police Web site. Norris won the award. But a review of his homicide cases by The Washington Post found that he had only two cases for 2010 and that both remain open. One was the robbery and fatal shooting of John Edwards, 58, who was killed Aug. 5 in the 1300 block of Good Hope Road SE. In the other, Antonio Wade, 18, was shot Dec. 11 during a dispute in the 1400 block of Ridge Place SE. ****When questioned about his closure rate, Norris acknowledged that he hadn’t solved either case and directed questions to the supervisors who nominated him. “I’m probably the wrong person to be talking to,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know what they go by to determine it. I don’t make the rules.” D.C. police officials said Norris received credit for closing several cases from other years. Lt. Ozetta Posey, Norris’s supervisor at the time, said it was her recommendation that led to his receiving the coveted award. “I was out on sick leave but called in and had the sergeant write it [the nomination letter] up,” she said. “Every detective of the year for the last seven years has been under my supervision, including Milton Norris.” The winners are chosen by a committee that includes several assistant chiefs. From 2004 to 2010, Norris investigated 41 homicides and closed 24, a 58 percent closure rate, according to police records. About 10 of his cases ended in convictions, court records show. Three of his cases were closed without an arrest. Norris received the award, which included a plaque, a medal and certificates signed by Chief Cathy L. Lanier and Mayor Vincent C. Gray, during the police department’s 11th annual awards ceremony last February at Gallaudet University’s Elstad Auditorium. Lanier presented the awards. “It wasn’t no shock to me,” Norris said. “I’ve been doing police work for 23 years. I think I’m a rather good detective.” Lanier said officials considered “several factors” in bestowing the award on Norris, but she would not elaborate. “We believe he was deserving of that award,” she said in a written response. Norris, who was paid $136,514 in 2010, including more than $61,000 in overtime pay, said he knew his record wasn’t what his supervisors claimed, but he didn’t dispute them during the ceremony — or afterward. “I had no idea they said that about me,” Norris said. “It probably was a mistake.” Another veteran homicide detective, Anthony Patterson, said he also was nominated and thought he had a good chance of winning. “I had three cases and closed them all,” Patterson said.

Maryland has to address its rape kit backlog

WHETHER A rape victim in Maryland gets justice may depend upon where the attack occurs. A lack of statewide standards governing rape kits allows the state’s dozens of law enforcement agencies to make widely varying decisions about when — and even whether — to examine this potentially vital evidence. Worse, some localities destroy the kits after just a few years. Let’s hope Maryland lawmakers take to heart the recommendations of a recent report urging the establishment of statewide standards. The backlog of untested rape kits is a national problem that thankfully is finally getting serious attention. Federal legislation passed last year established testing guidelines and victim protections for cases under federal jurisdiction. Grants from the Justice Department and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office have allowed state and local agencies to tackle the backlog of rape kits that have piled up in police departments and crime labs. The kits contain evidence such as samples of blood and semen collected during a lengthy, often grueling, medical examination; once tested, DNA results are entered into a national FBI database. A report last month by Attorney General Brian Frosh (D) makes clear how far behind Maryland is in dealing with this critical issue. A survey of the state’s 135 law enforcement agencies in which 102 responded revealed 3,700 untested rape kits, some going as far back as 1981. But the report noted that it’s not a backlog in the traditional sense of tests submitted to labs but waitlisted because of a lack of resources and staffing. Instead, a determination was made not to submit them for testing at all. And the patchwork of different policies results in some rape kits being destroyed after a year while others are kept indefinitely. Not only does this not give victims the time they sometimes need in deciding whether to pursue a case but it also robs police of evidence that could be helpful in identifying serial assailants. The report recommended that police test nearly all rape kits, notify victims of the results and store the kits for a fixed period of time. More than half of the states, the Baltimore Sun reported in its investigation of the handling of sexual assault crimes, have laws mandating a minimum time period to retain evidence. Included here is Virginia, where a change in the law last year, coupled with the success of Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) in getting new money for testing, has the state well on its way to eliminating its backlog of untested kits. Maryland should follow Virginia’s example, starting with legislation this session to establish the best practices detailed in the attorney general’s report and coming up with the funding to make them possible. **Read more here:** The Post’s View: America, test all the rape kits Mike DeWine and Timothy J. McGinty: Ohio leads the way on breaking through the rape kit backlog The Post’s View: Virginia needs to test its 2,369 rape kits Letters to the Editor: Editorial on rape kits gave complexity short shrift

D.C. mayor to present $23 million supplemental budget to council

D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) will present the City Council with a $23 million supplemental budget on Wednesday that she said will help District authorities address problems at the D.C. crime lab, allow the city to implement a stalled plan to outfit 2,800 police officers with body cameras, and launch a new job-training program for at-risk young adults. The supplemental budget draws on a $117 million revenue increase predicted by the District’s chief financial officer, the mayor said Tuesday at a news conference. Bowser plans to submit the budget as emergency legislation and is urging the council “to act as quickly as possible,” according to her spokesman, Michael Czin. Because the budget involves fiscal 2015 funds, the District government will have to spend it before fiscal 2016 starts on Oct. 1. That leaves the council with little time to hold hearings or to make changes to the document before sending it back to the mayor. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said that he met Tuesday with Bowser and told her that he would support council action on the document next week but that he would not guarantee support for all of her proposed measures. Bowser said Tuesday that she has briefed other council members on her budget proposal, but at least two of them, including Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), said they had yet to see details. Council member Elissa Silverman (I-At Large) and an aide attended Tuesday’s news conference at a recreation center in Northeast Washington to learn more about the mayor’s forthcoming legislation. The mayor’s multimillion dollar proposal includes $8 million to improve DNA testing and staffing at the troubled D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences. The lab was forced to suspend DNA testing earlier this year after an audit found that analysts at the lab were “not competent and were using inadequate procedures,” and that the lab had produced inaccurate analyses of crime scene DNA in some instances. Bowser, who replaced the department’s director in July, said that the extra funds would help get the $220 million facility, which opened in 2012, back on track. The mayor’s proposal also includes $5.4 million to fully implement an earlier plan to outfit 2,800 police officers with body cameras. The D.C. Council refused to approve the mayor’s earlier proposal because it did not include funds that would make video footage available to the public through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Kevin Donahue, the mayor’s deputy city administrator and deputy mayor for public safety, said Tuesday that nearly half of that $5.4 million would be used to cover FOIA request costs. The rest would go toward purchasing an additional 1,600 body cameras. Bowser chose to highlight a new $4.5 million job training program for at-risk young adults as the central component of her supplemental budget proposal. She said that the proposed D.C. Career Connection program would target young adults ages 20 to 24 and “will give up to 400 people the training skills and wrap around services that they need for success in their job and career.” The program would run from October to June. An additional $2.3 million would go toward placing 50 people in waste collection and customer service jobs at the D.C. Department of Public Works and the Department of Parks and Recreation, she said. Her proposal also included $1.25 million in small grants to community organizations and $1.6 million to improve lighting and security cameras at city recreation centers and at private buildings in an effort to counter the city’s recent surge in violence and homicides. Another $326,000 would go toward city testing of synthetic drugs, which D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier has partly blamed for the violence since May.

FBI notifies crime labs of errors used in DNA match calculations since 1999

The FBI has notified crime labs across the country that it has discovered errors in data used by forensic scientists in thousands of cases to calculate the chances that DNA found at a crime scene matches a particular person, several people familiar with the issue said. The bureau has said it believes the errors, which extend to 1999, are unlikely to result in dramatic changes that would affect cases. It has submitted the research findings to support that conclusion for publication in the July issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the officials said. But crime labs and lawyers said they want to know more about the problem before conceding it would not make much difference in any given case. “The public puts so much faith in DNA testing that it makes it especially important to make those the best estimates possible,” said Wright State University statistics professor Daniel R. Krane, an expert whose work has been cited by defense attorneys. “There is no excuse for a systematic error to many thousands of calculations in such a context.” Krane, who identified errors 10 years ago in the DNA profiles the FBI analyzed to generate the population statistics data, called the consequences of the disclosure appalling, saying the data has been used in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of cases worldwide in the past 15 years. He said when he flagged the problems a decade ago, the FBI downplayed his findings. The issue centers on the FBI’s “Pop stats,” which are built into the software programs used by 9 in 10 U.S. labs and many overseas, Krane said. While juries might well reach the same decision if errors mean that an individual has a 1-in-a-billion chance of matching a crime scene sample instead of 1 in 10 billion, for example, that may not be so if errors were to halve, say, assertions that person had a 1-in-180 chance of matching, as Krane said came up in a case that he testified in last week. Such low ratios are increasingly common as state and local labs analyze smaller and smaller traces of DNA found on objects such as guns or countertops — known as “low-copy” and “touch DNA” — and often are sifting through DNA mixtures, or profiles contributed by multiple people. Stephen Mercer, chief of the forensic division of Maryland’s Office of the Public Defender, said his office on Wednesday notified its attorneys about the issue and suggested they consider asking prosecutors about such problems in cases involving DNA evidence. “The prediction that the errors are likely to have a nominal impact has to be assessed by the defense in the individual circumstances of each particular case,” Mercer said. In a bulletin sent to crime labs, the FBI said the problem stemmed from “clerical mistakes in transcriptions of the genotypes and to limitations of the old technology and software.” The disclosure comes as some private researchers and lawyers in recent years questioned whether errors in the FBI’s national database of 13 million DNA profiles may have led judges and juries to give undue weight to DNA matches, long considered the “gold standard” in forensic science. They have called on the government to open the database for private research. Crime lab analysts in the United States generally develop a DNA profile by analyzing 13 or more specific locations on chromosomes, called loci, for specific markers that appear at different frequencies in a given population. Match probabilities are derived by calculating the likelihood of a person sharing the same markers at each point. The FBI is preparing to transition to using more than 20 loci, which theoretically should significantly improve the accuracy of results and allay concerns about the population statistics it used to generate those frequencies, officials said. With new commercial test kits available using more loci, the FBI commissioned a study that re-tested DNA samples used for its original work and uncovered the errors. “We are of the view that these discrepancies are unlikely to materially affect any assessment of evidential value,” the FBI stated in its May 11 bulletin to crime labs, according to a person who has a copy. “However, given that statistics based on these data have been included in thousands of lab reports and in testimonies, we believe the discrepancies require acknowledgment.” In a public statement late Friday, the FBI said it found errors in 33 of 1,100 profiles used, or 3 percent. The FBI added that the DNA community has cautioned that match probabilities should be viewed as varying by a factor of 10, saying, “Though these discrepancies are within the internationally accepted range, the FBI is committed to correcting the inaccurate values in a transparent manner.” The FBI has prepared a letter to the editor to be published by the Journal of Forensic Sciences, which originally published the bureau’s study 16 years ago. David Coffman, chairman of the accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, said it would be premature to comment on the significance of the errors until the FBI releases more data. “They said it would be very minor,” said Coffman, who is director of forensic services for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in Tallahassee. “We are waiting to see the journal article to see which [data] would be affected, so we could evaluate it.” In a statement, the National District Attorneys Association applauded the “transparent and responsible manner in which the FBI has disclosed this internal finding,” adding that “notification to all interested parties is an excellent first step in addressing this issue.”

Justice Dept., FBI to review use of forensic evidence in thousands of cases

The Justice Department and the FBI have launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence, officials said Tuesday. The undertaking is the largest post-conviction review ever done by the FBI. It will include cases conducted by all FBI Laboratory hair and fiber examiners since at least 1985 and may reach earlier if records are available, people familiar with the process said. Such FBI examinations have taken place in federal and local cases across the country, often in violent crimes, such as rape, murder and robbery. The review comes after The Washington Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people but had not performed a thorough review of the cases. In addition, prosecutors did not notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled. On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that it will conduct the more expansive review. “The Department and the FBI are in the process of identifying historical cases for review where a microscopic hair examination conducted by the FBI was among the evidence in a case that resulted in a conviction,” spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said in a statement. “We have dedicated considerable time and resources to addressing these issues, with the goal of reaching final determinations in the coming months.” FBI spokeswoman Ann Todd deferred comment to the Justice Department. In its April report, The Post identified two District men convicted largely on the testimony of FBI hair analysts who wrongly placed them at crime scenes. Santae A. Tribble, now 51, was convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1978, and Kirk L. Odom, now 49, was convicted of a sexual assault in 1981. Since the Post report, Tribble’s conviction was vacated, and on Tuesday, prosecutors moved to overturn Odom’s conviction and declare him innocent. The Justice Department had not previously reviewed their cases. Chitre said the new review would include help from the Innocence Project, a New York-based advocacy group for people seeking exoneration through DNA testing. It also would include the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Steven D. Benjamin, a Richmond lawyer who is incoming president of the association, called the review “an important collaboration” and a departure from one-sided government reviews that left defendants in the dark. “Mistakes were made. What is important now is our working together to correct those mistakes,” Benjamin said, adding that his organization will “fully assist in finding and notifying all those who may have been affected.” The review comes as the National Academy of Sciences is urging the White House and Congress to remove crime labs from police and prosecutors’ control, or at least to strengthen the science and standards underpinning the nation’s forensic science system. The last time the FBI abandoned a forensic practice was in 2005, when it ended efforts to trace bullets to a specific manufacturer’s batch through analyzing their chemical composition after its methodology was scientifically debunked. The bureau released files in an estimated 2,500 bullet-lead cases only after “60 Minutes” and The Post reported the problem in 2007. Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department official who investigated the FBI Laboratory in the mid-1990s as inspector general and, more recently, the city of Houston’s crime lab, said the review is important as the nation’s crime labs come under scrutiny. “These recent developments remind us of the profound questions about the validity of many forensic techniques that have been used over the course of many decades and underscore the need for continuing attention at every level to ensuring the scientific validity and accuracy of the forensic science that is used every day in our criminal justice system,” Bromwich said. The Post reported in April that hair and fiber analysis was subjective and lacked grounding in solid research and that the FBI lab lacked protocols to ensure that agent testimony was scientifically accurate. But bureau managers kept their reviews limited to one agent, even as they learned that many examiners’ “matches” were often wrong and that numerous examiners overstated the significance of matches, using bogus statistics or exaggerated claims. Details of how the new FBI review will be conducted remain unclear. The exact number of cases that will be reviewed is unknown. The FBI is starting with more than 10,000 cases referred to all hair and fiber examiners. From those, the focus will be on a smaller number of hair examinations that resulted in positive findings and a conviction. It also is unclear whether the review will focus only on exaggerated testimony by FBI examiners or also on scientifically unfounded statements made by others trained by the FBI, or made by prosecutors. Also unclear is at what point government officials will notify defense attorneys or the Innocence Project. In past reviews, the department kept results secret and gave findings only to prosecutors, who then determined whether to turn them over to the defense.

Federal officials are auditing D.C. public health lab in wake of botched Zika tests

Federal regulators are auditing the District’s public health lab in response to botched Zika testing that erroneously provided negative results to at least nine pregnant women, D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences Director Jenifer Smith said Tuesday. At an oversight hearing before a D.C. Council committee, Smith said officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had visited the lab Monday and Tuesday to review its operations and investigate how the mistakes were made. It is not clear what kind of disciplinary action regulators may take as a result of the fumbled virus testing. CMS oversees virtually all lab tests involving humans in the United States, ensuring that analysts comply with federal law, so loss of certification could shutter the public health lab until it can come into compliance. Smith’s disclosure of the visits from auditors came after D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) asked whether the botched tests could endanger the lab’s accreditation. She said officials who handle the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certification program had a “specific” concern about the Zika mishap. “They are reviewing all of this paperwork, and I’m sure they will provide their perspective on this,” Smith said. “I think they will determine that we did not follow the protocol. I think it’s clear we did not follow the protocol, so there will be some type of — not action — but advice given as a result of that.” Allen said after the hearing that any risk to accreditation was cause for concern, but that he remained optimistic that federal officials would not have to take such drastic steps. “I think it speaks to how serious this is,” Allen said. “This audit will hopefully come back and show that DFS has taken all the steps necessary” to avoid loss of CLIA certification. Such a loss would be a serious setback for the department, which has dealt with other accreditation problems in recent years. DNA forensic testing was halted for an extended period beginning in April 2015 — just three years after the opening of a new $220 million lab facility — because of questions about the quality of DNA analysis. Anthony Tran, who discovered the testing mistakes late last year after he took over the public-health lab, said the attention from federal officials would not necessarily affect the lab’s certification, as long as the lab can show it has fixed the problems. Interviews and public documents show that the debacle unfolded over a period of months last year during which the District lab was in a state of turmoil — understaffed, lacking permanent leadership, spread thin on competing projects and relying on new employees to test for the emerging public health threat in Zika. Smith declined to speak to a reporter after her testimony, requesting that questions be submitted in writing through LaShon Beamon, a department spokeswoman. “As we would expect, CMS inspectors arrived yesterday and left this afternoon to conduct a surveillance audit” of the test used to determine the possible presence of Zika, Beamon later said in an email. “As with all audits conducted of our laboratory, the auditing body will share their findings when they are finalized.” Beamon would not answer specific questions about how the auditors learned about the problems or what the consequences for the lab might be, except to say that any action taken by CMS would not affect the department’s forensic division. Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The Washington Post reported last week that D.C.’s public-health lab had produced erroneous results for nine and perhaps more pregnant women tested between July and December of last year for Zika, a mosquito-spread virus known to cause severe birth defects. Those women’s results were initially reported as negative, but follow-up tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were inconclusive for eight of them and confirmed that one had contracted Zika, public-health officials said. Lab officials said Tuesday that the mistakes had multiple causes, including incorrect use of the chemicals involved in the test and a bungled formula for analyzing the results that was entered in an Excel spreadsheet by a scientist who has since left the department. The number of incorrect results from last year may rise, as retesting of samples from the D.C. lab is not complete. In addition to the impact on affected families, the city may face millions of dollars in legal claims, lawyers say. Public health officials say they do not know how far along in their pregnancies the women were when they were tested or whether they have given birth. They said they have notified the subjects’ health-care providers so they can relay the information to the affected women. Allen said Tuesday that lab officials should follow up with those providers to confirm the women had been told their test results were faulty. Zika has spread to more than 60 nations and territories across the Western Hemisphere since the epidemic began in Brazil. Some babies of mothers infected with the virus have the severe birth defect known as microcephaly, a condition characterized by an abnormally small head and often an underdeveloped brain. But researchers say problems stemming from infection may be less obvious and not show up until a year after birth or longer. They can include hearing loss, irritability, and cognitive, sensory and motor-skill difficulties. That means the fallout in the District may not be felt for some time. A December report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 6 percent of women in the United States infected with Zika had a baby or fetus with at least one birth defect related to the virus.

Virginia needs to test its 2,369 rape kits

THERE ARE 2,369 rape kits sitting on Virginia shelves untested. That’s 2,369 crime victims who, after experiencing the trauma of sexual assault, submitted to an intrusive and painstaking examination designed to collect DNA evidence and identify a perpetrator. It’s an unknown number of rapists who might have been caught but have walked free. It is a failure on the part of Virginia police departments and a symptom of a national epidemic. Virginia’s untested kits, detailed in a state Department of Forensic Science audit released this month and reported on by The Post’s Rachel Weiner, should have been submitted to the DFS for analysis. But they sat in police departments instead — some since 1988. The state’s newly discovered backlog, which the DFS says it lacks the resources to tackle, is hardly a national outlier: The federal government has estimated that hundreds of thousands of kits languish on evidence shelves across the country. Not testing such kits denies victims closure and lets criminals walk free, ready to do more damage. Cities such as New York and Detroit that have tested backlogged kits have reduced crime rates and identified serial rapists. Yet many states, strapped for lab space and funding, are struggling to work through their backlogs. Others have not even counted or catalogued their untested kits. There’s some good news. Congress appropriated $41 million last year to a Justice Department competitive grant program in which states may secure funding by detailing their plans for rape kit reform. That means not just working through backlogs but also training officers and prosecutors in the proper procedure for handling cases of rape. This year, the House approved $45 million for the same purpose, and the Senate looks likely to fund the program at last year’s $41 million level, if not higher. Congress’s final budget is also expected to include $117 million for DNA testing and increasing crime lab capacity under the Debbie Smith Act, at least 5 percent of which is supposed to go to backlog reduction. And outside the Beltway, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. has offered up to $35 million in funding for jurisdictions nationwide to test kits. It’s encouraging to see some recognition of the dire need for kit testing. Still, it might take more than funding to get things on the right track. Though Virginia lawmakers were responsible enough to commission the report that counted untested kits, not all states have done the same. Even Virginia has not insisted that the catalogued kits be tested. No national requirement mandates either cataloguing or testing. Funding, both from states and from federal grant programs, will help localities forge through kit backlogs — and bring some rapists to court. But laws with the teeth to make sure kits get off the shelf and into the lab would pave an even clearer path to justice. **Read more on this topic:** Ohio leads the way on breaking through the rape kit backlog The Post’s View: Rape kit contribution should spur congressional action The Post’s View: Let’s get rape evidence off the shelves and start solving crimes

Va. will test 2,000 rape kits connected to unsolved assault cases

RICHMOND — Virginia received a $1.4 million grant to test more than 2,000 rape kits that have piled up in police departments across the state, Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) announced this week. The kits — some of which are more than 25 years old — contain DNA evidence that could help law enforcement authorities identify perpetrators of sexual assaults and connect them to unsolved crimes. Untested kits could become a crucial tool in the prosecution of sexual assaults. But across the country, a lack of resources has contributed to a sizable backlog, studies show. Virginia is one of more than 20 states awarded money through Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s $38 million initiative to reduce the national inventory of untested kits by more than 56,000. “We know that sexual violence is a serial crime and perpetrators are often repeat offenders,” Herring said in a statement. “By analyzing these kits we can build a stronger database, connect the dots on these terrible crimes, and put dangerous predators away.” The money means that Virginia can test 2,034 kits from 65 police departments that are storing five or more kits. A committee will be charged with figuring out which kits to analyze by the end of the year. “DNA profiles developed from this evidence can then be searched against the Virginia and National DNA Data Banks” to potentially identify the perpetrators and bring victims some degree of closure, Brian Moran, Virginia’s secretary of public safety and homeland security, said in a statement. A July report from the state Department of Forensic Science found that 2,369 kits are languishing in Virginia, for multiple reasons. Most often, the victim chose not to participate any further in the legal process, the police deemed the kit unnecessary or prosecutors declined to pursue the case, according to the report. Fairfax County has the most untested kits, at 347, followed by Richmond. Alexandria has 91 untested kits; Arlington, 85; Prince William, 67; and Loudoun, 38. Herring and the department, which is overseen by Moran, applied for the grant in June.

Charities furlough employees, brace for the worst

Several Washington area charities are furloughing employees, scaling back services and, in some cases, preparing for employee layoffs and possible closings as the federal government’s shutdown drags on. Sasha Bruce Youthwork, which runs a homeless shelter for youth, announced Wednesday that it has furloughed nearly half of its 120-member staff and closed six of its programs, including outreach efforts that offer food and clothing, afterschool activities, AIDS/HIV testing and teen pregnancy services. More than half of the charity’s $9 million in annual revenue comes from city funding, and 10 percent comes from federal funding. Many of those government contract reimbursements are now locked up until the federal shutdown ends. Although Sasha Bruce Youthwork is still operating its emergency homeless shelter, the D.C.-based charity fears that a prolonged shutdown could force it to close altogether. “By early next week, we’re going to have to make a decision on whether we have to close residential programs,” said Deborah Shore, executive director of Sasha Bruce Youthwork. “We’re tipping on the edge of that precipice.” The Latin American Youth Center announced this week that it has furloughed more than half of its staff and reduced its programming to essential services. The furloughed staff, which includes senior leaders, will continue to work as volunteers until the shutdown ends and funding resumes. “I’m so depressed. It’s so sad,” said Lori Kaplan, president of the youth center. “The center means so much to so many people, and this is hard on a lot of people.” The Columbia Heights nonprofit group, which offers youth development services to 5,000 children each year, will stop some programs that promote job training and education. The group is also in the process of piloting a program that offers mentors available round-the-clock for troubled youth. Kaplan said the mentors will now work part time. Services to homeless and foster-care youth will remain in operation. Mary’s Center, a federally funded health facility, is struggling to make its October payroll and to continue serving more than 30,000 patients, according to a statement. The D.C.-based charity was scheduled to receive nearly $600,000 from the District Health Department on Oct. 1. Those funds are on hold until the shutdown ends. On Wednesday, Maria Gomez, chief executive of Mary’s Center, spoke at a news conference held by Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) at the Capitol to highlight the local effects of the federal shutdown. The Nonprofit Roundtable of Greater Washington and a host of charities are lobbying on Capitol Hill this week, urging Congress to come to a budget solution. “This shutdown is senseless,” Diana Leon-Taylor, president and chief executive of the Nonprofit Roundtable, said in an e-mail. “It is not simply furloughing government staff, but devastating our business and nonprofit sector.” Volunteers of America Chesapeake expects to lose $1.2 million and furlough 160 employees if the shutdown doesn’t end within 30 days. Since the shutdown began, the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence has seen an increase in requests for food and transportation assistance, the group said in a statement. But if the shutdown continues, the 12-member agency, which receives 60 to 90 percent of its budget from government funds, may reduce services, and employees will go unpaid, the statement said. Children’s National Medical Center is awaiting $11 million it receives in Medicaid funding each month and is expected to announce this week how the delay will affect its services. “During the recession, banks were being bailed out . . . but the nonprofit sector hasn’t gotten any help,” said Kaplan, of the Latin American Youth Center.

Sessions orders Justice Dept. to end forensic science commission, suspend review policy

Attorney General Jeff Sessions will end a Justice Department partnership with independent scientists to raise forensic science standards and has suspended an expanded review of FBI testimony across several techniques that have come under question, saying a new strategy will be set by an in-house team of law enforcement advisers. In a statement Monday, Sessions said he would not renew the National Commission on Forensic Science, a roughly 30-member advisory panel of scientists, judges, crime lab leaders, prosecutors and defense lawyers chartered by the Obama administration in 2013. A path to meet needs of overburdened crime labs will be set by a yet-to-be- named senior forensic adviser and an internal department crime task force, Sessions’s statement said. The announcement came as the commission began its last, two-day meeting before its term ends April 23, and as some of its most far-reaching final recommendations remained hanging before the department. Justice officials said, for example, that no decision has been made on a call for new, department-wide standards for examining and reporting forensic evidence in criminal courts across the country. But the department has decided to suspend work on setting uniform standards for forensic testimony. **** “The availability of prompt and accurate forensic science analysis to our law enforcement officers and prosecutors is critical to integrity in law enforcement, reducing violent crime, and increasing public safety,” Sessions said in the statement. “We applaud the professionalism of the National Commission on Forensic Science and look forward to building on the contributions it has made in this crucial field.” The action marked the latest break by Sessions, a former federal prosecutor, with Obama-era priorities. The former senator from Alabama last week announced that top aides will reviewagreements reached with troubled police forces nationwide to ensure the pacts to overhaul departments do not counter the Trump administration’s goals of combating violent crime and promoting police safety and morale . Barack Obama, a constitutional law scholar, had championed changes to forensic science. In September, a White House science panel called on courts to question the admissibility of four heavily used techniques, including firearms tracing, saying claims about their reliability **** had not been scientifically proved. The Justice Department last year also announced a wider review of testimony by experts across several disciplines after finding that nearly all FBI experts for years overstated and gave scientifically misleading testimony about two techniques the FBI Laboratory long championed: the tracing of crime-scene hairs based on microscopic examinations and of bullets based on chemical composition. The wider review has been suspended pending review by the incoming administration and a strategy to be devised by the internal task force with input through public comments, Office of Legal Policy senior counsel Kira Antell said. at the start of Monday’s commission meeting in Washington. “We plan to consider all options,” Associate Deputy Attorney General Andrew D. Goldsmith said, including using a different commission, a Justice Department office or a group composed of representatives from many agencies. In his statement about the future of forensic sciences, Sessions highlighted the need to survey crime-lab workloads, backlogs and equipment needs as a way to increase the labs’ capacities to do work, and the need for reliability and “specificity” of results. Even before the announcement not to renew the national commission, several commission members from outside the Justice Department warned against ending its work, saying the Trump administration has made several moves to reduce the role of science and independent scientists in policymaking. In a letter Thursday, six leading research scientists on the panel urged re- upping the commission for an additional two years, saying, “for too long, decisions regarding forensic science have been made without the input of the research science community.” “Limiting the ‘relevant scientific community’ to forensic practitioners is a disservice to that field and to the criminal justice system,” they wrote, led by Thomas D. Albright, an internationally recognized neuroscientist specializing in vision and the brain at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The commission jointly led by Justice and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has prompted several changes. Following one recommendation, NIST launched a $20 million research effort to solidify understanding of whether techniques used more than 100,000 times a year in U.S. crime labs work as advertised — starting with the question of how often claimed matches of pattern-based evidence such as complex DNA profile mixtures may be in error, followed by studies of firearms and bite-mark tracing. Sessions’s predecessor as attorney general, Loretta E. Lynch, also accepted commission recommendations to set new accrediting and ethical codes for forensic labs and practitioners. Several commission members who have worked in criminal courts and supported the input of independent scientists said the department risks retreating into insularity and repeating past mistakes, saying that no matter how well-intentioned, prosecutors lack scientists’ objectivity and training. U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff of New York, the only federal judge on the commission, said, “It is unrealistic to expect that truly objective, scientifically sound standards for the use of forensic science . . . can be arrived at by entities centered solely within the Department of Justice.” In suspending reviews of past testimony and the development of standards for future reporting, “the department has literally decided to suspend the search for the truth,” said Peter S. Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has reported that nearly half of 349 DNA exonerations involved misapplications of forensic science. “As a consequence innocent people will languish in prison or, God forbid, could be executed,” he said. However, the National District Attorneys Association, which represents prosecutors, applauded the end of the commission and called for it to be replaced by an Office of Forensic Science inside the Justice Department. Disagreements between crime lab practitioners and defense community representatives on the commission had reduced it to “a think tank,” yielding few accomplishments and wasted tax dollars, the association said. The commission was created after critical reports by the National Academy of Sciences about a dearth of standards and funding for crime labs, examiners and researchers, problems it partly traced to law enforcement control over the system. Although examiners had long claimed to be able to match pattern evidence — such as with firearms or bite marks — to a source with “absolute” or “scientific” certainty, only DNA analysis had been validated through statistical research, scientists reported. In one case, the FBI lab in 2005 abandoned its four-decade-long practice of tracing bullets to a specific manufacturer’s batch through chemical analyses after its method were scientifically debunked. In 2015, the department and bureau reported that nearly every examiner in an elite hair-analysis unit gave scientifically flawed or overstated testimony in 90 percent of cases for two decades before 2000. The cases include 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison. Separately on Monday, the national commission heard from Keith Harward, an ex-Navy sailor exonerated last year after serving 33 years of a life sentence for rape and murder in Newport News, Va. Harward was convicted after six experts, including a leader in the field, concurred that bite marks on a victim matched his teeth to a “medical certainty.” DNA testing identified a different sailor as the perpetrator. No court in the United States has barred bite-mark evidence, despite 21 known wrongful convictions, a proposed moratorium in Texas and research showing that experts cannot consistently agree even on whether injuries are caused by human teeth. The Justice Department and commission’s moves have had impact. FBI Director James B. Comey last year asked U.S. governors to have state and local crime labs review their hair-comparison cases, and reviews of past convictions are underway in at least a dozen states, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “We want to make sure there aren’t other innocent people in jail based on our work,” Comey wrote in a June letter. “Unfortunately, in a large number of cases, our examiners made statements that went too far in explaining the significance of a hair comparison and could have misled a jury or judge.” In backing the expanded Justice Department testimony review, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in February 2016 that its goal was to determine whether “the same kind of ‘testimonial overstatement’ . . . could have crept into other disciplines.” “The authority afforded to scientific experts is second to none, and we must make sure that our statements are clearly supported by sound science,” Yates said. In another example, the Defense Forensic Science Center, formerly called the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory, has funded new research establishing error rates for firearms tracking and last month announced it would begin reporting fingerprint results using statistical probabilities instead of declaring one-to-one matches to individuals, a departure from FBI practice. **Read more:** Judge orders D.C. to pay $13.2 million in wrongful FBI hair conviction case

Someone — who may have looked like this — killed a Md. store owner 25 years ago

On a Sunday evening 25 years ago, someone walked into a country store north of Washington and brutally killed the friendly owner. The attacker left behind a telling clue: drops of blood. Forensic technicians extracted a DNA profile. Detectives submitted the profile to databases containing profiles of offenders nationwide. No matches. Closer to home, they compared the profile with DNA samples taken from about 20 suspects they’d developed. No matches. Now, taking advantage of a new technology that uses DNA details to create a drawing of what the possible killer looked like, detectives remain ever hopeful that they will finally solve the case. “This will help us narrow things down,” said Montgomery County Detective Mark Janney. On Monday, officials released a composite drawing of the possible killer based on the DNA information. The man almost certainly had black hair, brown eyes and skin that was light brown to brown, according to the analysis, performed by Parabon NanoLabs, based in Reston, Va. There is little to no chance he had freckles. And in appearance, the suspect may have looked Mayan or Native American, based on his facial shape, his pigmentation and that his ancestors probably were indigenous to the middle of the Western Hemisphere — a swath from Mexico to the central area of South America. Detectives note that based on the era **** and area of the crime, the man’s appearance might have made him stand out. The killing occurred March 22, 1992, at the Sugarloaf Mountain Market in the community of Comus, in northern Montgomery County about three miles west of Interstate 270. Janney said that before hiring the DNA company, he and colleagues had been following what appeared to be solid leads for white male suspects. He still is not ruling that prospect out and said such a person may have been working with a darker-skinned person. He has long thought the suspect or suspects in the crime were familiar with the work and closing habits of the store owner, James Kweku Essel. “Clearly, it was somebody who’d done some casing of the store,” he said last year. The killer or killers walked into the store around 5:30 p.m., bought items and for unknown reasons attacked Essel — stabbing him more than 20 times. Essel appears to have fought back, and an assailant was cut in the process. Essel immigrated to the United States from Ghana around 1959. He opened an African restaurant called Warababa on Kennedy Street NW in the District. Essel also held branch-manager positions at banks in Washington. After he retired from banking, Essel wanted the serenity he’d had as a child growing up near the ocean in Ghana. He purchased the store in the small community. Essel was known for letting customers buy items on credit if needed and was called James, Jim or Kweku by friends. He was well liked among his regular shoppers, who could come in for conversations and groceries. “He loved people,” his oldest daughter, Evangeline Raphael, said in an interview last year. She often worked with her father in the store. The night of his killing, she was supposed to work there but called him to say it was snowing and she didn’t feel well. She wasn’t coming in. She recalled how her father had told her to turn over the money if there ever was a robbery. “It’s not worth your life,” he had said. The area around the murder — near Sugarloaf Mountain — has many residents who remain intensely interested in the case and seeing it solved. Janney said he hopes the composite image may jog someone’s memory. Police are asking anyone with information about this case to contact Janney, a detective in the cold-case unit, at 240-773-5091, or email mark.janney@montgomerycountymd.gov. _**Correction:** An earlier version of this article had an incorrect date for the 1992 killing. It took place March 22, not May 22._ **Read more:** Lured to a park with promise of sex, Md. man was stabbed 153 times by MS-13 gang members What happens when you join the Islamic State --then change your mind Woman who left MGM casino with someone else’s $15,000 fur coat pleads guilty Police arrest man they say was buying blood from people at vacant D.C. apartment

Report: ‘Irreversible harm’ when FBI didn’t reveal flawed lab work in death-row cases

The Justice Department and FBI delayed notifying prosecutors in scores of death-row convictions that their cases might have relied on flawed FBI forensic work, the department’s Office of Inspector General reported Wednesday. In a scathing report that shed new light on one of the FBI lab’s worst modern scandals, the inspector general said the Justice Department didn’t properly review all of the cases by FBI examiner s whose work was known to be flawed. The report said the FBI took more than five years to identify more than 60 death-row defendants whose cases had been handled by 13 lab examiners whose work had been criticized in a 1997 inspector-general investigation. As a result, state authorities could not consider whether to stay sentences, and three men were put to death. One of those defendants, who was executed in Texas in 1997, would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, the report said. “Failures of this nature undermine the integrity of the United States’ system of justice and the public’s confidence in our system,” the 146-page report stated. The failure to admit errors at the time “also injured the reputation of the FBI and the Department.” The report was requested by Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) after The Washington Post reported in 2012 that Justice officials knew for years that flawed evidence and testimony might have led to the convictions of innocent people. The Post focused on the Texas case and three men in Washington, D.C., who were represented by the Public Defender Service and have been exonerated. Problems at the FBI lab first surfaced in the early 1990s, when scientist-turned-whistleblower Fred Whitehurst reported that sloppy work by examiners was producing unreliable forensic testimony. Justice officials launched a task force that was active from 1996 to 2004 to ensure that potentially exculpatory evidence involving criticized agents was turned over to defendants. But The Post found that such notification rarely happened and that not all flawed cases were properly reviewed. Justice Department officials, responding to Wednesday’s report, said that they had been diligent in trying to protect defendants’ rights in undertaking a review of unprecedented size and complexity. However, “with the benefit of hindsight, the Department agrees that certain aspects of the Task Force review could have been more efficient or effective,” Brette L. Steele, senior adviser on forensic science, wrote in a department memo included in the report. As of October, the 26 surviving death-row inmates whose cases were included in the review had all been notified that their convictions had been re-examined, Steele said. The inspector general had recommended the notifications and retesting of evidence in 24 death-row cases in which the defendant was deceased. The inspector general’s office said the department should notify all 2,900 defendants whose cases were reviewed by the task force, starting with 402 defendants whose cases were so problematic that the task force obtained a fresh scientific review. Their names were made public Wednesday for the first time. The report said that even more defendants’ cases should have been reviewed but were omitted for inappropriate reasons, and the scope of errors never would be known. For many defendants, it said, “delays were very prejudicial and, for some, they caused irreversible harm.” The report also stated that the FBI agent responsible for the greatest number of problem cases, hair examiner Michael P. Malone, was transferred to field work until he retired in 1999. He then became a contractor to the agency from 2002 until last month, conducting security investigations, the report said. “We believe that Malone’s employment as an FBI contractor was a consequence of the failure of the FBI and the Department to discipline Malone for the misconduct we identified in our 1997 Report,” Wednesday’s review said. In an interview, Whitehurst said it’s “preposterous” that two decades after he reported the forensic problems, the FBI is still allowed to re-examine its own mistakes. “When we divert our attention, we’ll be back where we were before,” he said. **** Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called Wednesday’s findings “shocking” and criticized the FBI for “foot-dragging and resistance to accountability.” “The initial shoddy lab work was compounded by the Justice Department’s unconscionable failures to fix the problems it caused in hundreds of cases,” Grassley said. “The FBI and the Justice Department will have a lot of work to do to restore the public’s confidence in their integrity following these revelations.” Get updates on your area delivered via e-mail

Police report new lead in killing of H Street deli owner

Reports by D.C. police of a promising lead in the shooting death of a popular Northeast Washington deli owner in June has renewed the family’s hope that the killer will soon be found, but it also has evoked a flood of painful memories. The victim’s son, Peter D. Lim, said relatives have been concentrating on trying to sell the shuttered shop on H Street. He said detectives told him two weeks ago that they linked a man to the crime scene through DNA. “We haven’t had a chance to deal with this whole thing emotionally,” he said of his mother’s death. “Now that it’s back in the news, it’s painful. It’s reopened the wounds and made it fresh again. But I think any progress is good. We’re hopeful.” Hae Soon Lim, 64, was found fatally shot inside Grace Deli, at Seventh and H streets NE, on the morning of June 14. Neighbors and customers knew her as June. Newly filed court documents say she was shot once in the back of the neck while standing behind her counter. A police affidavit seeking a search warrant, filed in D.C. Superior Court last week, says that the deli’s cash drawer had been rifled and that an empty gun holster was found inches from Lim’s body. A forensics technician with the D.C. police crime lab swabbed the holster for DNA, the affidavit says, and the results were submitted to a national database. The existence of the affidavit was first reported by Washington’s Fox 5 (WTTG-TV). Police said that on Aug. 7, the DNA database matched the evidence from the discarded holster to a 46-year-old man, a convicted criminal in Virginia who was wanted on an alleged parole violation. Details of that case could not be ascertained. D.C. police and members of the U.S. Marshals Service arrested the man Aug. 23 in an apartment in the 1200 block of M Street NW, where the affidavit says he had been living since May. The Washington Post is not naming the man because he has not been charged in Lim’s death. Police said in court documents that the man is being held in the D.C. jail. Police declined to comment on the latest developments. Police used the DNA match to obtain a search warrant for the M Street apartment, telling a judge that “there is probable cause to believe that inside the residence  . . . may be secreted firearms, holsters, ammunition, photographs, diagrams and firearms manuals.” But court documents show that police found nothing pertaining to the investigation. The affidavit says the man declined to talk with homicide detectives and asked for an attorney. The victim’s son, Lim, who lives in Maryland, said detectives told him that the DNA link is insufficient to bring charges. “We think this is a step in the right direction,” Lim said of the new developments. “I know this is the strongest link to anything they’ve had thus far. But I’m not really sure where they go from here.” __Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

Justice Department issues first standards for forensic expert testimony

The Justice Department proposed the first department-wide standards for forensic expert testimony Friday, responding to findings in 2015 that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit had overstated testimony in criminal trials for decades. The draft uniform language for court testimony and reports is based on written guidance developed by the FBI for about 20 techniques, and it would apply to all department personnel, including those with the bureau, Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, officials said in an announcement. Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates invited public comment and said the department is committed to ensuring that its experts’ claims are supported by strong science. “Forensic science is a critical component of our criminal justice system, both for identifying the perpetrator of a crime and for clearing the innocent,” Yates said in a statement. “Once finalized and adopted, these guidance documents will clarify what scientific statements our forensic experts may – and may not – use when testifying in court and in drafting reports, in turn strengthening the integrity of our system overall.” The draft standards apply to serology, toxicology and drug and chemical examiners, as well as more frequently challenged experts who make subjective, pattern-based comparisons of fibers, glass, foot- and tire prints and fingerprints. Proposals will follow this summer for more techniques, including analysis of DNA, hair, handwriting and explosive devices, the department said. The move comes after an April 2015 finding by the FBI and Justice Department that nearly all FBI hair examiners overstated testimony about hair matches incriminating defendants during the 1980s and 1990s. A root-cause analysis is pending, but authorities acknowledged that until 2012, they lacked standards defining scientifically appropriate and erroneous ways to explain results in court. In March, Yates proposed an expanded review of FBI forensic testimony to a National Commission on Forensic Science appointed by the attorney general, recommending audits of statements made in other pattern-based techniques used by crime labs in more than 100,000 examinations each year, including tracing fibers, fingerprints, tread marks, marks that guns leave on bullets, soil and other crime-scene evidence. Yates then characterized the inquiry into “testimonial overstatement” as a forensic science “stress test.” A National Academy of Sciences panel in 2009 reported that although examiners had long claimed to be able to match pattern evidence to a source with “absolute” or “scientific certainty,” only DNA analysis had been validated through statistical research. On Monday, department officials said that the proposed standards were not intended to set precedent for state and local crime labs or imply that others’ statements are incorrect. They also will not necessarily serve as the basis for the department’s proposed reviews of past forensic science testimony or foreclose a more far-reaching recommendation by the commission to end claims of matching evidence with “scientific certainty” without statistical proof. Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a member of the commission and a partner in the Justice Department and FBI’s hair review, applauded the proposed standards. However, he said, “It’s remarkable that the FBI developed internal standards for decades, without ever subjecting those guidelines either to public comment or more importantly, to the scrutiny of the nation’s leading experts in statistics and probabilities, with the exception of DNA,” Neufeld said. “But we hope this is the beginning of a new era, and we applaud that.”

Taking DNA samples should be limited

The May 2 editorial “A Md. Court’s war on modernity” missed the mark. The Fourth Amendment protects persons as much as it protects their papers, houses and effects, and a search for information as private as someone’s DNA profile deserves full protection against warrantless search and seizure. The Founders would be outraged. Police do not need DNA samples taken upon arrest to fight crime. They already have the ability to go to a neutral magistrate and obtain a warrant to take a DNA sample from a suspect who they have probable cause to believe has committed a crime. Nothing in the court’s decision forbids a person from volunteering a DNA sample if he thinks it could prove his innocence. The public was shocked when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that suspects could be strip-searched upon arrest even for very minor crimes. This is no different. Citizens do not lose their constitutional rights simply because they’ve been arrested. ****Lisa M. Wayne,** Denver** The writer is president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Shutdown: What would close, what would stay open in the Washington area?

As the threat of a government shutdown draws near, many residents in the Washington area are wondering how it would affect them and the services they rely on. Here are some of the local agencies and services that would be shuttered in the event of a shutdown, and others that will not be impacted: **Local attractions:** — The Smithsonian museums, the National Zoo, Civil War battlefields and other federally funded attractions would close. ******Mail:** — The U.S. Postal Service is an independent agency, so mail would continue to be delivered. **Transportation:** — Amtrak trains, Metrorail, Metrobus and Circulator would continue to operate. **D.C. services: ** Mayor Vincent C. Gray has determined the District government will not close during a federal shutdown – meaning trash will be collected, permits and licenses will be issued, and city offices will remain open regardless of whether Congress reaches an accord. **Other:** — There would be no new applications for benefits such as Medicare, Social Security and child-care subsidies, no new housing or small-business loans, and no new clinical trials for research funded by the National Institutes of Health. — Child-care centers in federal agencies would close. — Passport offices would remain open. More questions? Reporters answered questions about a government shutdown, the politics of the budget battle and the impact on federal agencies and the D.C. area.

D.C. man imprisoned by flawed FBI forensic evidence exonerated

A Superior Court judge has exonerated a District man who spent 28 years in prison for murder, the fifth D.C. man to be cleared since 2009 after being convicted in connection with flawed FBI forensic testimony. Judge Laura A. Cordero on Friday declared Cleveland Wright, 56, innocent of murdering William Horn, a D.C. floral shop worker, in an early morning robbery in July 1978. “The Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that Mr. Wright did not commit the crimes of first-degree murder while armed, first-degree felony murder, and armed robbery of Mr. Horn, of which he was convicted in this case,” Cordero wrote in a 14-page opinion. “This is the day that Mr. Wright and his family have been waiting for for more than 36 years. Judge Cordero has given him the complete victory he deserves,” said Wright’s attorney, Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C Public Defender Service, which uncovered four of the wrongful D.C. convictions. “We are proud to share in his victory and in the undoing of a terrible miscarriage of justice.” The ruling ends a long legal odyssey for Wright, whose case helped uncover similar problems in FBI testimony across the country. Thirty-six years ago, Wright, then 20, and Santae Tribble, then 17, were childhood friends who were accused of teaming to rob and kill two men, using the same gun, two weeks apart, in the same Southeast Washington neighborhood. Both were charged in both killings. Tribble was convicted of the slaying of a taxi driver, and Wright of the slaying of the flower shop worker. Wright was released from prison in 2007 and placed on lifetime parole. However, DNA testing in 2012 ruled out claims at trial by the prosecution and an FBI Laboratory forensic hair expert that a hair found in a stocking near the taxi driver’s killing probably came from Tribble. A witness said the killer had worn a stocking mask, but DNA results showed that hairs in the stocking did not come from either defendant. The Washington Post featured Tribble’s case in a series of reports about flaws in FBI hair examinations that had led to wrongful convictions in the District and elsewhere. In response, the Justice Department and FBI announced last month that they had found that nearly every examiner in the FBI lab’s hair unit who gave evidence against criminal defendants overstated testimony in nearly every trial over a two-   decade period ending in 2000. Cordero exonerated Tribble in December 2012. Then-U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. in January 2014 agreed to vacate Wright’s conviction, agreeing that his prosecution relied on now-   discredited evidence. However, the government took no position on Wright’s petition for a certificate of innocence, which would have helped him obtain financial compensation. In her ruling, Cordero granted that certification, saying that the only evidence at Wright’s trial that directly linked him to the crime came from two state witnesses whose testimony has become unreliable, because their other claims had been discredited by the DNA results exonerating Wright’s co-defendant.

The dark side of forensic science

KIRK L. ODOM is innocent. Federal prosecutors finally have confirmed that Mr. Odom was wrongfully convicted of a 1981 D.C. rape, for which he served 20 years in prison. Mr. Odom was sentenced at age 18; this nightmare has consumed more than half his life, and all because of errors in forensic techniques. Worse still is that he isn’t alone. As The Post’s Spencer Hsu and others reported in a series of investigative articles this spring, similar errors have led to the convictions of two other men in the District: Santae A. Tribble, who served 28 years in prison, before a judge overturned his conviction in May, and Donald E. Gates, who served the same number of years for a 1981 Rock Creek rape and murder he didn’t commit. These three cases should serve as a call to explore forensic errors that could have put more innocent men behind bars — or could do so in the future. In the wake of The Post’s reports, the Justice Department and the FBI announced last Tuesday the largest-ever post-conviction review, which will examine all cases after 1985 that relied on hair and fiber examinations. This is necessary and long overdue. However, while the review’s results almost surely will uncover deficiencies in previous uses of forensic evidence, many flawed practices — including hair-sample analysis — are no longer in standard usage. Beyond finding and acknowledging errors of the past, a focus should be on taking every conceivable step to eliminate future wrongful convictions. In terms of forensics, there’s still considerable work to do. As the National Academy of Sciences recommended in a 2009 report to Congress: “Research is needed to address issues of accuracy, reliability, and validity in the forensic science disciplines.” Although hair-sample analysis may be obsolete, uncertainty attaches to other techniques still in common use, such as firearm examination and fingerprint analysis. To that end, Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) each have proposed bills that would, among other things, promote more scientific research and develop uniform forensic standards. These reforms are critical steps that should have been enacted long ago, and they should be enacted without further delay. U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. expressed his office’s sympathy with Mr. Odom: “Though we can never give him back the years that he lost,” he wrote, “we can give Mr. Odom back his unfairly tarnished reputation.” He’s right: No amount of recompense — financial or otherwise — could right the wrongs done to Mr. Odom, Mr. Tribble, Mr. Gates and however many others have been wrongfully convicted. All the more reason to take every possible step to avoid similar mistakes in the future. **Read more from Opinions:** Marc Thiessen: Take the mitts off, Mitt Lawrence Summers: Our inequalities of opportunity Robert J. Samuelson: Character assassination on the campaign trail

Forensic techniques are subject to human bias, lack standards, panel found

In Hollywood, the moment the good guys trace a hair, a bullet fragment or a fingerprint, it’s game over. The bad guy is locked up. But the glamorized portrait is not so simple in real life.  Even fingerprint identification is partly a subjective exercise that lacks research into the role of unconscious bias or even its error rate, the panel’s 328-page report said. “The forensic science system, encompassing both research and practice, has serious problems that can only be addressed by a national commitment to overhaul the current structure,” the panel concluded in 2009.    Police and law enforcement agencies have rebuffed recommendations to remove crime labs from their control. Since 2002, failures have been reported at about 30 federal, state and local crime labs serving the FBI, the Army and eight of the nation’s 20 largest cities.  A 2009 study of post-conviction DNA exonerations — now up to 289 nationwide — found invalid testimony in more than half the cases.  More DNA testing alone is not the answer, experts say. Biological evidence historically is collected in fewer than 20 percent of criminal cases. Other questioned forensic techniques are used far more often, with mistakes harming defendants and crime victims whose true assailants remain at large. The National Academy of Sciences report cited the lack of effective standards for examiners, laboratories and court testimony. It also criticized Justice Department agencies for a dearth of research into problems and for being “too wedded” to the status quo to be trusted to lead reforms.  Arson investigation is an example of how research has dramatically improved practices. Since 1990, the number of U.S. structure fires attributed to arson has dropped by half. One reason is that scientific test burnings have disproved the notion that some burn marks could be caused only by liquid accelerants. Meanwhile, scientific doubts have festered for decades with fingerprint examination. While fingerprint analysis is one of the most valuable and frequently applied investigative tools, its accuracy has not been scientifically defined. FBI examiners claimed until recently that they can match fingerprints to the exclusion of any other person in the world with 100 percent certainty using a method with an error rate essentially of zero. The academy report found that assertion was “not scientifically plausible” and had chilled research into error rates.  Neumann declined to comment for this article. A person familiar with the episode blamed a polarized climate in the adversarial legal system, saying, “Few agencies in the forensic-science community want to be the first ones associated with an error rate.” The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive federal research funding decisions.  Since then, the Justice Department has begun research to try to quantify how complete a fingerprint must be to properly declare a match; how different conditions may affect the reliability of examinations; whether computers can do such work; and how to present forensic testimony about probabilities to judges and juries. The FBI has also required “blind verification” of results by agents unfamiliar with initial examinations. The bureau said that skilled analysts are extraordinarily accurate, at least when they know they are being tested. An FBI study with Noblis Corp. last year found that when 169 examiners compared thousands of fingerprints and decided there was enough information to declare a match or not, they were correct 99.8 percent of the time.  Crime lab directors and prosecutors welcome calls for more money for research and to improve examiners and facilities. But with budgets tight at all levels, Washington has few other tools to prompt 350 state and local labs across the country to improve. Because techniques have not been scientifically proved does not mean they do not work, defenders say, and mistakes can be handled traditionally through case-by-case appeals.

Federal funds help crime labs struggling with DNA evidence backlogs

Twelve years ago, Congress passed a bill aimed at bolstering the capacity of state and local crime labs. It was known as the DNA Analysis Backlog Elimination Act. The ensuing effort now bears the more modest title of DNA Backlog Reduction Program. But even with the new name, it is an ambitious venture. Since 2006, Congress has poured $785 million into helping fix the logjam in DNA evidence collection at the state and local levels through this and other programs. There’s no question that a serious problem exists. Recent advances in science and technology have made DNA a more useful tool for convicting the guilty and exonerating the innocent, but major backlogs persist, despite broad acknowledgment that delays in processing DNA evidence are keeping criminals on the streets. “A lot of it is supply and demand,” said Kermit Channel, director of the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory. “Because the technology offers so much more today than even five or six years ago, law enforcement is asking for more and more from us.” Federal help is making a difference. Between 2004 and 2010, the Backlog Reduction Program, run by the National Institute of Justice, has funded completion of 172,761 cases and significantly increased state and local DNA laboratory capacity. Channel credits federal funding with dramatically reducing the Arkansas backlog — which peaked at 18,000 cases in 2005 — to 4,200 now. “Without those funding sources, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today,” Channel said. Federal grants have allowed the state to invest in more sophisticated equipment that sorts through evidence faster, as well as nine additional staff members to process the evidence. Still, while the crime lab is now able to stay up to date with homicides and sexual assaults, property crimes remain a major driver of the state’s backlog. Processing evidence of property crimes is critical, Channel said, not just for solving those offenses but also for investigating others that may have been committed by the same person. This is because in addition to analyzing DNA evidence recovered from crime scenes, crime labs maintain databases that hold DNA profiles of certain convicted offenders. State and local DNA databases and the national DNA database, connected through the FBI-run Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, have become important tools for solving crimes in cases for which there are no suspects. As of January 2012, CODIS had led to 171,800 “hits” or matches and assisted in more than 165,100 investigations, according to the FBI. As the utility of DNA databases in solving crimes has become apparent, state policies have expanded to require that more DNA be collected and processed for inclusion in those databases. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo helped pushed througha bill that would require DNA from any person convicted of almost any crime to be included in a database, and about half of states now include DNA from arrestees who have not been convicted of crimes. While inclusion of additional offenders and arrestees has made CODIS more useful, it has also clogged crime labs and raised concerns about privacy for individuals who have not been convicted, said Sara Katsanis, a researcher at Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy. “The presumption is that if we had the whole population in there, then it would work best,” she said. When states expand requirements to include more offenders and arrestees, Katsanis adds, they often fail to consider the impact on their existing crime lab capacity. “There’s not a lobbyist for the rape victims who aren’t getting their samples processed,” she said. Crime labs have become highly reliant on federal funding. A recent report by the Congressional Research Service noted that 83 percent of state and local crime labs say they would see an increase in DNA casework backlogs if federal funding were to disappear. But the federal rules lead to a bit of a conundrum: While the core backlog reduction program is formula-based and available to states that do not have backlogs, other funds give priority to states that have documented large backlogs. That gives them less incentive to get the problem fixed. “It makes you more competitive if you have an existing backlog,” said Sheila Jerusalem, a spokesperson for the National Institute of Justice. Funding from the National Institute of Justice has helped state and local labs bolster their capacity so they can sustain higher workloads on their own. Investments in technology and robotics and workflow improvements have enabled some states to process higher volumes of DNA more quickly in ways that aren’t federally dependent. Another way that states have tried to minimize backlogs is to work more closely on the front end with law enforcement officials — the ones submitting the evidence — to ensure that the right evidence is being tested. “Our contributors sometimes watch too much ‘CSI’ and they don’t realize it takes so much time to conduct these tests,” said David Coffman, chief of forensic services for Florida’s state crime lab. Florida and many other states have raised acceptance thresholds so that, for property cases especially, they aren’t testing DNA from doorknobs or other places where samples from multiple people are likely to be found. Still, said Coffman, “there’s a way to ask us to bend the rules depending on the nature of the case.” When there is lots of evidence — a trail of blood, for example — Florida now works with law enforcement to pick the five best samples first and then will go back and test more as necessary. State crime labs don’t typically charge law enforcement agencies for their services, but Arizona experimented with this approach as a way to reduce costs and provide an incentive to law enforcement not to submit unnecessary evidence. The legislature passed a law in 2007 requiring it but reversed course in 2009 because of pushback from local jurisdictions. **— Stateline.org**

Catherine Fuller’s murder consumed D.C. But were innocent people sent to jail for her death?

IT HAS been 32 years since Catherine Fuller, a 48-year-old mother of six, was murdered in an alley in Northeast Washington. The savagery and senselessness of her death — robbed, beaten and sodomized with a metal pole — unsettled Washington. That authorities blamed a large group of young gang members who swarmed the woman for thrills and the $50 tucked in her bra only heightened the horror for a city that had not yet become inured to violence. Equally unsettling — and horrifying — would be the possibility that officials erred in their prosecution and that innocent people were wrongly sent to jail. That, though, is the claim of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which has been leading an effort since 2010 to reopen the case. On Wednesday, the advocates scored a significant victory when the Supreme Court unexpectedly announced that it will hear arguments in the case. The court will decide whether the murder convictions of seven defendants must be set aside because prosecutors withheld information, notably about a suspect who had been spotted near the crime scene and was later convicted of killing a woman in a manner terrifyingly similar to Ms. Fuller’s case. The court could either uphold the convictions or return the matter to the trial court, at which point prosecutors would have to decide on retrials. Of 13 people charged, 10 defendants, from 16 to 25 years old, went on trial in 1985, and eight were convicted. Six men, all now middle-aged, remain behind bars. One died in prison, and another was paroled after serving 26 years. Arguments before the high court will turn not on their claims of actual innocence but on whether their convictions were tainted by violations of case law requiring prosecutors to disclose favorable evidence to the defense. Both a D.C. Superior Court judge and the D.C. Court of Appeals rejected those arguments, and federal prosecutors in court filings cited the “overwhelming” evidence that led to the convictions being upheld. We, of course, have no way of divining guilt or innocence, but the work of the defense lawyers has raised issues that have played a role in other cases of wrongful conviction and should give pause. Among them: There was no physical evidence; medical testimony was conflicting; some witnesses had monetary or other interests; and some defendants claimed they were bullied into false confessions. Nearly all of the living witnesses in the case have recanted their testimony. “It is hard to convey, more than 16 years later, the impact Catherine Fuller’s murder had on Washington,” journalist Patrice Gaines wrote in a 2001 Post article that first raised questions about the convictions. “Fuller’s death and the resulting trial consumed the community.” Whether justice was done is a question that 32 years later should also consume the community. **Read more on this topic:** Jody Goodman: The Catherine Fuller case: When witnesses recant The Post’s View: It’s not too late to revisit a 1984 murder case Samuel R. Gross: The staggering number of wrongful convictions in America Harry T. Edwards and Jennifer L. Mnookin: A wake-up call on the junk science infesting our courtrooms The Post’s View: Preventing wrongful convictions

Federal Faces: John Butler

**Name:** John Butler **Position:** National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fellow and group leader, Applied Genetics Group, Biomolecular Measurement Division **Best known for:** Improving DNA technology to help solve crimes. TV shows such as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “NCIS” may make DNA forensic testing appear relatively easy, but scientists such as Butler are truly advancing the technology for crime-solving. A leading expert on forensic DNA technology, Butler developed a system to improve how scientists perform forensic analysis on degraded DNA samples — a process used on remains from the World Trade Center attacks, on fallen soldiers and in decades-old criminal cases. He’s now testing the reliability of new technology to speed up DNA analysis from eight hours to one and refining the testing to make it more precise. He is also involved in research to isolate the male Y chromosome from DNA samples, making it easier to identify those who have committed sexual assaults. In addition to crime-solving, DNA technology is used to resolve paternity issues, identify disaster victims and assist in missing-person cases. Butler has written four books on DNA testing, including one textbook, “Forensic DNA Typing,” which many forensic DNA analysts consider to be the field’s bible. **Government work:** After working at the FBI laboratory in Quantico, during graduate school, Butler conducted his postdoctoral work at NIST, spent two years at a private company and returned to NIST in 1999 to lead the agency’s efforts in human identity testing. **Motivation for service:** Butler sees his work as an important public service because it helps forensic laboratories do their jobs more effectively and assists the criminal justice process. “NIST is a place where I can have an impact and help society,” he said. **Biggest challenge:** Finding enough time to conduct research and write while responding to requests that range from helping the FBI with data analysis to assisting domestic and foreign forensic laboratories improve their processes. **Quote: “** We are helping solve crimes. The results from these tests can impact life and liberty.” **— From the Partnership for Public Service  ** For a full profile, go to The Fed Page at washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-government.

D.C. Court of Appeals judge faults overstated forensic gun-match claims

Claims that forensic experts can match a bullet or shell casing found at a crime scene to a specific weapon lack a scientific basis and should be barred from criminal trials as misleading, a D.C. Court of Appeals judge wrote this week. The opinion, by Associate Judge Catharine Easterly, is not binding on criminal prosecutions in D.C. Superior Court, where firearms and ballistics evidence have been introduced in scores of violent felony cases in recent years. But it continues a nationwide push for heightened scrutiny of forensic techniques and testimony relied upon in thousands of criminal convictions. Easterly’s opinion came in response to an appeal brought by Marlon Williams, 36, of Southeast Washington. He argued that his murder conviction in the 2010 fatal shooting of Min Soo Kang, 37, of Fairfax County should be overturned because, among other things, a D.C. police forensics expert improperly declared a “unique” match between bullet slugs recovered from the victim’s car and a handgun found in Williams’s bedroom. “Those markings are unique to that gun and that gun only,” Luciano Morales testified, according to court filings. “Item Number 58 fired these three bullets,” he told the jury, referring to the handgun by its trial exhibit number. Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the District called the error “regrettable,” acknowledging in 2011 court filings that forensic practitioners should not state conclusions to an “absolute” or “100% scientific certainty.” Prosecutors also told the Court of Appeals that the policy barring those 100 percent conclusions in firearms examination cases had been in place since about 2009, predating the testimony delivered at Williams’s trial. The error “is more than regrettable. It is alarming,” Easterly wrote in a concurring opinion to the decision of the three-judge panel published Thursday. Easterly likened claims of a one-to-one match of bullet to gun to “the vision of a psychic,” a statement of “foundationless faith in what he believes to be true.” “To uphold the public’s trust, the District of Columbia courts must bar the admission of these certainty statements,” Easterly wrote. “We cannot be complicit in their use.” Because Easterly’s statement was delivered in a concurring opinion, it does not carry the force of law. Easterly noted that only one state supreme court, in Massachusetts, and no U.S. Court of Appeals expressly limits testimony by firearms examiners, despite extraordinary criticism of its validity from legal scholars. At trial, Williams’s defense lawyer at the time, failed to object to the testimony from Morales. Absent that objection, Easterly — a former public defender appointed by President Obama to the D.C. Court of Appeals in 2011 — wrote, “We could only reverse if the law were clear that the expert could not make these statements.” District law does not have that clear prohibition, she said, “but it should.” Williams failed in his bid to have his conviction overturned, with Easterly writing a majority opinion joined by Associate Judge Phyllis D. Thompson and Senior Judge Frank Q. Nebeker. Easterly’s opinion comes as a national commission appointed by Obama to improve forensic science in the criminal-justice system weighs whether to recommend far-reaching changes to some forensics. In her concurring opinion, Easterly noted that the policy shift that prosecutors tracked to about 2009 came after two National Research Council panels reported in 2008 and 2009 that there is no statistical basis to determine how often bullets fired by different weapons might look alike, or even whether a firearm makes a unique, reproducible mark. Many scientists also have questioned the reliability of other identification claims made based on subjective analysis of hair samples, bite marks, burn patterns or firearms. Such pattern-based forensic analysis and testimony have long been admitted by courts and championed by law enforcement officials, who say when performed and described correctly, they can yield valuable evidence. In an interview, Williams’s attorney for the appeal, Enid Hinkes, said, “Judge Easterly’s concurring opinion is an accurate statement of the science — or the lack of it. But, unfortunately, it was not translated into action.” Hinkes said she intends to seek a hearing before the full appeals court for Williams, who is at the U.S. Penitentiary Hazelton in Bruceton Mills, W.Va. Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said it is reviewing the ruling and had no comment beyond what the office stated in its court filings. In court papers, prosecutors said pattern-matching remains widely accepted by scientific practitioners and courts. Current policy calls for testifying to matches on bullet-gun markings “to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty,” not to an absolute certainty. Morales’s testimony violated that policy, prosecutors said in their appeals court files, but said the error was harmless given the evidence in the case. The office declined to provide information about often such errors in testimony occur or about how it enforces the policy.

Virginia deserves applause for its work to eliminate a rape kit backlog

NOTHING IS a more powerful symbol of the failure of the criminal justice system to take sexual assault seriously than the tens of thousands of rape kits that languish — untested — in police departments and crime labs across the country. So when authorities undertake to eliminate the existing backlog and prevent future ones, it is a sign of a new approach that prioritizes getting justice for victims and holding offenders accountable. That is what is happening in Virginia, and it should be applauded. Virginia is in the middle of a $3.4 million program launched two years ago to test an estimated 3,200 sexual-assault evidence kits that have waited, some for decades, on police shelves. The kits contain evidence such as samples of blood and semen that can be tested for DNA. The first phase, funded from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s $38 million initiative to tackle testing in more than 20 states, focused on kits collected prior to 2014. Of the 2,000 kits, more than 1,000 have so far been sent to the state lab, with results on 450 kits. There have been at least 44 matches to known profiles in the Combined DNA Index System database. No arrests or prosecutions have come from those hits, but the cases will be referred back to local law enforcement for further investigation, and the inclusion in the database may help in identifying serial rapists. The second phase, announced  this month by Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D), will use a $2 million federal grant to deal with kits from between 2014 and 2016. “We’re keeping up the momentum on this project. I’m not going to stop until every single kit gets tested, survivors know the result and each case gets a fresh look,” said Mr. Herring. Going forward from 2016, there should be no backlog of cases because Virginia last year enacted new rules governing the collection, storage and analysis of rape kits. Virginia’s push for testing is part of a national effort that has highlighted the value of the kits as well as the indignity suffered by rape victims who submit to an invasive exam only to see the potential evidence collect dust. First lady Dorothy McAuliffe, who helped lead a state task force that led to testing reforms and new supports for victims, said victims of sexual assault can now feel more confident about reporting their assaults to police. “The work,” she said, “is making a difference.” **Read more on this topic:** The Post’s View: Maryland has to address its rape kit backlog Terri Slapak-Fugate: Victims are guaranteed rape exams. But the nearest trained examiner could be hours away. The Post’s View: For Baltimore rape victims, added pain Colbert I. King: Multiple D.C. police officers have abused underage girls. Where’s the accountability? The Post’s View: A man was sexually assaulted in a D.C. court cell. Where were the U.S. marshals?

Va. exoneration underscores mounting challenges to bite-mark evidence

The exoneration of a former sailor who served 33 years for a 1982 rape and murder in Virginia has highlighted mounting concerns about the use of bite marks as evidence in criminal cases. Keith Allen Harward, 60, was released Friday from Virginia’s Nottoway Correctional Center, where he had been serving a life sentence. Harward was convicted after six experts concurred that bite marks on one victim’s leg matched Harward to a “medical certainty.” But DNA testing last month proved those experts wrong — and cleared Harward. “I had a life. I got locked up, now I got to start life all over,” Harward said in remarks made outside prison and streamed live by Richmond television station NBC12. He added: “They weren’t looking for the truth. They were looking for a conviction. . . . They need to stop this stuff.” Harward was convicted in the beating death of Jesse Perron and the sexual assault on Perron’s wife in their home blocks from the Newport News naval shipyard on Sept. 14, 1982. The woman said the couple’s attacker was wearing Navy clothing, but she did not identify Harward. On Thursday, Virginia’s Supreme Court declared Harward innocent and ordered his release. The move came after Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) joined a defense motion citing DNA testing that identified the perpetrator as another sailor from the U.S.S. Carl Vinson. That man later died in prison in Ohio while being held for abduction, attempted burglary and other charges. Forensic odontologists said Harward’s exoneration raises hard questions for a field whose validity has been undermined by scientific and legal developments. At least 25 people arrested or convicted on evidence that included bite marks have been exonerated by DNA, according to the Innocence Project. Still, no state or federal appellate court has found bite-mark evidence to be inadmissible. The Innocence Project, part of Harward’s legal team, called such evidence “grossly unreliable” and urged judges to halt its use in criminal prosecutions. “How many more Mr. Harwards do we have to find before courts take seriously the obligation to eliminate this unreliable evidence from being used when life and liberty are at stake?” said M. Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the project. “Every state in the nation should be conducting reviews to see if there are others like Mr. Harward sitting in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.” In an interview, Adam Freeman, president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, which accredits forensic dentists and sets guidelines, called the case “very troubling.” He said Harward was convicted using practices that were “state of the art” at the time. Freeman said the field has a duty to correct any similar mistakes. “I would encourage all to review our individual cases,” he said, citing a recent message to the board’s 90 certified and roughly 30 actively testifying members, as well as an unknown number of noncertified experts, who consult on more than 100 cases a year, including capital cases. “We need to take this responsibility seriously.” Testimony at Harward’s trial came from one of the field’s leading practitioners, Lowell J. Levine, then an independent consultant whose involvement in cases including serial killer Ted Bundy and Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele established his worldwide reputation. He has served as president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the odontology board. Levine testified to “a very, very, very high degree of probability those teeth left that bite mark,” referring to Harward, and said a coincidental match to another person was a “practical impossibility.” Levine was joined by another government witness, Virginia dentist Alvin G. Kagey, who independently examined the evidence and testified “with all medical certainty” that “there is just not anyone else that would have this unique dentition.” Two experts contacted by Harward’s trial defense concurred with Kagey and Levine and were not called to testify, according to limited defense records maintained by his family. Another two dentists first ruled out Harward in the investigation while screening dental records of sailors aboard the ship, but they reversed themselves and corroborated the match to Newport News police, case records show. In a statement, Levine said he was upset and disturbed at the result, given that the case produced wide agreement among examiners who had access to more information than is often available. “This case should persuade all my colleagues to agree with the need for more scientific research and investigation,” Levine said. Harward’s release comes at a time of transition for bite-mark evidence in courts and greater scrutiny of forensic testimony. In February, the Texas Forensic Science Commission became the first official state or federal entity to call for a moratorium in the use of bite-mark identification in criminal trials, saying the validity of the technique had not been scientifically established. The odontology board also issued new guidelines that say experts should no longer make identifications but instead limit testimony to including or excluding a person as a potential contributor or declaring results inconclusive. Many prosecutors and practitioners say skilled examiners exercising proper caution can glean valuable evidence in cases, including violent crimes where there is a limited pool of suspects and DNA is less helpful because the perpetrator is known to the victim, such as in child-abuse cases. “Bite-mark comparisons can often serve as important corroborative evidence on very complex and serious cases involving vulnerable victims,” said Joan Vollero, spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance. Vollero declined further comment, citing the pending prosecution of Clarence Dean in the death of an aspiring model in New York in 2007. The office withdrew bite-mark evidence in January to speed proceedings for witnesses, the victim’s family and the court in the case, after the Innocence Project renewed efforts to exclude that evidence. The Texas commission cited research last year by Freeman’s group that cast doubt on fundamental assumptions of dental analysis. Freeman’s group found that board-certified members shown photos from real cases could not agree, in most instances, even whether injuries were caused by human teeth.

After the Supreme Court’s DNA decision, what is the future of criminal justice?

Technological innovation, from photography to fingerprinting, has long made identifying suspects easier for law enforcement. DNA testing is no more than the latest development in that progression, according to a decision by the Supreme Court on Monday.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University As The Post’s Robert Barnes reports, the Court’s decision will allow police to continue what has become a routine in many states: using cheek swabs to take DNA from the people they arrest.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University “Law enforcement agencies routinely have used scientific advancements in their standard procedures for the identification of arrestees,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. DNA testing has led to the exoneration of more than 300 people wrongly convicted of crimes. Yet the technology is far from fulfilling its promise of aiding law enforcement to identify criminals and letting the innocent go free. A Department of Justice study estimated that around 900,000 requests for biological screening, mostly DNA testing, were backlogged nationally at the end of 2009, the most recent year for which data is available. Meanwhile, large numbers of kits from routine arrests may be making the problem worse, argued Brandon Garrett, a professor at University of Virginia School of Law.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University “As taking more DNA from arrestees has increased, the backlogs have increased at the expense of testing DNA from actual crime scenes,” he said. Garrett also said that simply adding a DNA sample from everyone who is arrested might even make it harder for police to identify criminals, increasing the likelihood of false positives without adding any perpetrators to the system. “A lot of innocent people will have their DNA in these databases,” he said. “That dilutes the databases and weakens their power.” He argued that since many criminals have prior convictions, taking samples only from convicts would be more efficient. The state’s constitutional authority to take samples from convicts is not disputed. Barry Scheck, one of the directors of the Innocence Project, agreed. The organization helps wrongfully convicted people clear their names through DNA analysis. “We’re all in favor of DNA databanks, and using them to exonerate the innocent and apprehend the guilty,” he said. Scheck and two coauthors wrote a book on the subject, and Kennedy quoted them on the value of DNA testing in his opinion. But Scheck, who disagrees with the ruling, said he worried the court’s reasoning could open the way for large numbers of minor offenders’ DNA profiles to be pointlessly added to databases. “What’s most important is that when you have an unsolved crime, within 7-10 days of the commission of that crime, it [DNA evidence] should be uploaded to the forensic database,” he said. In a friend-of-the-court brief he filed with Erin Murphy of New York University School of Law, UVA’s Garrett argued that for these reasons, the government’s interest in acquiring DNA from arrestees is not strong enough to outweigh their protection under the Fourth Amendment.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The court disagreed, but states are still free to decide whether they’ll use the authority that Monday’s decision secured for them. The ruling is not the end of the discussion about how DNA testing can make law enforcement fairer and more effective.

Victim testifies Jesse Matthew said, ‘I will kill you if you scream again’

The woman testified she was just three or four steps from the safety of her Fairfax City home when the nightmare began. She heard footsteps from behind, and the powerful man lifted her off the ground “like a baby.” She screamed in terror as he dragged her to a grassy patch just feet from surrounding homes. The attacker beat her, laced his fingers around her neck and then began sexually assaulting her as she fought back. “He said, ‘I will kill you if you scream again,’ ” the victim told a hushed Fairfax County courtroom Monday. “He said, ‘Let me do this, and I’ll let you go.’ ” The woman’s life was probably saved, she said, when her attacker suddenly ran off. She then rasped “help me” to a man passing by. Naked from the waist down, she ran toward him slathered in mud and blood. The harrowing account came on the opening day of the trial of Jesse L. Matthew Jr., 33, of Charlottesville, who could face life in prison if convicted in the 2005 Fairfax City sexual assault. The victim’s testimony gave voice to allegations against a man who authorities believe is a serial offender, a predator who ambushes young, vulnerable women as they walk alone at night. Matthew was first identified as a suspect in the Fairfax case through DNA evidence after police said they linked him to the high-profile disappearance, and later the slaying, of University of Virginia student Hannah Graham last fall. He is charged with capital murder in that case. Police say Matthew also has been linked forensically to the investigation into the killing of a second college student, Morgan Harrington. The Virginia Tech student was slain in 2009 after attending a Metallica concert in Charlottesville. Matthew hasn’t been charged in that case. In his opening statement Monday, Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh offered a sweeping account of the events of the fall 2005 Fairfax attack. The woman was abducted, beaten and assaulted, and perhaps saved by the headlights of a car that could have illuminated the dark patch where the assailant had the victim pinned to the ground. Public Defender Robert Frank said in his opening statement that Matthew’s DNA, which was found beneath one fingernail of the victim in the Fairfax County case, may have gotten there accidentally. He said DNA remnants from other people were found there as well. “There is a possibility the DNA that was found on the scrapings came from an innocent contact,” Frank said. He also said the composite sketch police produced based on the woman’s description looked nothing like Matthew. Morrogh said the woman, a native of India who was 26 then and had come to the United States to study, was about to embark on a new career that September day in 2005. She spent a lazy Saturday reading at a bookstore near her home and lost track of time. The Washington Post generally does not name the victims of sexual assault. The woman noticed it had gotten dark, so she began heading home, making a brief stop at a Giant for milk. Prosecutors said that as she turned onto her block on Rock Garden Drive after 8:30 p.m., a stranger asked her a question about the address of one of the homes. The woman answered but began walking more quickly — Morrogh said the victim sensed that something about the man seemed off. She was at the front walkway of the townhouse she rented when the attack began. “This case is about an innocent young woman snatched off a sidewalk,” Morrogh said. “She was in the springtime of her life.” The woman spoke in even tones on the stand as Matthew, who wore a yellow dress shirt and his braids pulled back, watched intently. Her voice quavered only when she described the sexual assault. After she was dragged to the grass, the woman said, her attacker slammed her head into the ground, punched her in the face, and placed his hands around her neck and over her face. Morrogh said she fought “like crazy,” punching and kicking the man. The woman testified that the attacker sexually assaulted her, then he tried to rape her. She passed in and out of consciousness. Then, she noticed the man walking by and began trying to yell at him, but she could barely get out a sound. Mark Raul Castro said that he came upon the victim while visiting the neighborhood to watch a televised heavyweight boxing match at a friend’s house. Castro said he’d been walking through a parking lot when he saw a figure in the darkness from the corner of his eye. “She looked like she was nearly dead,” Castro said. Castro began shouting for the man who had assaulted her to come out, but he had gone. Castro said he knocked on doors in the neighborhood until he found someone who could call police. The woman was transported to a hospital and examined by nurses who specialize in sexual assault. Photos taken in the hospital after the attack and displayed in court showed she had a swollen eye and marks around her neck. A sample of material was taken from beneath the woman’s fingernails and later produced a match with Matthew’s DNA. Soon after the attack, the woman returned to India. She agreed to come back to Fairfax to testify in the trial against Matthew. Prosecutors did not ask the woman whether she could identify Matthew as her assailant. She said the attack left her deeply traumatized and physically violated. “I was in a state of shock,” she said. “I was not able to understand if this was reality or some kind of bad dream.” Dana Hedgpeth contributed to this report.

D.C. officials ponder whether to defy federal shutdown and keep city government open

District leaders pondered an unprecedented act of defiance Tuesday, threatening to keep the city government open even if congressional leaders are unable to avert a federal government shutdown next week. The District is unique among local jurisdictions in the United States in requiring a federal appropriation to spend its budget, even though it is largely funded by locally raised taxes and fees. Should Congress fail to extend spending authorization beyond the current limit of Sept. 30, the city government would be legally bound to curtail all but essential services. Police and firefighters would report to work, and public schools would remain open. But libraries and recreation centers would close. The DMV would go dark, potholes would go unfilled and no parking tickets would be issued. Trash would pile up for a week before haulers could be called in. But new frustrations over the city’s lack of autonomy emerged at a John A. Wilson Building breakfast meeting between Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and members of the D.C. Council, who pressed the mayor to confront Congress. By late Tuesday, a person close to Gray’s deliberations said the mayor was considering informing the federal Office of Management and Budget, which coordinates shutdown preparations, that he intends to keep all of the city’s roughly 32,000 employees on the job, setting up an unusual confrontation. ###  Yes   %  No%  Cast your vote  Results from an unscientific survey of Washington Post readers “Enough is enough when it comes to our money,” said David Grosso (I-At Large) at the morning meeting. “We should keep this government open.” “Let’s do what the rest of this country is doing with respect to Congress: Ignore it,” said David A. Catania (I-At Large). Within an hour, an afternoon news conference to discuss shutdown contingency plans had been canceled, and Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said he would draw up legislation declaring all city employees essential and thus eligible to work through a shutdown. Most council members expressed support for such a bill, even as the city’s top lawyer warned against it. **** Gray — who wasamong 41 District voting-rights activists arrested in a 2011 protest amid the last shutdown threat — at first appeared resigned to a shutdown and dismissive of the suggestions to keep the city open. But he ended up entertaining 45 minutes of debate over what would become the city’s most significant act of defiance toward Congress since 1997, when then-Mayor Marion Barry clashed repeatedly with a congressionally appointed financial control board. “Isn’t this how the country was founded?” Gray said, growing visibly emboldened by the idea. The District government closed for six days during a November 1995 federal shutdown, though it was exempted by Congress from a second, longer shutdown that took place a month later. During occasional bouts of congressional brinksmanship since then, city officials have been forced to depart from their normal routines to revisit shutdown contingency plans. In April 2011, a shutdown was averted about an hour before it was set to begin. Among the provisions of the deal negotiated between the White House and congressional Republicans was the restoration of a restriction preventing the city from spending locally raised funds on abortions for low-income women. Two days later, Gray led a protest on Constitution Avenue, where he was among those arrested for unlawful assembly. Last year, city voters endorsed a referendum granting the city budgetary autonomy from Congress — a measure that advocates said would exempt the District from federal shutdowns. But the referendum has been called illegal by some and does not take effect until Jan. 1. The major obstacle to the city government continuing in full effect is the federal Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits agencies and officials from obligating or spending funds not properly appropriated. District Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan, who attended Tuesday’s meeting, warned of “significant adverse consequences” from violating the law, including stiff fines and potential criminal prosecution of defiant officials. In addition to raising the prospect that defiance could lead to criminal prosecution, Nathan also warned that Congress could reassert control over the city government, suspending officials who subvert a shutdown or even removing the mayor from office. “We have to follow the law, and I think it’s very important for the District to follow the law,” he said. But several members questioned whether criminal prosecutions of Anti- Deficiency Act violations were a credible possibility. While administrative sanctions are regularly levied against federal employees for unauthorized spending, there are no documented cases of criminal prosecutions under the act. Ellen Canale, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment on whether city officials or employees are at risk of prosecution should they remain on the job during a shutdown. Vincent B. Orange (D-At Large) suggested that the council might pass emergency legislation when it meets again Oct. 1 — the day the federal shutdown could take effect — declaring all city employees essential. “If we ever wanted to make a stand, this would be the opportune time,” he said. But by then the legislation could be moot. The city is required to submit shutdown plans in coming days to the Office of Management and Budget, under whose rules only employees in key financial positions or engaged in activities “bearing a reasonable relationship to the safety of human life or the protection of property” may remain on the job. It is unclear how the office might react should Gray submit a plan seeking to keep all city employees on the job; calls and e-mails to the agency’s communications office went unreturned. Aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly said Gray is prepared to undertake an act of defiance, but several important questions remain unanswered: Will city employees face potential prosecution? If employees are ordered to work during a federal shutdown, will they have to refrain from some of their duties? And if they work, when and how will they be paid? The District has control of cash accounts that could fund ongoing operations during a shutdown, including a contingency reserve fund that a mayor may tap for “unforeseen needs.” But it remained unclear whether Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi would comply with actions that could violate appropriations law. “It would be illegal and improper for me to pay” employees and contracts outside of a congressional appropriation, he said during the breakfast meeting. Later in the session, however, he said he would “leave it up to the mayor and the council” and said he was not concerned about being prosecuted. “We Gandhis are used to going to jail,” he said. Aaron C. Davis contributed to this report.

Police turn to new DNA-powered technology in hopes of finding killer

Four years ago, Candra Alston and her 3-year-old daughter, Malaysia Boykin, were murdered inside their South Carolina apartment. Police in Columbia collected DNA at the scene, but the investigation stalled. Prime-time crime shows would have you believe DNA samples can convict the guilty and clear the innocent, but real life is more complicated. In order to find an assailant, the DNA has to match either a previous offender in the FBI’s CODIS database or a sample from one of the victim’s acquaintances. When it doesn’t, the investigation hits a wall. In the South Carolina case, police gathered 150 DNA samples and conducted 200 interviews with likely suspects — and still nothing. Now the Columbia police are experimenting with a new technology that uses tiny amounts of DNA to create a computer-generated illustration of their suspect. Snapshot, a program developed by a Reston, Va., company called Parabon NanoLabs, goes beyond simply listing physical attributes — eye color, hair color, ethnicity and facial features — and creates a 3-D image of what the killer might look like. The police in South Carolina hope that publicly releasing the suspect’s image and description will bring up fresh leads in a stale case. Dabrien “Dabe” Murphy, the senior solutions architect at Parabon, sits in front of three monitors in a little office on the fourth floor of an unremarkable Reston office building — not exactly the first place that comes to mind when you think of a lab. With a few keystrokes, Murphy brings up a revolving 3-D image — the back of a head. Another few taps and a face attaches itself along the hairline. The face is a man’s: olive skin, greenish eyes, full lips. Murphy has fed DNA markers, linked to certain facial attributes, into 3-D imaging software to create what he calls a “composition.” It produces a somewhat distorted image where the face meets the rest of the 3-D model. “There’s a little bit of, okay, manual manipulation to make this not look quite so Frankensteined,” Murphy explains. Using his cursor to adjust points and axes in the imaging software, Murphy smooths out the hairline and jaw where the projected face attaches itself to the head. According to the markers Murphy feeds into the imaging software, the man on the screen is of Northwest African ancestry, with hazel or green eyes; black or brown hair; and few or no freckles. This man’s DNA was publicly available, so they’re using it to test their model; they know, from the data included with the DNA, that he is Algerian. The trait predictions come with varying levels of confidence; Parabon’s scientists are 73.4 percent sure that their skin color prediction is accurate, but they are 94.7 percent confident in the subject’s eye color. All this from 9.6 nanograms of DNA. That’s less than 0.00000001 grams, an amount so small, it’s hard to compare to anything else. Snapshot combs through a genotype, searching for significant markers and clusters that might indicate physical attributes and removing unimportant variables. “We start from our million markers and then we cut that down to hundreds or thousands,” says Ellen McRae Greytak, the bioinformatics manager at Parabon. “We’re not specifying ahead of time markers that we think might be important. We’re just searching through the whole genome to find what is important.” Greytak and others then cross-validate their prediction against DNA samples not included in their model. Greytak and Steven Armentrout, a Parabon founder and chief executive, say they have performed sample analyses for major metro police departments and federal agencies, and they are working on about a dozen cases. But Parabon’s scientists won’t reveal which agencies they’ve worked with, and they would not show these images and photographs of sample subjects to The Post, citing privacy issues. The only publicly available image is the South Carolina suspect — a case that is still unsolved. Moses Schanfield, professor of forensic science at George Washington University, is skeptical. “How many times has this led to an arrest and conviction?” he asks. He is wary of latching onto the latest shiny innovation. “We’ve got lots of things we can do technologically. Whether or not they in fact work is a whole different question.” Schanfield also questions Parabon’s decision not to publish any of its work. “So none of it’s peer-reviewed?” he asks. “There’s no track record. There’s no data. There is nothing hard that establishes that they can actually do what they say they’re doing.” It’s your high school math teacher’s favorite adage: Show your work. “We’re not trying to publish a paper,” Armentrout counters. “We’re trying to do prediction. “This is for generating a lead. We’re providing information to help the law enforcement community be more effective.” Any lab can test for eye color, hair color and ethnicity to some extent, but Greytak says Snapshot offers greater detail and higher levels of confidence in the accuracy of its predictions. Greytak is also confident that the program can pinpoint ancestry in greater detail than before. “So, someone has one parent from one place and one from another, we’ll detect that,” she says. “That’s very new.” “There’s a lot of information in DNA that is just not being used in the forensics field.” Predicting face shape and features is also new. Snapshot examines the effects of characteristics such as sex and ethnicity. “The most important one is going from a very feminine face to a very masculine face,” Greytak says. “This affects the whole face: the cheekbones, the length of the face, the shape of the nose.” They don’t expect to find markers for a single feature, such as where the tip of the nose falls. “But there might be a marker that does affect the whole size of the nose.” The company is developing Snapshot through a small-business grant from the Department of Defense. It works with outside labs to do the genotyping. Snapshot is being used on cold cases such as that of Alston and her daughter, but it could be used in any case with DNA samples. “By narrowing the suspect pool and allowing investigators to focus on high-value suspects, we aim to keep cases from going cold in the first place,” Greytak says. Armentrout says he thinks this technology could one day be applied to less-major cases, such as property crimes. “We think it’s game-changing,” he says. Predicting, with a certain level of confidence, a subject’s features could be helpful in an investigation. However, Parabon’s scientists have learned that excluding certain characteristics may be even more important. “When we got into this, we only gave point predictions: ‘Skin color is X,’ ” Armentrout says. “We quickly learned that what they [law enforcement] really prefer is a higher-confidence statement about what it’s not.” Of course, there are other characteristics not determined by genetics, like age and weight. And while researchers have found markers for height, no one has yet determined how one’s DNA actually affects how tall they’ll be. Creating the images, too, has come with certain challenges. For instance, creating realistic 3-D hair — including facial hair — has been quite difficult. “We’re still working on it,” Armentrout says.

A Md. court’s bizarre ban against collecting DNA samples

MARYLAND’S HIGHEST COURT last monthbarred police from collecting DNA samples upon arrest from suspects charged with violent crimes and burglaries. The decision deals a blow not just to public safety but also to common sense. It should be appealed, and overturned, as quickly as possible. In Maryland, as in about half the states, it has been routine practice since 2009 for law enforcement officers to take DNA samples from individuals charged with certain serious crimes. Collecting the samples involves swabbing the inside of a cheek — an easy, quick and painless procedure, no more invasive than fingerprinting. In addition to its utility in identifying suspects, collecting DNA from pretrial detainees has helped to close cold cases, including some serious ones. Nonetheless, in a 5 to 2 decision, the state Court of Appeals ruled that suspects enjoy, along with the presumption of innocence, an expectation of privacy — including from DNA swabs — that outweighs the government’s interest in fighting crime. The court had previously given the green light to taking DNA samples from violent criminals following conviction. It’s a bizarre decision, to say the least. In many jurisdictions, and with explicit Supreme Court sanction, suspects are frisked, handcuffed and even strip-searched upon arrest. They are routinely fingerprinted, and in jail they can be observed, by uniformed officers or by other inmates, sleeping, eating or on the toilet. But according to the Maryland court, a five-second cheek swab constitutes an unreasonable search and an unwarranted intrusion into a suspect’s reasonable expectation of privacy. That seems a stretch, to say the least. In fact, the collection of DNA samples — a technology that’s been forensically useful for a quarter century — is nothing more than an updated means of accurately identifying arrestees. As with fingerprints or even blood drawn from suspects — which the Supreme Court has explicitly permitted — DNA swabs can help police to implicate or exonerate a suspect in a crime, past or present. The Maryland court frets that DNA contains a treasure trove of genetic information that a suspect should not be compelled to reveal. But state law forbids authorities from using DNA for purposes beyond identification. And, as Judge Mary Ellen Barbera pointed out in her dissenting opinion, the procedure by which DNA samples from suspects are tested does not yield any intimate genetic information. The effect of the court’s decision will probably be to void the conviction of Alonzo Jay King Jr. for a 2003 rape. Mr. King’s conviction was based on a DNA sample taken six years after the fact, when he was arrested in an unrelated assault case in 2009. The appeals court says that, in most cases where DNA is needed for conviction, police will have other evidence establishing probable cause for a search warrant to do the swab. “Unfortunately,” the court adds, somewhat sheepishly, “that does not seem likely” in Mr. King’s case. Unfortunately, indeed. ****

FBI errors prompt retrial in 1981 Md. killings

A Maryland judge has thrown out the murder convictions and ordered a new trial for a man imprisoned for nearly 32 years in a notorious 1981 double killing in Harford County, faulting scientific errors in the testimony of several FBI forensic experts. Frederick County Circuit Court Judge G. Edward Dwyer Jr. made the ruling after a new DNA test in March refuted key FBI statements in the 1983 trial of John Norman Huffington, who is now 50. The genetic testing contradicted testimony by an agent with the FBI Laboratory who said that he found Huffington’s hair in the bed where one victim was killed, claiming an accuracy rate of 99.98 percent. “Due to the substantial weight given to the microscopic hair analysis by the jury . . . as well as the results of the DNA test . . . there is a significant possibility that the outcome of Petitioner’s case may have been different,” Dwyer wrote in a May 1 order that Huffington’s lawyers received Wednesday. Harford County State’s Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly said he will ask Dwyer to reconsider the ruling and, if necessary, appeal, citing evidence of Huffington’s guilt. Cassilly said he would continue to pursue the case “if there is any possible way I can.” Huffington’s lawyers said they hoped there would be no retrial. “John Huffington has asserted his innocence for more than 30 years,” said Ryan M. Malone, counsel with the Ropes & Gray law firm. “He’s served 30 years in prison, and today we’re celebrating a victory because the truth has finally come out.” Huffington’s case was among those featured in a series of articles last year in The Washington Post, which reported that government officials knew for years that flawed forensic testimony and false hair matches may have led to hundreds of wrongful convictions. On Tuesday, Mississippi’s Supreme Court stayed the execution of Willie Jerome Manning for a 1992 double slaying after the FBI offered to retest DNA evidence because of testimony problems uncovered by a new Justice Department review of all FBI hair cases from the 1980s and 1990s. In Maryland, Huffington was convicted of shooting Joseph Hudson, 30, during a drug deal on May 25, 1981, and later using a vodka bottle and knife to beat and stab Hudson’s girlfriend. Diane Becker, 21, was stabbed 33 times in their trailer as her 4-year-old son slept nearby. Huffington’s trial was moved to Frederick County. A key prosecution witness was Huffington’s friend, Deno Kanaras, who testified that he sold Huffington a gun and that Huffington used that gun in the crime. Kanaras also testified that he was forced to accompany Huffington in the killings. The FBI found blood and Huffington’s fingerprint on a gallon liquor bottle that was dumped in the woods near Becker’s burned purse. Kanaras led police to the evidence, as well as to a gun, knife and bullets. Huffington claimed that while he had been with Kanaras and the victims earlier that evening, he had gone home to bed. The fingerprint, he said, was left during one of several earlier visits to the trailer. Kanaras secured a lesser sentence after prosecutors tried him separately for Becker’s murder; he was freed on parole in 2008. Huffington’s lawyers said they did not know of specific problems with the FBI hair examination until informed by The Post that in July 1997, Cassilly considered and then rejected having the FBI review the case because the hair expert involved, FBI Special Agent Michael P. Malone, had been discredited. Cassilly said he subsequently asked the FBI to go forward with a DNA test, which led to the new findings in March. While an FBI microscopic hair examination last May reached the same conclusion as Malone, DNA testing found that the hair on Becker’s bedsheet that was traced to Huffington did not come from him, Kanaras, Hudson or Becker. Separately, other FBI agents testified that bullets found at several crime scenes could be traced to a single box of ammunition. They relied on a technique that has been scientifically discredited. They also claimed that slugs found at different scenes were fired by a single weapon, a claim the FBI now says must be qualified. Huffington was initially sentenced to death. He was resentenced to two life terms in prison after a 1991 appeal . A retrial would be Huffington’s third. His defense has cost more than $1 million, his lawyers said.

After 46 years in prison, man argues DNA evidence proves he is innocent of 4-year-old’s murder

When Sherman Brown was convicted and imprisoned in the brutal killing of a 4-year-old Virginia boy, the Vietnam War was still raging and the Watergate was just a hotel, not a scandal. Then 22 years old, he maintained his innocence at the time and as each decade faded into the next. Now, after nearly a half-   century behind bars, Brown is petitioning Virginia’s Supreme Court, saying DNA collected from newly recovered evidence indicates that he could not have committed the murder. Justices now will have to weigh whether that genetic evidence is strong enough to warrant overturning his 1970 conviction in Albemarle County. If Brown, 69, is exonerated, he would be among the longest-serving prisoners to be cleared of a crime in the history of Virginia and the nation. It would be an extraordinary turnabout for a man who was initially sentenced to death before the sentence was reduced to life. “Recent DNA testing demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence what I have maintained for over 45 years: that I am innocent of this crime,” Brown wrote in his writ of actual innocence filed in early October and first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “The evidence against me at trial was deeply flawed.” Brown was convicted of first-degree murder after a vicious 1969 attack near Charlottesville, Va., during which a woman was beaten, stabbed and possibly raped in her home. The same man also fatally stabbed the woman’s 4-year-old son, leaving him face down on his bed. The mother survived and identified Brown as her attacker. He was also linked to the crime via a type of fiber and hair analysis that the FBI in recent years has acknowledged is flawed, in part after reporting by The Washington Post. Brown writes in court filings that new tests ruled him out as the source of a partial male DNA profile found in a recently recovered slide containing a vaginal swab taken from the woman after the attack. Neither the woman nor her son are identified in recent court records. The tests also showed a greater than 98 percent chance that the material did not come from the woman’s husband, according to the filing. The woman recently told prosecutors she had a monogamous relationship with her husband, Brown’s attorneys said in the court papers, arguing that the DNA must have come from an unidentified third man who was the actual attacker. Brown’s attorneys, who include lawyers from the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and New York’s Innocence Project, said that the type of Y-chromosome DNA recovered from the swab cannot be matched against DNA samples of known perpetrators contained in state or federal databases. Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring’s office has not filed a response to Brown’s writ of actual innocence and another writ of habeas corpus claiming that prosecutors relied on the discredited hair and fiber analysis. Albemarle County prosecutors did not respond to a request for comment. “As with all such petitions, we will closely examine and consider the claims and evidence as we prepare a response for the Supreme Court,” Michael Kelly, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, wrote in an email. Brown had recently returned from serving in the Vietnam War when the horrific events of Oct. 1, 1969, unfolded. Prosecutors said at trial that a man knocked on the door of the woman’s home that afternoon. The woman went to the door with her 4-year-old son and opened it. The man asked for a drink of water. After a brief conversation, prosecutors said, the man propositioned the woman for sex and the woman repeatedly refused. Prosecutors said the man told her, “I’m so sexed up, I don’t know what to do.” Soon after, the woman vaguely remembered receiving painful blows to her side and was knocked unconscious, prosecutors said. Later that afternoon, the woman’s sister-in-law came to the house and found the woman beaten and stabbed. Her underwear had also been removed. The 4-year-old boy was found covered in blood on his bed, prosecutors said. He had been beaten and stabbed several times. Prosecutors argued at trial that the suspect raped or tried to rape the woman and attacked her and killed her son to try to get rid of any witnesses. An analysis of the woman’s vaginal swab performed after the attack indicated the presence of sperm, according to Brown’s filing. At trial, the woman was the sole eyewitness who identified Brown as her attacker. The woman testified that she had smoked a cigarette with him during a previous 15-minute encounter. In his filings, Brown denies ever meeting the woman and said she might have misidentified him because they were of different races, among other factors. Brown is African American; the woman is white. At trial, an FBI agent testified that Brown’s hair was found on a sweatshirt that also contained fibers that matched a robe the woman was wearing during the attack, tying Brown to the crime. The woman’s testimony and forensic evidence was enough for an all-white jury to convict Brown after a brief deliberation. He was sentenced to death. Brown was on Virginia’s death row when the Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty in 1972. Brown was resentenced to life, before the death penalty was reinstated. In 2008, the Innocence Project reached an agreement with the Albemarle County prosecutor’s office to begin DNA testing in the case. After an audit, the Justice Department also recently told Brown’s attorneys that the FBI agent erred in his analysis of the hairs found on the sweatshirt. But the true break came last year, when members of the University of Virginia’s Innocence Project discovered the slide containing the vaginal swab at the school’s Department of Pathology. More than 40 people have been exonerated of crimes in Virginia, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. If exonerated, Brown would join Earl Washington Jr. as the only other person to have sat on death row in the state before being cleared of a crime, if the Supreme Court rules in his favor. There are a number of steps before that could happen. The Virginia Supreme Court stayed the writ of actual innocence for 90 days so that additional testing can be done to try to conclusively exclude the woman’s husband as the contributor of the male DNA found in the vaginal swab. The state must respond to Brown’s filing. Then, the Supreme Court will decide whether to hold oral arguments before rendering a decision. After 46 years, Brown will have to wait a bit longer for his claim of innocence to be decided once again. “It’s very tragic to think someone has been in prison for four decades and he may actually be innocent of the crime,” said Susan Friedman, an attorney with the Innocence Project. Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

Jesse L. Matthew linked to earlier assault via DNA from victim’s fingernail

The man accused of abducting University of Virginia student Hannah Graham has been linked to a 2005 sexual assault in Fairfax City via DNA evidence collected from one of the victim’s fingernails, according to court records. The Virginia Department of Forensic Science’s comparison of DNA taken from Jesse L. Matthew Jr. and the sample taken from the woman at the time of the attack concluded that there is a “1 in greater than 7.2 billion” chance the DNA might belong to another person, according to the court records. Such a scientific finding, which eliminates almost the entire world population, probably will be central to the criminal case against Matthew. The analysis was performed late last month after Matthew’s indictment on several charges related to the Sept. 24, 2005, attack on a 26-year-old woman in Fairfax City, court records show. The woman was walking home from a supermarket about 10 p.m. when a man approached her from behind and grabbed her, authorities have said. The attacker carried the woman to a wooded area, where he sexually assaulted her. The man fled when a passerby startled him. The sample collected from the victim jibes with a description of the attack that people with knowledge of the investigation gave The Washington Post. They said the woman vigorously fought her attacker and might have scratched his face; they described the suspect as possibly having scratches. Skin cells and blood from a scratch can provide enough evidence for a DNA match. The victim in the Fairfax City case lives overseas, and attempts to reach her have been unsuccessful. The Post generally does not identify victims of sex crimes. Matthew, 32, of Charlottesville has been charged with attempted capital murder, abduction with intent to defile and object sexual penetration in the case. Matthew was arrested in Texas in September on charges related to the Graham case. Graham, 18, of Fairfax County, disappeared after she got lost during a night out in Charlottesville. Surveillance video showed Matthew following her and later with his arm around her. Graham’s body was found on an abandoned property outside of Charlottesville last month. Matthew has been charged with abduction with intent to defile in her case. Frank Battle, an administrator with the office of the chief medical examiner, said Thursday that the investigation into the cause of death is ongoing. James L. Camblos III, an attorney for Matthew, declined to comment on the DNA evidence because he had not seen the analysis. Dawn Butorac, the Fairfax County deputy public defender who also represents Matthew, and Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh both declined to comment Thursday. Authorities had said that forensic evidence also linked the Fairfax assault to the disappearance of Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington. She vanished after leaving a Metallica concert on the U-Va. campus in 2009. Her body was discovered months later on a farm outside Charlottesville. People with knowledge of the investigation have told The Post that the cases were tied by DNA evidence. Matthew is scheduled to appear in the Fairfax case Nov. 14. Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

Remains of Cynthia Gastelle of Takoma Park identified 32 years after her disappearance

Cynthia Joan Gastelle left her Takoma Park home on the morning of April 3, 1980, her family said, headed for job interviews in Silver Spring. The diminutive 18-year-old made it to one appointment, at a delicatessen, and then disappeared. Cynthia’s father reported her missing, and for more than 30 years, the Gastelle family searched for her, making agonizing trips to morgues and fielding tips from across the country. Each lead turned up cold. On Wednesday, authorities announced that DNA from skeletal remains found in 1982 — in what was then a remote section of Prince William County — was Cynthia’s. For her relatives, some of whom attended the news conference, the discovery did not bring closure but a fresh wound: Cynthia, described by her brother Peter as a “beautiful and vibrant” girl who loved to dance, had been killed. “We had so hoped that she would come back to us,” said Peter Gastelle, whose voice cracked as he spoke. “Our hope is now gone, and our hearts are broken again.” Peter Gastelle and police issued an appeal to the public for leads in the long-standing mystery. Emphasizing the many years that have passed, Gastelle — with a shock of white hair — stood next to a portrait of his sister, who had long, feathered blond locks. Cynthia would have been 49, if she had lived. Gastelle, who was accompanied by a brother and sister Wednesday, said his parents died without knowing what happened to their youngest child. Prince William police said the break in the case came after DNA samples were collected from the Gastelle family in 2011 to see whether the material matched DNA from remains found in another jurisdiction. There was no hit in that case, but the Virginia medical examiner notified police in May that the family’s samples matched remains discovered in Prince William. Authorities credited advances in forensic science for the hit. The match was produced by a type of test that uses mitochondrial DNA and that has been used in Virginia only since 2008. A hiker stumbled upon the remains in a wooded area in the 1100 block of Mountain Road, near Haymarket, in February 1982. The skeleton showed injuries consistent with a stabbing, police said. A cream-colored sweater and dark corduroy pants were found with the remains, police said. Cynthia stood 5-foot-1 and weighed about 90 pounds. Detectives said they want to speak with Cynthia Gastelle’s former boyfriend, a man who was called Mike or Michael and who was a part-time student in his late teens or early 20s at the time of her disappearance. Police said they are unsure of his full name, but they showed a photo of him in which he has long, curly hair, lambchop sideburns, a goatee and mustache. They emphasized that he is not a suspect in the case. Cynthia, who had recently received a general equivalency diploma from Montgomery Blair High School and a cosmetology certificate, left home about 10:30 that April morning in 1980 and boarded a Ride On bus to Silver Spring, Peter Gastelle said. There were no hints that she was in trouble before she vanished, relatives said. Takoma Park police interviewed relatives and friends and checked records in the days and weeks that followed, but no sign of Cynthia turned up. In 2001, her DNA was entered in a national database, and police have periodically asked the public for help with the case. Police said it is unclear how she ended up in Prince William, about 45 miles from her home. “We don’t see any connection between Cynthia Gastelle and Northern Virginia,” said Detective Brian Cody of the Prince William police. On the day Cynthia disappeared, her father received a call from the Silver Spring deli where she had interviewed for a job, Peter Gastelle said. The owner of the deli informed Terrence Gastelle that his daughter had gotten the job. “Cindy, we love you — always have and always will,” Peter Gastelle said. “We hope you are at peace.”

After FBI admits overstating forensic hair matches, focus turns to cases

With federal officials’ acknowledgment that nearly an entire unit of FBI forensic examiners overstated testimony about hair matches for decades, legal analysts say the question now is how courts and prosecutors will respond to criminal convictions that may have relied on such evidence. A sampling of cases in Massachusetts and North Carolina shows the challenges facing convicts seeking to appeal. They also pose a reminder that state and local forensic experts trained by the FBI testified against defendants, too, using the same microscopic hair comparison methods now deemed scientifically erroneous. In a joint statement Monday with the two outside legal groups assisting them, the Justice Department and the FBI acknowledged that 26 of 28 FBI examiners gave flawed testimony or reports in at least 90 percent of the 500 criminal cases reviewed so far, including in 96 percent of the 268 trials in which examiners gave evidence against defendants. The cases in question date to 1972. “Such statements are no longer being made by the FBI,” which now conducts DNA testing on hair in cases of visual matches, said Amy Hess, FBI executive assistant director for science and technology. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (Tex.), the ranking Democrats on the Senate judiciary and House science committees, called on Congress to pass forensic-science reforms to hold examiners to the highest standards. “This kind of gross misconduct simply cannot be tolerated in our criminal justice system,” Leahy said. Prosecutors and defense lawyers are being notified to determine if the outcome of cases hinged on the problem testimony. The FBI has offered new DNA testing, and the Justice Department will drop procedural objections to appeals in federal cases. But the picture is different in state cases, where most errors occurred. Biological evidence in these cases often is lost, destroyed or degraded. Only California and Texas specifically allow appeals when experts recant or when scientific advances undermine forensic evidence at trial. According to the Innocence Project, which along with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers participated in the government review, scientifically invalid forensic testimony should be considered a violation of due process and grounds for appeal, as courts have held with false or misleading testimony. “Nobody disputes that mistakes are made or that mistakes are inevitable,” said M. Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project. “But here we have an ethical and moral obligation to address these individual cases.” In Massachusetts, attorneys for George Perrot, in prison for nearly 30 years after being convicted of raping a 78-year-old woman in Springfield in 1985, are seeking a new trial. Perrot is among the first defendants notified of the FBI errors who have asked for new trials in the absence of DNA evidence. Perrot, who was 17 at the time of the rape and had multiple burglary arrests, was identified in a purse-snatching the night of Dec. 7, 1985. After lengthy interrogation, he confessed to burglarizing the homes of two elderly women in his neighborhood a week earlier but denied attacking one of the women who said she was raped, according to court papers. The victim declined to identify him. But at trial, an FBI expert testified that he had found a hair matching Perrot on the victim’s bedsheet, court papers said. “It would be a substantial miscarriage of justice to keep Perrot imprisoned on the basis of this now indisputably false and misleading forensic testimony,” his lawyers wrote in seeking a new trial. Perrot’s attorneys say the original prosecutor was reprimanded by the state bar for falsifying Perrot’s signature on a confession to the crime and other similar crimes, in an attempt to get alleged co-conspirators to confess. They also say inconsistencies with other evidence suggest police misconduct and perjury. Prosecutors say biological evidence has been destroyed and cannot be tested for DNA. They say that Perrot did not appeal in a timely manner and previously challenged the FBI evidence, and that there was other evidence of guilt. “The Commonwealth’s case against the defendant was strong. Justice was done in the defendant’s case,” the Hampden district attorney’s office wrote. In North Carolina, Timothy Scott Bridges is seeking a new trial while serving life for the rape of an 83-year-old woman in Charlotte in May 1989. The disabled victim, who died of unrelated causes in 1990, gave varying descriptions of her attacker and never identified Bridges. A Charlotte forensic expert, among hundreds trained by the FBI before 2000, matched two hairs at the crime scene to Bridges, then 22, according to court papers. The expert asserted there was only a 1 in 1,000 chance that they might have come from someone else, testimony the FBI review states “exceeds the limits of the science.” There is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same. The FBI now uses DNA testing in combination with hair examination. “If offered today, the hair evidence would be inadmissible, and without the hair evidence there was insufficient evidence to convict Mr. Bridges,” wrote his attorney, Lauren E. Miller, with North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services. A spokeswoman said that the Mecklenburg County district attorney’s office has been communicating with Bridges’s defense team and that “the matter is under review.” **Twitter: @hsu_spencer**

In D.C., the federal government gives released criminals many chances to fail

**SECOND-CHANCE CITY** | _This is part of a continuing series that examines issues related to repeat violent offenders in the District of Columbia.Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V _ Over two years, 23-year-old Steven Pugh violated almost every condition of his court-ordered probation for carrying a gun in the nation’s capital: He tested positive for PCP, was charged with assault for allegedly dragging his girlfriend across a floor and pleaded guilty to committing a robbery in Maryland. For months, he had disappeared entirely from his probation officer’s radar screen. Still, Pugh’s probation was not revoked, sparing him from a year in jail. In August 2015, Pugh was still failing to show up for drug tests and other appointments, but his probation officer did not press for him to be locked up. The next month, a father of three in Southeast was shot and killed. Pugh was arrested fleeing the scene and later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. A version of Pugh’s case plays out frequently in the District. About 150 times a year, the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency loses track of offenders it classifies as high-risk, the agency acknowledges. Several hundred additional offenders classified as lower-risk also go missing, and scores of them turn up as suspects in new crimes, according to court records. But the problem does not stop there. Unlike supervisory agencies in many states, CSOSA does not notify law enforcement or the public in the District about missing offenders, even when it believes an offender “has the potential to create a new victim,” as the agency wrote in court records about Pugh. Doing so, it says, would violate federal privacy laws protecting those it calls its “clients” — the absconders. The District is the only jurisdiction in the country where Congress has made supervision of local criminals a federal responsibility. A Washington Post investigation has found that federal control has created layers of bureaucracy that make it difficult to quickly put those who violate the terms of their release back behind bars or to effectively monitor the most dangerous offenders released back into the community. A review of hundreds of court cases and federal documents, as well as interviews with prosecutors, police, defense attorneys and criminal justice experts, shows that the District’s uniquely constructed criminal justice system often breaks down at the vulnerable point when offenders are leaving jail or prison and returning to the streets. CSOSA (see-so-sa) does not automatically share details about its offenders’ absences with D.C. police, as many similar state or local agencies do with police in their jurisdictions, criminal justice experts say. And when offenders are caught in a serious violation, the agency has to petition the courts and the U.S. Parole Commission to revoke probation or parole, or to have a warrant issued for their arrest. Then, CSOSA must usually rely on a third federal agency, the U.S. Marshals Service, to get the offender back to the D.C. jail or prison. About once a week, a D.C. offender under federal supervision ends up as either a victim or a suspect in a homicide investigation. Last year, nearly one out of four people charged with a killing in the District was under CSOSA supervision, while one out of five victims also was in its care, according to agency and police data. Offenders under CSOSA’s supervision were charged with nearly 1,500 crimes of violence in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, according to documents submitted to Congress. In all of 2016, 836 individuals have been convicted of crimes, and that represents about 5 percent of the total under supervision, the agency said. “It’s set up to fail people,” said Philip J. Fornaci, past director of the D.C. Prisoners’ Project, who now works to find jobs for returning inmates as head of the Employment Justice Center. “If it was actually a system that was geared toward rehabilitation, it wouldn’t be set up like this, and if public safety were a real concern, it wouldn’t be set up like this.” Nancy M. Ware, director of CSOSA since 2012, said the agency first tries to give offenders every chance to succeed before it labels someone an absconder, potentially sending an offender back to jail or prison. “Sometimes a person is in a loss of contact for several days because they have a death in their family, they have some issue with children. There are all kinds of reasons that we lose contact,” she said. “With our population, we want to give them the benefit of the doubt.” Ware said CSOSA has made strides in coordinating with D.C. police and other law enforcement agencies, including joint home visits to high-risk offenders. She also stressed that the number of CSOSA clients linked to violent crimes in the District is a small fraction of the roughly 17,000 offenders who cycle through supervision in a given year. Ware said that the agency conducts a “fatality review” of every killer or victim who was under CSOSA supervision but has not been able to discern a pattern to prevent future violence. She suggested that those who do return to violent crime — especially those who kill — are often beyond the help of any government agency. “They go into a liquor store or get into an argument with somebody and, you know, take that person out,” she said. “Or they are in a crap game and get mad at each other, so they have an incident where it escalates to the point of violence. “In some cases, it’s people who have had a history with that person and it goes way, way back,” Ware said. “Their pasts may have caught up with them.” CSOSA did not respond to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Post seeking detailed data on recidivism. The federal office has almost 900 employees and an annual budget of $182 million. CSOSA was born almost two decades ago out of a dark moment in the District’s history, when the city under then-Mayor Marion Barry was tumbling toward bankruptcy. As a condition of a federal bailout, Congress took control of most of the District’s criminal justice system. Because it is a federal agency, CSOSA does not have to report to the District’s mayor or the D.C. Council. It also does not have to answer to the Justice Department. Its director is appointed by the president to a six-year term, and Congress, which has oversight, has not called a hearing on the agency in almost four years. CSOSA’s unique position constrains its ability to help or monitor offenders. It lacks the resources of a state or local social services agency, such as the ability to provide short-term housing placements or care in long-term mental- health facilities for those too unstable to remain in the community. A new report from the nonprofit Council for Court Excellence said that almost half of all offenders returning to D.C. from federal prisons have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. After 90 days under supervision of CSOSA, the report said, more than seven in 10 offenders capable of working had no job and nearly a third of those had no stable housing. Fixing these problems is hard. It took years of lobbying, an act of Congress and the signature of President Obama this year to add two words — “and incentives” — in the agency’s federal charter. That insertion gives CSOSA the latitude to offer offenders not only punishments but also rewards for good behavior. The most-discussed incentive was $1.75 in D.C. bus fare to travel to job interviews. It’s a stark contrast with rapid policy changes underway in states across the political spectrum, from Kansas to North Carolina, where in recent years officials have instituted programs that provide incentives but also, when offenders slip up, almost immediate overnight stays in jail. In the District, court records show, it can take nearly two months for CSOSA officials to get a warrant approved and served. “It’s really easy to see the next homicide coming, but they don’t connect the dots,” said Nardyne Jefferies, who has been advocating for policy changes in the District since 2010, when her 16-year-old daughter, Brishell, was among four people killed in a drive-by shooting carried out by several repeat offenders, including two under CSOSA supervision. “Those who monitor these criminals have to do their jobs and be more proactive, because there is a lot of damage and destruction to families they are leaving behind out here,” Jefferies said. “It’s not like we’re flushing goldfish down the toilet — these were human beings. We had fed them and loved them.” In court documents, the limited effectiveness of the agency is perhaps best reflected in one of the few punishments that it can order: electronic monitoring. Each year, the agency affixes ankle bracelets equipped with Global Positioning System transmitters onto roughly 1,700 repeat, violent or sexual offenders. Agency documents say the goals of the program are to allow CSOSA to track offenders’ compliance with curfews, and set up restricted areas — around known territories for gang members, or schools and parks for sexual predators. In recent years, court records show that offenders who tampered with the devices routinely faced little to no jail time, even after disabling them again and again. In 2012, a convicted robber cut off his GPS bracelet and later challenged his conviction for doing so. He argued that it wasn’t a crime because a civilian agency, and not a judge or parole commissioner, had ordered it. The D.C. Court of Appeals sided with the offender, Jeffrey Hunt. Early this year, CSOSA successfully sought a warrant for 23-year-old Deandre Providence, saying he had repeatedly tampered with his GPS device, including failing to charge it. CSOSA was unable to locate him more than 10 times between December 2015 and February this year, court records show. Providence, who was on supervised release stemming from a gun charge from 2013, was charged with tampering with a detection device. Prosecutors in March offered him a plea bargain, which he accepted: one night in jail. Providence has since been arrested on charges of selling synthetic drugs and has been released pending trial. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment. The agency did not publicly push to close the GPS loophole until September, after The Post reported that a judge allowed a violent offender, Antwon Pitt, to remain free after being found with a substance that appeared to be synthetic marijuana **** and a disabled GPS monitoring device. Pitt raped and beat a college professor in her Hill East home days later. The D.C. mayor and council responded this month, with the support of CSOSA, passing emergency legislation designed to make removal of any GPS device a crime. But CSOSA’s difficulties with electronic monitoring are not solved. It is not uncommon for offenders to commit new armed robberies, carjackings and even homicides while under GPS surveillance, according to a review of more than 200 Superior Court case files. The agency said 72 individuals under GPS monitoring were convicted of new crimes this year, which represents about 9 percent of the total convictions for those supervised by CSOSA. Ware, the CSOSA director, acknowledged that GPS is not a magic bullet: “It’s definitely not a deterrent to crime, and I think that’s the misunderstanding sometimes about GPS,” she said. Dalonte Weems, now in federal prison in Cumberland, Md., is among dozens of offenders who have brazenly — and repeatedly — committed crimes while under CSOSA monitoring. In the fall of 2013, Weems had a bracelet on when he rang a doorbell and pointed a handgun at the man who answered. Weems, then 20, was under supervision for a previous conviction in his teens, and GPS data later showed Weems leaving his apartment, walking to the victim’s home and then departing. Through GPS, police tracked Weems to his apartment and found a loaded 9mm handgun in a closet, court records show. Weems could have been sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison for carrying a firearm without a license, but under the District’s Youth Rehabilitation Act, he was given 20 months with all but 10 months suspended. The law allows young adult offenders younger than 22 to receive shorter sentences for some crimes and have their records sealed from public view. By April 2015, Weems had twice more been fitted with a GPS device, the last time a month before he committed three armed robberies of taxicab drivers in the District’s Brightwood and U Street neighborhoods, according to charging documents. In the last of those robberies, in May, the driver told police that after he arrived at his passenger’s requested destination, near Fort Totten, he felt the barrel of a gun against the right side of his head. The driver claimed that Weems and another person took $120 from the driver’s pocket as well as his ID badge, cellphone and wallet, documents show. It is unclear from court records whether Weems was still wearing the GPS device at the time. A cellphone he had when he was arrested had been used to summon two of the taxis, according to court records. Weems pleaded guilty to two counts of robbery and is scheduled to be released from prison in 2020. Weems declined a request for an interview. As the District’s homicide tally was rising rapidly in the summer of 2015, during Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s first year in office, the tone was growing increasingly urgent at monthly closed-door meetings of the city’s local and federal law enforcement agencies. Kevin Donahue, Bowser’s deputy mayor for public safety, wanted to know whom he could talk to about getting CSOSA to share more information with police. He had attended meetings with officials in Maryland and other states where chiefs of police and corrections were cabinet members, but in the District he was not sure who was ultimately in charge of probation and parole. “Who is your boss?” Donahue asked, turning to Ware, the director of CSOSA. He expected, perhaps, that she would answer with the name of an assistant attorney general or a high-ranking official in the federal prison system whom he could get on the phone or drive across town to see. Instead, Ware’s answer floored Donahue. “I report to the president of the United States,” she said. Ware and Donahue both confirmed the exchange. Ware told The Post: “That doesn’t mean I don’t also report to Congress and I don’t also report to the people of the District of Columbia.” Donahue said recently, “I think it illustrates the complexity of the system within which we operate.” By August 2015, nearly half of the suspects that D.C. police were charging in killings were offenders under the supervision of CSOSA or were free pending trial, according to briefing documents prepared for city law enforcement leaders. Bowser’s administration pushed for CSOSA to more aggressively monitor offenders who had been convicted of a violent crime. Bowser could not change CSOSA’s charter, but she could affect the conditions that D.C. inmates must agree to for release. She introduced a bill to require offenders who had been convicted of a violent felony to submit to random searches of their person and residence by CSOSA. But the agency lobbied against a more hands-on role. Cedrick Hendricks, a top CSOSA official, testified before the D.C. Council. He read a letter from Ware that called the proposal “problematic” because it would authorize CSOSA officers to seize firearms or other dangerous weapons that they were not trained to handle. The letter from Ware also warned that the searches would “undermine” the relationships its officers seek to build with clients, to intervene positively in their lives. “Many of CSOSA’s supervised clients are plagued by limited education, unemployment, unstable housing, frayed family relationships, and, increasingly, mental health needs,” she said. “This proposal would undermine the successes we have realized to date.” D.C. officials testified that police could not conduct the searches if CSOSA refused to do so because officers need probable cause. Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), chairman of the D.C. Council’s Judiciary Committee, said the proposal was unworkable and killed it. McDuffie is among CSOSA’s many defenders in the city. He said CSOSA’s lack of transparency can undermine public confidence, but he believes the agency gets an outsize share of the blame for the failures of a confusing and inefficient system. “They have an impossible job,” McDuffie said. “We need to start by doing a better job rehabilitating those who have been incarcerated before they are put back in the care of CSOSA and back into the community.” Thomas H. Williams, who used to be in charge of all 500 probation and parole officers at the agency, said that during his years there that he tried unsuccessfully to get the Federal Bureau of Prisons to more deliberately match inmates with job training programs in prison so they could return with useful skills and ease the job of CSOSA. “If a person wanted to have skills as an electrician, great, work on that while they’re inside,” Williams said. But years of meetings with federal prison officials, he said, led nowhere. There are few national standards in parole and probation. Roughly 30 states have a centralized system for supervising former inmates. In the remainder, rules differ from place to place. If there is one commonality, said Marshall Clement, director of state initiatives at the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center, it is that budget pressures and politics have forced every jurisdiction to search for more effective solutions. CSOSA, however, operates in a realm unbound from such pressures, its budget requests largely fulfilled by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and Congress. It is also insulated from the local political pressures that the District’s elected leaders face to keep crime down. When Congress authorized the creation of CSOSA in 1997, it made the agency an independent entity under the executive branch. The agency promulgated its own rules for dealing with the offenders coming under its supervision. When CSOSA lost contact with an offender, its employees were supposed to immediately begin a search, make phone calls to the offender and send a certified letter to the offender’s last known address. The agency gave itself 21 days to complete the process — 18 days to hear from the offender, and another three to file a report of the missing with a judge or the parole commission — to start the process of getting a warrant to pick someone up, according to agency policy. Ware said officers can move more quickly than 21 days, if they determine it is warranted. But Williams, the former head of probation and parole, said the certified letter process is an embarrassment for the agency. The time frame for getting a warrant, he said, can stretch to 51 days because it can take roughly 30 days to schedule a hearing before a judge. “The timeline is just too long,” Williams said. Before working for CSOSA, Williams led Maryland’s statewide parole and probation system. He said CSOSA does as well as or better than Maryland in identifying offenders who pose a risk to the community. But he said the neighboring jurisdictions could not be more different in terms of how quickly they move to get problem offenders off the street. “If I have a high-risk individual, I could write the warrant, take it to the judge and that same day it could be out for service” in Maryland, he said. “That culture has existed in Maryland for decades, but it does not exist in the District.” ****In the case of Steven Pugh, CSOSA did not file its first report to a judge about his behavior until April 2014, after 41 days of near constant probation violations. Pugh was under supervision after firing a gun outside his Southwest apartment and pleading guilty to a charge of carrying a firearm. A month after Pugh failed drug tests and after three weeks without any contact with him, a CSOSA officer did not list him as being in loss-of-contact status but, instead, classified Pugh’s overall adjustment as “unsatisfactory” and recommended that a judge send him to CSOSA’s 30-day mental health and drug assessment center. CSOSA declined to discuss Pugh’s case. Before he could appear before the judge, Pugh got into an altercation with his girlfriend “about him wanting her to give him money,” according to a police report. Pugh slapped the woman with an open hand around her face and head, said “F--- you, b----, you work, you get money!” and dragged her on the floor, cutting her elbow. He took the woman’s purse and Metro card and her son’s stroller and fled. Pugh was arrested that night and later released. Two months later, in July 2014, he was picked up on a warrant for a previous robbery conviction in Maryland. Pugh pleaded guilty and served most of the next year in jail in Prince George’s County. When he returned to the District after serving his time, he was once again put on probation, this time for assaulting his girlfriend. CSOSA recommended that his probation be revoked, but a judge ordered Pugh to undergo a mental health evaluation and drug treatment. He quickly began violating again. Pugh skipped drug tests on “6/2/2015, 6/10/2015, 6/16/2015, 7/14/2015, 7/21/2015, 8/4/2015, 9/1/2015 and 9/15/2015,” according to another CSOSA violation report. At a court hearing near the end of this period, a CSOSA officer backtracked from the recommendation to have Pugh’s probation revoked. The officer said that while Pugh had missed appointments and walked out of a drug-treatment program, he had attended other meetings and passed a urine test for drug use. He was left on probation. ****On Sept. 19, police responded to reports of gunfire in Southeast and found Marcellus Green with a gunshot wound to the chest. Green’sex-wife told reporters that he had been talking to the couple’s 11-year-old son when a car drove up and people inside began shooting. Pugh was caught after a high-speed chase and charged with first-degree murder. He admitted to being the driver and conspiring to shoot someone he had a “beef” with on the block where Green was killed, according to a police affidavit. Pugh agreed to a plea deal for second-degree murder. He is awaiting sentencing. Pugh’s attorneys declined to comment for this article. Court records show Pugh was among 149 of the most high-risk offenders who were out of contact at some point last year. In Maryland and Virginia, where probation and parole officials have some law enforcement powers, the states maintain websites identifying parole or probation absconders. But CSOSA General Counsel Sheila Stokes said her agency cannot publish or share information in the District that might be considered personal in nature about those it supervises, because CSOSA does not have law enforcement powers and must observe federal privacy laws. “They have not been convicted of an additional crime,” she said, “so we have to be careful how we characterize individuals in the public.” Previously in this series: Amy Brittain and Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

The District drops the ball on Zika

NO “CAUSE for alarm from the general public.” That was the reassurance posted on the D.C. government website in the wake of revelations that health officials had botched Zika testing for hundreds of residents. No doubt the words ring awfully hollow to the nine pregnant women who were incorrectly told they did not have the virus and to scores more who are now anxiously awaiting the results of retesting to determine if they too had been misinformed. Clearly, there is cause for concern — and so it’s important there be a thorough review to determine what led to the mistakes and to guarantee the integrity of future testing. At issue is testing for the Zika virus done by the District’s public-health lab between July 14 and Dec. 14. Discovery of an error in the lab’s testing procedure has resulted in retesting of 409 specimens, including 294 for pregnant women. So far, retests of nine pregnant women have come back positive and, The Post’s Aaron C. Davis reported, that number is likely to rise. The Zika virus can cause severe birth defects, particularly during the first trimester of pregnancy, and accurate and timely testing is critical for women who may want to determine if a pregnancy should be continued. The consequences of the false confidence that results from a mistaken test can be devastating, and it is clear the District should be held liable. It appears the District is the only jurisdiction in the country to have experienced problems with its testing. That’s another troubling black eye for the Department of Forensic Sciences, which operates public-health, crime and forensics labs in a $220 million state-of-the-art facility that opened to much fanfare in 2012. Earlier problems with DNA testing led the U.S. Attorney’s Office to stop using the facility and a subsequent audit found “insufficient and inadequate” practices. There is some small comfort in the fact that the Zika test errors were discovered when Anthony Tran, previously director of policy and operations at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, took over the D.C. lab. It suggests that the new leadership put in place by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) since the problems with the crime lab is more effective. Jenifer Smith, a retired FBI special agent named director of the forensics department in 2015, has gotten good early reviews for her leadership. But if those improvements are to continue and public confidence in the lab maintained, it is critical that additional information about the inaccurate testing be provided to the public and support given to anyone proven to have suffered harm because of the faulty testing. **Read more here:** The Post’s View: D.C.’s inadequate crime lab William C. Thompson: A setback for forensic science Tom Frieden and Edward McCabe: One year later, Zika still affects us all

D.C. launches lead-testing blitz of water sources at schools, recreation centers

In the current academic year, 17 water sources at 12 D.C. public schools tested positive for elevated lead levels. And in recent weeks, the school system has come under fire for not communicating to parents when their children’s school tested positive for the elevated levels. Now, the District says it is responding with more lead testing out of an “abundance of caution” and vows to be upfront about any elevated levels. The Department of General Services (DGS), the city agency responsible for lead testing, announced that throughout May it will retest all water sources in D.C. Public Schools for elevated lead levels. This includes sinks and hoses, not just water fountains. It will also test water sources at city recreation centers before summer camp starts June 17. “As test results are returned, we will remediate any issues, and we will publicly share the results,” City Administrator Rashad M. Young wrote in a letter. High levels of lead are linked to brain damage and developmental problems, including impulsive behavior, poor language skills and trouble retaining new information. The Environmental Protection Agency calls for action when lead levels in schools are at or above 20 parts per billion (ppb) in a 250-milliliter bottle. The District’s threshold is a bit more conservative, at 15 ppb. Last year, DGS discovered traces of lead in the water of Capitol Hill Montessori @ Logan but did not relay this information to the school or parents. Instead, it shut off the water source. A water source tested positive for elevated lead levels again this year. DGS has long posted the results of these lead tests online but never alerted parents to the results. D.C. Public Schools will now alert parents to the results, and when the blitz testing is complete, the school system will provide a detailed report. If a water source tests positive for lead, the source is shut off, filters are installed, and the water is retested before anyone is allowed to use it again. D.C. Council member David Grosso (I-At Large), who chairs the council’s Education Committee, is scheduled to hold a city hearing in June on the testing of lead levels in D.C. public and charter schools.

D.C. police take most breath test machines out of service

D.C. police have been working for nearly two months with only one of the eight machines the department uses to measure the blood-alcohol content of suspected drunk drivers, complicating prosecutions and possibly slowing the number of arrests. The problem arose after the only city employee trained to test the accuracy of the devices, known as Intoximeters, quit early in the summer, officials said. Because the devices require regular certification for the results to be allowed in court, several had to be taken offline. The only Intoximeter in use is in a police station four miles north of downtown. Officers also can take suspects for urine or blood tests — a more cumbersome process. “We haven’t made DUI arrests in large numbers” since July 26, when the machines were deactivated, said Master Patrol Officer Ben Fetting, the D.C. police union’s chief shop steward at the 3rd District station. District officials said that they have hired a new supervisor and trained additional staffers to calibrate the machines, and that three additional Intoximeters will be running this week, with the remainder to become operational in early October. The breath-testing program is run by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which has forensic experts. Police said that between July 26 and Tuesday, D.C. officers made 179 arrests in suspected cases of driving under the influence of alcohol or driving while intoxicated. That is down from the 249 arrests on the same charges made during that period in 2014, according to D.C. police. A police spokeswoman did not comment on possible reasons for the decrease, but said, “Of course we would want as many instruments as possible to reduce processing time by officers.” A spokesman for the Office of the Attorney General, which prosecutes most drunken-driving cases in the city, called the impact minimal, saying authorities have relied on witness testimony or results of the blood or urine tests “to ensure we had the evidence required to prosecute DUI cases fully.” The office did not provide information on whether prosecution or conviction rates dipped for arrests made this summer. Police labor union leaders said officers are choosing to charge many suspects with driving while impaired, which relies more on observation, rather than with the more serious charges of driving under the influence of alcohol or driving while intoxicated, which often require precise measurements of how much alcohol a person had consumed. “It’s not worth the effort battling it in court if it all gets thrown out for something we have no control over,” Fetting said. Problems with the breath machines are just one of the issues involving evidence that have impacted law enforcement agencies in the District this summer. A toxicology lab run by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner halted some blood and urine testing for a few weeks. A separate city-run DNA lab stopped work in April after a national accreditation board identified problems with analysis. Cases were sent to a private lab. Several top employees at the city lab, which is run by the Department of Forensic Sciences, were replaced. The lab is hoping to resume testing by November or December, spokeswoman LaShon Beamon said. Authorities and defense attorneys said no criminal convictions have been impacted thus far by the OCME lab issues. But coming on the heels of the DNA testing issue at the District’s $220 million Consolidated Forensic Laboratory, which opened in 2012 in Southwest Washington, the developments fed questions about the reliability of forensic evidence used by city police and prosecutors, as well as the competence of examiners. “It doesn’t give you confidence that the evidence gathering in the city is in good shape,” said Betty Ballester, head of the D.C. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association. “What is going on? What do you trust? It gives you pause, that’s for sure.” The Office of the Attorney General informed defense attorneys and D.C. judges of the issues with the breath tests and toxicology at the end of August, according to letters obtained by The Washington Post. The legal community had previously been notified of the halt in DNA testing. The medical examiner’s office stopped blood and urine testing at the toxicology lab between May 22 and July 31, outsourcing 108 cases at a cost to taxpayers of about $40,000. D.C. police said there were no delays in investigations during this period. Roger A. Mitchell Jr., the District’s chief medical examiner, said work was suspended because some technicians did not understand when a quality-control feature on the lab instruments indicated that there probably was a problem with results in one drug case. A supervisor later noticed the issue. Mitchell said no faulty test results were published or used, but officials decided that they needed to reeducate staff. “We trained people better to ensure that an error would not get to the last step before the results would go out,” he said. “I wanted to make sure we shored up any errors that could be identified and corrected.” Two months after problems in the toxicology lab surfaced, Mitchell said he suspended the alcohol breath program when the supervisor resigned. He said that additional employees are now trained to maintain the breath machines so that one departure won’t impact the program. “So if someone were to leave now, we won’t have that gap in service,” he said. This is not the first time that the District has stopped using breath-testing machines. The program was halted in 2011 after more than 400 people were arrested based on unreliable test results. At the time, the city was using machines that had not been properly calibrated. They were replaced with the Intoximeters, which are made by another company. The District paid out about $368,000 to settle 20 civil cases brought by drivers convicted using faulty test results. Fetting was one of three police officers who testified about the problems; they later claimed that the department retaliated against them, but courts refused to grant them whistleblower status. In 2013, city officials gave control of the new breath-testing program to the medical examiner’s office. Fetting said that with the machines offline, it is more difficult for officers to arrest suspected drunk drivers. He said that taking suspects to the 4th District — which has the only operational breath machine — on Georgia Avenue NW, one mile south of the Maryland line, can take hours. Blood tests administered at clinics also take time, and urine samples, which can be taken in station houses, are unreliable. Tests on urine are often imprecise because they measure alcohol consumed hours earlier and no longer circulating in the bloodstream.

Questions arise over criminal background searches of jurors in D.C. Superior Court

District prosecutors ran criminal background checks on several potential jurors in a high-profile gang case, raising serious concerns from a judge who questioned why most people they selected were African American. The comments by D.C. Superior Court Judge Lynn Leibovitz came in the recent case of suspected gang members accused of murder, assault and conspiracy. The judge questioned how prosecutors selected those who were given extra scrutiny and ordered them to work through the night to conduct checks on the entire pool of 60 possible jurors. “The focus here is not on whether you had a right to do an investigation of jurors but whether it should be selective as to race,” Leibovitz, a former D.C. prosecutor, said in court. Most prosecutors around the Washington area, including those in Fairfax, Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, said they do not run criminal checks on would-be jurors. Arlington County prosecutors said paralegals there run checks on all potential jurors — a practice started more than a decade ago after a convicted felon was seated on a jury. The Alexandria commonwealth’s attorney said such checks are run only in cases in which authorities think they recall the person from a prior case. Vincent M. Sutherland, senior counsel with the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, called what prosecutors did in the case “troubling.” “If you subject one person to this type of treatment, you have to subject everyone to it. It sends a bad message. Even if the prosecutor had no malicious intent, it smells bad, to say the least,” he said. “When people hear about stories like this, it gives chilling effects on people who want to serve on juries and it breeds mistrust with respect to law enforcement and prosecutors.” Prosecutors initially said they conducted the checks on seven potential jurors, all of whom were African American, according to a transcript of the November jury selection. They later said the inquiries were done on 18 people, 13 of whom are African American. Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Miller told the judge that some of the people were lifelong D.C. residents who had failed to answer a question on a court form about whether they had prior arrests. She also said that in some cases the prosecution had an “instinct or judgment” about the would-be juror. Prosecutors said some of those people had failed to reveal past arrests on charges including prostitution and drug possession — but none had felony convictions that would have disqualified them from serving, and in some cases prosecutors had dropped the charges. Defense lawyers questioned the racial makeup of the group and said it was unfair that prosecutors used databases that aren’t publicly available. Leibovitz ultimately found that there was no racial bias but cautioned prosecutors that “the question about how you select whom you check is one that arose in this case and obviously is one that you ought to be giving thought to in the office in the future.” The judge ordered prosecutors to share the background checks done on all 60 possible jurors with defense lawyers. Under D.C. law, convicted felons are disqualified from jury service until 10 years have passed since the completion of their sentence, including probation or parole. People called for jury duty in D.C. Superior Court fill out a form that includes questions about their criminal record. During the selection process, prosecutors, defense lawyers and the judge can ask the potential jurors about any knowledge they may have of the case or the defendants, witnesses or lawyers involved. Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, said that the law dictates which convictions bar someone from jury service and that the checks suggest that lawyers may be rejecting people based on other run-ins with the law. “It troubles me. We have laws as to when jurors can serve on a jury based on their prior conviction,” Kerr said. “Prosecutors want to keep people off if they have a criminal record. You have a de facto expansion of rules on jury service. Those rules should be settled by city council and state legislators, not prosecutors.” Former U.S. attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor, who served as head of the office from 2006 through 2009, said he did not recall any of his prosecutors doing criminal background checks on jurors. Still, Taylor said he would not have had a problem with the inquiries as long as the prosecutors had the time to do checks on all of the jurors and not just a few. “But you have to have a justifiable reason, other than a hunch, that someone is lying to you to do it,” Taylor said. In a statement, the U.S. attorney’s office defended its prosecutors and said it “seldom” conducts criminal background checks but chose to do so in the gang case because the defendants are accused of involvement in a variety of criminal activity. “We conducted criminal background checks on a diverse set of prospective jurors — white and black, women and men — to determine whether they had told the court the truth about their contacts with the criminal justice system,” according to the statement. “We learned that a number of prospective jurors had not been truthful with the court and failed to disclose convictions and arrests for offenses like carjacking, assault with a deadly weapon and handgun possession. On the basis of the information that had been withheld, the court excluded some of those individuals from serving on the jury.” “Targeting people based on race is inexcusable,” the statement said. “If it ever came to our attention that this occurred, we would not tolerate it.” Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said he never heard of prosecutors using government databases to do criminal background checks on prospective jurors but knew of cases in which they used Google or Facebook to gather information. Burns said that he understands running the criminal checks if the police or prosecutors had information that a potential juror was lying about his or her criminal history but that “it should be disclosed to the jurors, defense attorneys and the judge.” The D.C. trial involves four co-defendants who are alleged members of a Northwest Washington street gang called the 14th and Girard Crew of Northwest. Robert Givens, Lester Williams, Keir M. Johnson and Marcellus E. Jackson are charged with more than 80 counts, including murder, conspiracy and assault in connection with crimes in Columbia Heights and along the U Street corridor. District residents called for jury duty in other cases seemed split on the issue. “So I am fulfilling my civic duty, coming down here, waiting in line, and I say that I don’t have any arrests, and you don’t believe me and run my criminal history anyway. That’s not fair,” said Susan Vasquez, 44, of Northeast, who was not seated on a jury. But others said that in the Internet age, background searches are being done all the time. “If it’s public information, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. I can understand why they do it. If I were an attorney on the case, I’d do it, too,” said Robert vom Eigen, 68, of Georgetown, who also was not selected for a jury. The gang trial was delayed by a day or so, and a new panel of jurors was called. The trial is proceeding. None of the 18 people on whom background checks were initially conducted were seated on the jury.

D.C. could at last have board-certified chief medical examiner

Next year, for the first time in a decade, the District could have a board-certified chief medical examiner. Mayor Vincent C. Gray announced Friday he was nominating Roger Mitchell, an assistant state medical examiner in New Jersey, to succeed Marie-Lydie Y. Pierre-Louis as the city’s top forensic pathologist. The hope, Gray said, is that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will soon regain national accreditation, which it lost in 2011.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Pierre-Louis has served in the post since 2003 and has been credited with reducing a once-staggering backlog at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The D.C. office had not been accredited from 1987 until it regained a provisional accreditation under Pierre-Louis in 2008. But her lack of certification from the American Board of Pathology was a persistent issue. Twice she had to be exempted from a District law requiring board certification for her position, and her status was the primary reason the National Association of Medical Examiners revoked the provisional accreditation in 2011.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Keith St. Clair, a Gray administration spokesman, said “board certification absolutely was and remains the roadblock” on accreditation. “The thinking on this is, when there is a board-certified chief medical examiner, the certification process would follow quickly,” he said. Pierre-Louis has been asked to stay on as a medical examiner after stepping down from the top job, the release said. Mitchell has ties to the Washington area, with an undergraduate degree from Howard University and a stint at the FBI Laboratory in Quantico. In a statement circulated by the mayor’s office, Mitchell said he will “strengthen efforts to ensure that [Office of the Chief Medical Examiner] becomes accredited.” St. Clair said Mitchell will likely start in February. The nomination is subject to D.C. Council confirmation.

DNA exoneration of co-defendant lifts murder conviction of Cleveland Wright in 1978 killings

Prosecutors have agreed that a court should throw out the conviction of a District man who spent 28 years in prison for murder, acknowledging that flaws in their case were revealed by DNA testing that exonerated his co-defendant. U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. cited discredited scientific evidence in agreeing to dismiss charges against Cleveland Wright, 55. It is as much a prosecutor’s “duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one,” Machen wrote in court papers, quoting an oft-cited 1935 U.S. Supreme Court opinion. In the papers, signed Wednesday and received by Wright’s attorneys Friday, Machen stopped short of joining Wright’s bid for a declaration of innocence, but he said he would not try Wright again. Wright was convicted of murdering a District floral shop worker in an early morning robbery in July 1978. He was released from prison and placed on lifetime parole in 2007. Thirty-five years ago, Wright, then 20, and Santae Tribble, then 17, were childhood friends who were accused of teaming up to rob and kill two men using the same gun, two weeks apart, in the same Southeast Washington neighborhood. Both defendants were charged in both killings. But Tribble was acquitted in the slaying of the flower shop worker, and Wright was acquitted in the slaying of a cabdriver. DNA testing in 2012 indicated that prosecutors and the FBI Laboratory were incorrect in linking Tribble to a hair found in a stocking near the cabbie’s killing. A witness said the killer had worn a stocking mask, but DNA testing found that hairs in the stocking came from neither Wright nor Tribble. In December 2012, D.C. Superior Court Judge Laura A. Cordero found that “by clear and convincing evidence,” Tribble was not guilty and that he had nothing to do with the crime of which he was convicted. In August, Wright asked Cordero to review his conviction in the killing of the flower shop worker. “If neither of them was the masked murderer of [the first victim], then neither of them was the murderer of [the second], as the same gun was used to kill both men under similar circumstances,” wrote Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service, which handled each man’s post-conviction petitions. In its reply, Machen’s office agreed that the prosecutions’ reliance on now-discredited hair evidence should void Wright’s conviction and that the government is not in a position to develop new evidence 35 years after the slaying. Prosecutors also noted that Cordero had declared Wright’s co-defendant innocent. “The interest of the United States ‘in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done,’ ” Machen wrote, again citing the high court’s 1935 opinion in _Berger v. United States._ Machen said the government took no position on Wright’s petition for a certificate of innocence, which would help him obtain financial compensation, the same stance he took in Tribble’s case. Levick said that Wright wept upon hearing the news Friday and that he would continue to ask the court for full exoneration. “For 35 years Cleveland Wright has protested his innocence. Today we learned that the United States is vindicating his quest for justice,” Levick said in a written statement. “On Mr. Wright’s behalf, [the Public Defender Service] looks forward to what it hopes will be quick action by the court on our pending motion.” ****The flower shop worker, William Horn, 52, was killed as he walked from his car to his apartment building about 2:30 a.m. July 13, 1978. The cabdriver, John McCormick, 63, was slain on his front porch 13 days later, after he parked his cab about 3:10 a.m. Both men were shot with .32-caliber bullets that police said were fired from the same weapon blocks from Tribble’s mother’s home. Tribble’s case was featured in a series of reports in The Washington Post about flaws in FBI hair examinations that had led to wrongful convictions in the District and elsewhere.

The trick to D.C. police force’s 94% closure rate for 2011 homicides

**Editor’s note** _The article about the D.C. police department’s homicide-closure statistics suggested that the department may have manipulated data to foster a positive impression of the force’s performance._ _The article characterized the department’s reporting of homicide-closure rates as a “statistical mishmash that makes things seem much better than they are.” It also suggested that the department’s methodology produced a number that was not “a true closure rate.” As a result, the article, as well as elements of the headline and an accompanying graphic, implied that the department artificially inflated public data on the number of cases that are closed each year._ _In fact, as the article reported, the department has followed practices consistent with federal crime-data guidelines and relied upon the same methodology used by other major municipal police agencies. The department hasn’t altered the ways it calculates homicide-closure rates since Cathy L. Lanier became chief in 2007, and it discloses its methodology in its annual report._ _The data the department publicly reports include prior-year cases that are opened or closed during the calendar year. In recent years, the closures of cases from earlier years have tended to enhance closure rates. For capturing the department’s performance over time, that may be a statistically valid approach, although it could leave the impression that police are solving current-year cases faster than they actually are. The decision to publicly cite the higher rate casts the department in a more favorable light but does not mean that the underlying data are distorted._ * * * For the past two months, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier has touted the city’s astronomically high homicide closure rate — 94 percent for 2011 — and warned anyone contemplating murder in the District to think twice. “Your risk of being caught is pretty high if you commit a homicide in D.C.,” Lanier told The Washington Post in December. The closure rate she presents for the District is 154 percent higher than Boston’s and at least 104 percent higher than Baltimore’s, and it gives residents reason to believe that D.C. police have been remarkably successful at solving homicide cases under her watch. But an examination of District homicides found that the department’s closure rate is a statistical mishmash that makes things seem much better than they are. The District had 108 homicides last year, police records show. A 94 percent closure rate would mean that detectives solved 102 of them. But only 62 were solved as of year’s end, for a true closure rate of 57 percent, according to records reviewed by The Post. D.C. police achieved the high closure rate last year by including about 40 cases from other years that were closed in 2011. _**Also: The mysterious closure rate of an award-winning D.C. detective ** _ The cases date from 1989, records show. The pattern was first reported by a local Web site, homicidewatch.org, in D ecember. Lanier said the department followed FBI Uniform Crime Reporting guidelines in calculating its homicide clearance rate. ****“The UCR guidelines have been used to report on clearance rates as long as anyone here can remember, and is not unique to my tenure as Chief of Police,” Lanier said in a response to written questions. “Most agencies across the country use the same guidelines and rules in reporting homicide clearance rates.” Lanier referred a reporter to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Web page. A separate FBI publication on law enforcement records says only that a clearance rate is calculated by dividing the number of offenses cleared by the number of offenses known. Each year, police departments across the country send their crime statistics to the FBI’s UCR Program, reporting the number of crimes that occurred in a year and the number that were closed — or solved — in that year. But the numbers are not necessarily connected to each other: Crimes cleared in one year might have occurred in another. When asked by The Post for statistics, some departments — those in Baltimore, Chicago and Prince George’s County — provided two sets of closure data, one with just the cases from a particular year and one with older cases included. Boston counted only closures from a particular year. Several local law enforcement veterans and some criminologists from around the nation said that including older cases produces a misleading impression. W. Louis Hennessy, a former D.C. police captain who oversaw the homicide unit from 1993 to 1995, called such statistics “entirely unfair.” Hennessy said D.C. police in the past calculated the closure rate by using only homicides that happened in a particular calendar year. When the closure rate declined in the 1980s, he said, the department switched to using the UCR totals, making it appear that the department was solving more homicides. “I felt like anytime you could have more than 100 percent, it’s a little bit misleading and deceiving,” said Hennessy, who is now a Maryland District Court judge. “When I came in, I changed it back. If we look like we’re deceiving or being deceitful, how can we, in good faith, ask them [people] to put their lives on the line? “We have problems, and the more that the community knows we have problems, the better off we are. You don’t want to mislead people and have them come back and question our motives.” Homicides have dropped significantly during Lanier’s tenure, and the true closure rate has also improved, The Post found. But the practice of counting closures of older cases as well as those from the year being reported has helped boost the rate every year since Lanier was confirmed as chief in April 2007. For 2010, she reported a 79 percent closure rate, but The Post found that the department solved 72 of 131 homicides that year, for a true rate of 55 percent. For 2009, Lanier reported a rate of 76 percent, which would amount to about 110 of 144 cases. Records show that 67 of the 2009 cases, or 46 percent, were closed. For 2008, a 75 percent closure rate was reported, but the department closed 91 of 186 slayings that year, for a true rate of 49 percent. And for 2007, Lanier reported a nearly 70 percent closure rate, but records show that 89 of the year’s 181 homicides were closed, for a rate of 49 percent. “They’re fostering the false perception that they’ve accomplished something when actually what they’re doing is fudging their numbers,” said James Trainum, a longtime D.C. homicide detective who handled several high-profile cases. Trainum said homicide closure rates are a political football in the District. “Careers rise and fall based on statistics,” said Trainum, who also investigated cold cases before retiring in 2010. Wyndell C. Watkins Sr., a retired D.C. deputy police chief who headed the department’s homicide unit in the early 1990s, remarked: “The pencil has solved a lot of cases.” David M. Kennedy, a professor and director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said it is “very confusing” to combine homicides from more than one year. Kennedy said that most people think a closure rate “is a year’s killings that have been solved.” Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, said there are no national standards or rules governing how to count closed cases, a situation that prevents criminologists from using such data for more sophisticated analyses. The numbers are “more administrative than scientific,” Alpert said. “Across the United States, there’s no real best practices or criteria for measuring closed cases.” Former FBI special agent Brad Garrett said the lack of federal standards allows police departments to put their own twist on the numbers with little or no oversight. “Are there correct ways of doing it? Yes,” Garrett said. “If the case is from 1994, then you say that the rate includes X cases from 1994, X cases from 1996 and so on. That way it’s clear that it’s a combination from other years.” Lanier’s 94 percent is “not even a realistic number” for a D.C. homicide closure rate, Garrett said, in part because many of the city’s homicides are stranger slayings, which are relatively difficult to solve. A simple, single-year count was also endorsed by Isaac Fulwood Jr., D.C. police chief from July 1989 until September 1992, during which time homicides peaked at 482 a year. “When the chief can stand up and say, ‘We’re closing 94 percent of the homicides,’ that is a powerful message,” said Fulwood, chairman of the U.S. Parole Commission. “That says something about the fact that the science has improved significantly. It says something about the homicide investigators. It says a whole lot. “It’s important that the numbers be correct and that you always can prove it so that there’s no queasiness in the process.” To give an accurate picture, “you need to adjust the numbers back,” Fulwood said. “I’d say, ‘Okay, if I’ve got a closure in 2011 of a homicide I should have closed in 2008, I’d go back and adjust the 2008 numbers. That way, there’s no sense that you’re trying to do something different.” Prince George’s had 95 homicides last year and closed 51 of them, resulting in a 54 percent closure rate, records show. Police closed 12 more cases that occurred in other years, boosting the UCR closure rate to 66 percent. Baltimore police closed 65 of the 196 homicides reported in 2011, a true closure rate of 33 percent. Add the 26 cases from previous years and the rate climbs to 46 percent, records show. The national homicide clearance rate was about 65 percent in 2010, based on the multiyear totals reported to UCR. Rates for 2011 will not be available until the fall. John C. DeCarlo, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, Conn., and a former police chief in Branford, Conn., said a 94 percent closure rate is difficult for any major urban police force to attain. The difficulty is compounded in a historically high-crime city such as the District, once known as the murder capital of the country. “Ninety-four percent is a rate in an urban area that every police department should aspire to but it may not be a realistic goal,” DeCarlo said. Ron Waldrop, former assistant chief of the Dallas police, was involved in more than 5,000 homicide investigations during his 40 years on the force. He said he hasn’t heard of a 94 percent closure rate since the 1960s, “when most of the murders were people who knew each other.” “That’s unbelievable,” he said. _**More from The Washington Post:** _ Jurors in Huguely case to begin deliberations Wednesday Metro writes few tickets for offenses Supreme Court to review criminilization of lies about military record Man charged in fatal D.C. stabbing on New York Ave. The Washington Post’s Crime Page Sign up for local crime alerts

Auditor to review District police use-of-force policies

The D.C. auditor has launched a review of the District police department’s use-of-force practices to ensure the department remains in compliance with recommendations from seven years of federal oversight that ended in 2008. Michael R. Bromwich, a former independent monitor for the Department of Justice who oversaw the police department from 2001 through 2008, will conduct the review, which is expected to take several months. Bromwich now runs a crisis management group in Washington. Auditor Kathy Patterson, a former three-term member of the D.C. Council and chairman of its Judiciary Committee, said that “seven years later, it seems to me to make sense to look back.” She said that “if the police are doing a pretty good job, let’s document that, and it will be a good thing for the national conversation.” A police spokesman said: “Given the current environment, [the department] welcomes an independent and objective audit. We are confident in our policing.” Patterson said the agency is cooperating. Police departments across the country, most recently in Baltimore, have come under intense scrutiny after the high-profile deaths of several men during interactions with law enforcement officers. In Baltimore, six police officers have been charged — one with second-degree murder — in connection with the death of Freddie Gray, 25, of injuries he suffered in police custody. The charges against the officers followed looting and civil unrest on the night after Gray’s funeral by residents expressing anger about his death. The Justice Department is considering a request from Baltimore’s mayor to investigate whether the city’s police department has engaged in a “pattern or practice” of excessive force. The D.C. review will analyze how the city has fared since it underwent a similar investigation. Then-Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey asked for a Justice Department review in 2001 after The Washington Post published an investigation on the frequent use of deadly force by officers. Shootings by police dropped, and in 2008 the Justice Department ended the monitoring. The Post revealed that D.C. police shot and killed more people per capita than officers in any other large department. The statistics included 57 fatal police shootings in five years in the 1990s. In 2013, the latest year for which statistics are available, D.C. police shot 16 people, killing five. Bromwich said his duties are to “try to confirm whether the Metropolitan Police Department remains in compliance with that agreement.” He said the department “went through a very bleak period and made very significant reforms. Our job is to determine whether, on these issues, it remains in the same good shape it was in 2008.”

Excessive force not a problem in the D.C. police force, but issues remain

Nearly a decade after the Justice Department ended its oversight of D.C. police, the use of excessive force and shootings by officers have remained low and have “not reemerged as a problem,” according to an independent report made public Thursday. The police force, according to the review commissioned by D.C. Auditor Kathleen Patterson, “is plainly a very different, and much better, law enforcement agency” than it was when federal authorities in 1999 began investigating fatal shootings by officers. At the time, the department had the highest rate among large cities in the nation. “There is no evidence that the [police department] has an excessive use-of-force problem,” said Michael R. Bromwich, who oversaw the review and had served as the court-appointed monitor overseeing the consent decree with the Justice Department that expired in 2008. “Bottom line is that the reforms are still in place, and they continue to be managed by people who still care for them.” The report did find fault with the police department, however, identifying what it called “significant shortcomings” that were procedural and substantive. Those include concerns about the way some internal investigations were conducted and about the merger of an elite squad that handled probes of shootings by officers into a larger unit. The report cites several instances in which investigations were incomplete, including cases where detectives failed to follow up on discrepancies between accounts of officers and questionable tactics that went unexamined. “We do think the quality of the use-of-force investigator has declined,” Bromwich said a news conference. Police disputed or sought to correct many parts of the report and said their investigations have not declined in quality. The department said in a written response that the agency “remains a leader in the field of use-of-force investigations. The investigations conducted by [internal affairs] from 2008 to the present have investigative substance and are based on sound investigative principles.” But overall, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier called the review “very satisfying to us” and said it proved other police agencies now facing similar oversight by the Justice Department can emerge as better police departments. The report, titled “The durability of police reform,” comes at a time when law enforcement is under increased scrutiny across the country for tactics and use of deadly force. Many departments are implementing reforms that mirror those the District was forced to undertake years ago, and prosecutors are increasingly criminally charging officers for deadly shootings. Bromwich and Patterson said the just-completed review marks the first time a police agency that had been under federal oversight has been examined to determine if any of the reforms remain. Bromwich said the District’s success shows that reform can work “not only for the police departments that are under siege, but for the communities that they serve.” Lanier, a 26-year veteran who became chief in 2007, said that in the 1990s, the District and the police force had little money. She said the binding agreement with federal authorities to repair the department forced government to pour in money. “Once we signed that agreement, the city had to back the police department,” the chief said. She added that on Friday she will be working with other police chiefs across the country on new rules governing use of force that could become a new standard. Lanier also has begun a program designed to identify and root out problem officers and has implemented body-worn cameras to increase accountability. The Metropolitan Police Department came under scrutiny in 1999 after The ********Washington Post published a series called “Deadly Force,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for public service that year. In addition to the Justice Department review, the police chief ordered new firearms training for all 3,500 officers. The report published Thursday says that since that time, intentional discharges of weapons — 28 in 2001, 30 in 2004 and 31 in 2007 — have declined to seven in 2010, nine in 2012 and 15 in 2015. Since 2009, the report says, the number of fatal shootings by police has remained relatively constant, between three and eight each year. Other types of force used by officers — such as batons and tactical takedowns — were difficult to track because of changes in policy and reporting requirements. But the report found “no evidence of any significant or sustained increase in any category of use of force employed by MPD officers.” The report found fault with Lanier’s decision in 2012 to merge the Force Investigation Team, called FIT, which had exclusively reviewed police-involved shootings and serious uses of force, into the internal affairs division, citing among other factors a diminished workload because of the fewer shootings by officers. Police responded that the auditors drew “broad conclusions regarding the quality” of internal investigations “based on a review of handful of cases.” It defended merging its elite force investigation squad into internal affairs, saying detectives were exceptionally trained. The report recommended that the internal affairs division assign specialists to handle such complex cases. The report authors singled out for review three police-involved shootings. In one, they said that while agreeing that shooting was justified, they said detectives failed to reconcile inconsistencies in the reasons officers gave for chasing the man hey had shot. The report also found that there were discrepancies between written summaries of interviews and tape recordings, and said a use-of-force review board made no “serious effort to conduct a tactical analysis” of the officers’ actions. ********The reviewers also said they were troubled at what the report called an inordinate length of time to investigate use-of-force cases, noting inquiries typically took more than 19 months to complete. The report says that based on information from prosecutors, “there has never been a criminal prosecution of an on-duty MPD officer arising from an officer-involved shooting.” Auditors said authorities should find a way to speed up inquiries or overlap administrative and criminal reviews, which can be difficult given the different legal requirements of both. Officers, for example, can’t be compelled to give statements until after the criminal investigation is complete. Auditors put some of the blame on prosecutors, who said the report oversimplifies the complexities of the cases, the difficulties in completing forensic testing and the large workload of their office, which deals with many police agencies aside from the District’s. The U.S. attorney’s office for the District said Thursday that prosecutors review more than 100 police use-of-force incidents each year, and must often wait for different agencies to complete parts of the probed before they can assemble all the investigative pieces.

Are you running for president? Please answer these questions about the criminal justice system.

The recent announcement from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that he’ll be running for president and an expected similar announcement from former senator Jim Webb (D-Va.) suggest that we may actually see some discussion of criminal justice reform on the campaign trail soon — at least during the primaries. To that end, I’ve put together a quick and dirty list of questions I’d like to see some or all of the candidates answer. I realize there’s little to no chance this will happen. But they’re worth throwing out there, if for no other reason than to generate some discussion. Feel free to add your own questions in the comments. I’ll pull out the good ones for a follow-up post.  — The Obama administration has made heavy use of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate patterns of abuse and civil rights violations by local police departments. Would you continue this policy in your administration? To what extent is the federal government obligated to step in when local police and prosecutors are either habitually violating or failing to protect the constitutional rights of citizens in their jurisdiction? — President Obama recently formed a National Commission on Forensic Science to address the use of forensic analysis in the courtroom. This comes after a number of crime lab scandals across America in which analysts were caught fudging data, hiding unfavorable results, faking tests and in some cases just displaying general incompetence. It also comes after a 2009 National Academy of Sciences report, which found that in many forensic disciplines, analysts routinely give testimony in court that is unsupported by any scientific research. Currently, we have tasked judges with assessing the validity of scientific evidence. But judges are trained in law, not science. Do you agree that there are significant problems with forensic evidence? Do you think we should continue to ask judges to assess its validity? Would you support looking for an alternative system of distinguishing good science from bad before allowing it to be used in court?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced changes to the Justice Department’s civil asset forfeiture policy. These changes put some restrictions on the ability of local police agencies to use the federal government to get around state laws aimed at curbing forfeiture abuses. But the changes come with loopholes, and the new policies will affect only a relatively small percentage of forfeiture cases. Do you believe that law enforcement agencies should be able to seize and keep property alleged to have been connected to criminal activity without ever charging or convicting the property’s owner? Should police agencies in states that have passed laws to restrict this practice be able to circumvent those laws by partnering with federal law enforcement agencies?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — It has long been the case that the Solicitor General’s Office represents the government, and defends the laws of the land. On issues like police and prosecutorial misconduct, and even state and local laws, the solicitor general’s office nearly always defends the government (although it sometimes sits a case out). But there is no law mandating this. The solicitor general after all works for the people, and answers to the president. There’s no compelling reason why a president should instruct some of the country’s smartest legal minds, who work at his discretion, to defend laws he believes are unconstitutional. Would your solicitor general continue this tradition of reflexively defending all laws and government officials, even if you believe the laws are unconstitutional, or that the government officials are at fault in the case in question?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — In a similar vein, would you enforce laws on the books that you believe are unconstitutional? Technically speaking, as chief law enforcement officer of the land, you’d be legally obligated to enforce laws on the books that the courts have upheld. But the federal government hasn’t nearly enough resources to enforce all laws all the time. What laws or areas of federal criminal law would you prioritize? What laws would you instruct the Justice Department to ignore, or assign a low priority? — Are there any current federal laws that you believe are unconstitutional? — If you could add one amendment to the Constitution, what would it be? — Several media reports, advocacy groups and judicial opinions (including a recent opinion by Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit) have described an epidemic of prosecutor misconduct across the country. Do you believe there is a widespread problem of prosecutor misconduct in America? Do you believe the federal government has a responsibility to address it?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — Currently, allegations of prosecutorial misconduct are investigated by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility. But the filing, status, and results of those investigations are kept secret, not only from the public, but from the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General. Do you think this policy is appropriate? Would you be willing to open the OPR to investigation by the IG’s office? Would you open it to FOIA requests?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — Currently, federal law tasks the U.S. attorney with collecting and reporting data on shootings by police officers across the country. That has never really happened since the 1994 law requiring it. Would you instruct your attorney general to begin keeping a tally of officer-involved shootings? Would you require local police agencies to report this data, perhaps by threatening to withhold federal funding? — Do you believe the criminal justice system is infected with institutional racism? I’m not asking you to assess whether individual cops, judges, or prosecutors are racist; I’m asking if you believe there is inherent bias built into the system. — Last December, Ed Krayewski at Reason magazine proposed creating a “police offenders registry.” This would be a master list of police officers who have been caught lying in police reports or on the witness stand, using excessive force, or abusing or intimidating citizens. The idea here is to prevent corrupt and abusive cops from simply picking up and moving to another police department. There of course would be some details to work out about what would qualify an officer for listing on the registry, but generally speaking, do you support this idea? Is it something you would consider asking your Justice Department to create and oversee?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — Since the Ferguson protests, there has quite a bit of discussion of the Pentagon’s 1033 Program, which allows military equipment designed for use on a battlefield to be transferred to local police departments for use on American streets. (It authorizes the transfer of more innocuous equipment as well.) This has raised concerns about police militarization, as well as more practical concerns about the lack of training that comes with the gear, and about gear that has been reported missing or stolen. Do you support the 1033 Program in its current form? Would you abolish it? Would you make changes to it? If so, what changes?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security has been handing out grants to local police departments to purchase military-grade equipment such as armored personnel carriers. These grants are ostensibly to protect against terrorism, but grants are handed out without much assessment of the probability of terrorism, and the equipment inevitably is then used in more routine policing. Do you support these grants? Would you end them? Modify them? Leave them unchanged? — There are currently thousands and thousands of federal laws. In fact, there are so many federal laws that a number of efforts to count them came up with only rough estimates. This is because in addition to the sheer volume of laws, some laws are so vaguely written that it’s difficult to determine what they do and don’t allow. Other laws are repeated throughout the United States Code. Regulatory laws are also now increasingly enforced as criminal violations. U.S. citizens are expected to know and follow all of these laws, upon punishment of fines or incarceration, even though some regulators and law enforcement officials whose job it is to enforce these laws don’t always know them all, and even though some legal commentators have noted that it is impossible to follow some laws without violating others. Do you agree that there are too many federal laws? Should citizens who want to, say, run a small business, or support a political cause, be required to hire an expensive attorney simply to avoid breaking the law? If you agree that these are problems, what would you do to change them?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — A number of commentators have noted with alarm the increasing arming of the regulatory state. The Department of Education, Small Business Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Labor, and Department of Commerce, among others, now all have armed law enforcement personnel. Many also have “high-risk warrant teams” that use SWAT-style tactics to serve search warrants on people suspected of nonviolent, white collar crimes and what were once regulatory offenses . Do you find this trend troubling? If so, what would you do to change it?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — We now know that the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have been giving “Stingray” technology to local police departments across the country. Generally speaking, these devices intercept and interfere with cell phones. But because the technology is classified, we don’t know exactly what the devices do, and whether their method of collecting data is consistent with the Fourth Amendment. Federal law enforcement officials have then told local police to keep silent about when and how they’re using the technology, to the point of asking them to sign nondisclosure agreements, and even instructing them to lie to judges and prosecutors. But we now know that the technology has routinely been used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security (mostly drug cases). Does this seem fair or just to you? Would you change these policies?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico — The last three presidents have made some variation of a promise to run the most transparent administration in history. By any objective measure, all three have failed. What, if anything, would you do differently? — Do you believe the TSA’s pre-flight procedures at airports protect us from terrorism? Is there anything you would change about the agency? — What do you believe is the primary function of prisons — to punish people for doing bad things, to isolate dangerous people from society, or to rehabilitate criminals so they can reenter society as productive citizens? What do you believe our prisons primarily do today? — Should people convicted of nonviolent felonies be permitted to vote once they’ve served out their sentences? — One sign of moral leadership is a willingness to do the right thing even if it is politically unpopular. According to U.S. Sentencing Surveys of federal judges, federal judges by a wide margin believes the federal sentencing guidelines for one crime is more disproportionate and unfair than any other. That crime is possession of child pornography. Would you support an effort to pass more reasonable sentences for this crime? — Justice Antonin Scalia has written that so long as the defendant was afforded due process, a government execution of innocent person would not be a violation of that person’s constitutional rights. Do you agree? — How would you treat government whistleblowers? Would you prosecute anyone who releases classified information to the press, regardless of whether or not they expose waste or abuse? If your answer is no, what would be your criteria in determining whether or not to prosecute? — The Obama administration has waged an unprecedented war on people who leak classified information that is unfavorable to the government. Is there anyone the Obama administration has prosecuted whom you would have excused? Is there anyone they have excused whom you would have prosecuted? — Edward Snowden has been called a hero, a whistleblower, a careless leaker, a civil liberties crusader, an idealist, a criminal, a spy and a traitor — among other things. What do you think of him? Would you consider pardoning him? Would your administration aggressively pursue him and prosecute him? Do you think he exposed real wrongdoing by the federal government? Do you think the American people had a right to know about the surveillance policies he exposed? — Which amendment in the Bill of Rights do you think is most important, and why? — If after taking office you discovered law breaking and abuse committed by your predecessor and/or his immediate subordinates, would you investigate and, if necessary, prosecute? How serious would the transgressions need to be in order for you to pursue them? — Do you think an atheist or agnostic could make a good president? Could you vote for one? — Do you believe that Colorado and Washington state are in violation of federal law by legalizing recreational marijuana? Would you attempt to enforce the federal marijuana laws in those states? What if other states follow suit? What if other states begin to legalize other illicit drugs? — Do you believe America’s police forces are overly militarized? If so, and you could change some federal policies to stop or slow that tend, would you do so? — The last three presidents have been historically stingy with the pardon and clemency power. The power today is mostly used to confer mercy and redemption on people who have already served their time. But it was originally intended as a last check to prevent any injustices that may have slipped through the system. What approach would you take to granting pardons and commutations? Do you think the last two administrations were too generous, too frugal, or just about right? — Is there any type of speech that you believe should be prohibited by the government? — We haven’t had a justice on the Supreme Court with any real criminal defense experience for nearly a quarter century. We currently only have one with any day-to-day criminal law experience at all. Given that the Supreme Court routinely issues rulings with profound implications on the powers of police and prosecutors and the civil rights of suspects, some commentators are troubled by the lack of criminal law experience on the court, and in particular the lack of any experience from the perspective of criminal suspects. Do you agree? Could you see yourself nominating a justice with significant criminal defense experience? — Do you believe an innocent person has been executed since the United State reinstated the death penalty in 1976? If so, do you believe this is an indictment of the death penalty, or that the benefits of capital punishment outweigh this risk? — If Kitty Dukakis had been raped and murdered in the late 1980s, but we recently learned that the state of Massachusetts executed an innocent man for that crime, would that change how you feel about the death penalty?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Prince George’s police to transform photo lineups

The Prince George’s County Police Department is transforming how detectives conduct photo lineups in an effort to prevent innocent people from going to prison. Starting this spring, detectives must show witnesses photos of potential suspects one at a time on separate pieces of paper rather than all at once on a single page. Lineups must also be “blind,” which means a detective unfamiliar with the case must present photos to witnesses instead of an officer investigating the crime. The method is called the “double-blind sequential lineup.” The goal is to reduce chances that witnesses would falsely identify suspects or that detectives would unwittingly nudge witnesses to choose a particular photo. “You don’t want to catch the wrong guy because now you’re messing with someone who is innocent and the bad guy is still out there,” said Carlos F. Acosta, inspector general for the Prince George’s police. The county is not alone in overhauling its lineup policies. Baltimore adopted new photo lineup policies in the fall, while the practice has become the norm in Dallas, North Carolina, Philadelphia and other jurisdictions. And late last month, Maryland state Sen. Catherine E. Pugh (D-Baltimore) introduced a bill in the General Assembly that would require all law enforcement agencies to change their procedures to blind but not sequential lineups. But while Prince George’s — and possibly the entire state — joins other localities changing photo lineup practices, it will still be among the minority. That’s because despite decades of social-science research and robust endorsements from law enforcement leaders heralding the double-blind sequential lineup, there is still doubt among policy experts as to whether the procedure is an improvement. “There was a time when everyone in the field who was involved in the research or police took the position that sequential is better than simultaneous and blind is better than non-blinded,” said Steven Clark, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside who studies eyewitness identification and photo lineups. “Now it’s controversial. Things have really changed.” In the past few years, at least three academic papers have emerged bucking nearly 30 years of research favoring the practice. Before, researchers thought sequential lineups would reduce false identifications without affecting correct identifications. But more and more, some are saying that while chances of mistaken identifications decrease, so does the likelihood of accurate identifications. For some, there is no debate. They say the double-blind sequential lineup makes sense in real-life investigations. Prince George’s police Capt. George Nichols said that under current lineup methods, witnesses “Frankenstein” a suspect based on the six photos they see on a page. They compare the features of each, maybe selecting the nose on one and the eyebrows on another. Then, they get overwhelmed. “With the sequential, you show them one picture at a time so they’re comparing what they see to their memory versus comparing to other suspects on the same page,” said Nichols, assistant commander of the Criminal Investigation Division. “It’s more of a cleaner ID.” The consequences of a false identification and bad eyewitness memories can be devastating. About 75 percent of wrongful convictions later overturned through DNA evidence originally involved bad eyewitness identifications, according to the nonprofit Innocence Project. One of the most notable wrongful convictions came from Virginia. Thomas Haynesworth spent 27 years in prison there for rapes he did not commit. Victims misidentified him in person and in photo arrays. Most of the controversy lies in whether the photos should be presented simultaneously on a single page, as is common practice, or sequentially. “It is somewhat sobering to realize that it is currently unknown whether the recommended procedures, no matter how sensible they might seem, are diagnostically inferior, diagnostically equivalent, or diagnostically superior to the alternative lineup procedures they would replace,” according to a 2012 paper published by the American Psychological Association. Policymakers, law enforcement groups and psychologists are hungry for definitive answers. Last week, the country’s top social scientists, legal experts and criminal-justice advocates convened in the District to discuss eyewitness identification and lineup changes at the National Academy of Sciences. After months of study, the committee will issue a report and recommendations on the debate. University of Virginia professor Brandon Garrett is part of that committee and has pushed eyewitness identification changes in the commonwealth. In a survey last year, Garrett found that fewer than half of the departments in Virginia conducted blind lineups, while only a handful — 6 percent of 144 agencies — adopted the model policy recommending double-blind sequential lineups. “A lineup is designed to test someone’s memory, but a bad lineup can change someone’s memory,” Garrett said. “These policies are important to make sure police don’t work with an eyewitness in a way that would change their memory. That is something that doesn’t do right by the victim.” In the District, investigators have the option of selecting whether lineups are simultaneous or sequential, but the photo array must be blinded. Blind presentations are meant to reduce the chance that an investigator would unconsciously bias a witness to a certain photo, said Shawn Armbrust, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which helped exonerate Haynesworth and is backing Pugh’s bill. “It’s like a drug trial, and the person handing out the placebo doesn’t know it is a placebo,” Armbrust said. Maryland requires agencies to have written policies dictating how lineups are conducted. But the bill Pugh introduced recently would mandate changes. The changes are meant to give everyone a “fair break and make sure eyewitness identification is appropriate,” Pugh said. The judiciary committee is expected to hear Pugh’s bill in March, shortly before changes in Prince George’s are expected to become official. Armbrust applauds the Prince George’s police initiative and hopes other Maryland agencies will follow suit. That way, everyone has “a chance of having the most accurate identification procedures,” she said. “If I’m arrested in one of the majority counties that haven’t adopted these policies, I’m at a disadvantage,” Armbrust said. “You have an uneven quality of justice throughout the state.”

One D.C. museum has a great sense of humor

The furlough certainly wasn’t fun, but one D.C. museum made its post-furlough reopening announcement funny. Read more about that and some other wondrous Web tidbits in the last Blog Log of this simultaneously long and short week. ** **“The Hirshhorn reopens at 10 am. To make up for lost time, please look twice as hard. Thank you.” —@hirshhorn****, the Twitter account of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, advises art lovers to make up for lost time. The museum, which showcases world-class modern art, was closed for the duration of the shutdown. It is now officially reopened, along with the rest of the Smithsonians.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **“And the trolling for dates only accelerated as the shutdown dragged on.” — Benjamin Freed atwashingtonian.com** summarizes a set of statistics that reveal D.C.-area residents spent a lot of time looking for love during the furlough. According to the dating site Zoosk, during the first week of the shutdown, the site’s Washington-area users who expressed a desire to meet others increased by 91.6 percent; during the second week, it increased by 110 percent.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **“While I will miss workout clothes being my go-to wardrobe choice on a daily basis, it’s good to feel like a productive member of society again.” — Jess atjessruns.com** celebrates putting on work-appropriate attire after being furloughed during the government shutdown. But while she writes Thursday that she’s feeling more productive, she notes that she will miss the newfound hobby she picked up during her unwanted days off — cooking. She made everything from peanut-butter bars to butternut squash soup.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **“Your kitty sees in Instagram, it seems.” — Shaunacy Ferro atpopsci.com** assesses a new project by artist Nickolay Lamm that compares what humans see to what a cat might see. Lamm based his work on science, which shows that cats lack some of the color receptors that most humans have, meaning felines cannot see red, orange or brown. This results in what the artist thinks would be retro-looking, slightly washed-out images. Yep, your cat’s a hipster.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University **“When was the last time you heard of someone paying $2,000 for a brand-new Motorola RAZR flip phone?” — Mike Wehner attuaw.com** wonders why unopened packages containing the original iPhone 2G, which came out in 2007, have been selling on sites such as eBay for nearly $2,000 a pop, while other obsolete technologies are considered almost valueless. It might have something to do with Apple’s cult following. In May, an original Apple computer, the Apple-1, which was designed and built by hand by Steve Wozniak in 1976, went for $663,000 at auction.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University _And keep us in mind over the weekend. If you see a link, tweet or comment online you think is worth a spot in Blog Log, let us know by tweeting@WaPoExpress._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

U.S. to commit scientists and new commission to fix forensic science

The federal government announced Friday that it will commit a scientific agency and launch a national commission to tackle recurring concerns about the quality of forensic evidence used in criminal courts across the country. A new National Commission on Forensic Science will draft proposals for the U.S. attorney general and Justice Department and draw from expert groups led by a Commerce Department science agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the departments announced. “This initiative is led by the principle that scientifically valid and accurate forensic analysis strengthens all aspects of our justice system,” said Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole. The announcement marked the broadest federal commitment to establishing national forensic science standards since the rise of the FBI Laboratory during the last century. It comes four years after the National Academy of Sciences urged the White House and Congress to remove crime labs from police and prosecutors’ control or at least to improve standards for crime labs, examiners and researchers. The academy was responding to a drumbeat of crime lab scandals and hundreds of DNA exonerations over the past two decades. The new 30-member commission will be co-chaired by Justice Department and NIST officials. It will include forensic scientists, researchers, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, and will meet several times a year as a federal advisory committee subject to open government requirements. Most significantly, experts said, it could replace or reorganize the ad hoc groups of practitioners who now govern individual forensic techniques with teams administered by NIST. Critics have long complained that such groups worked in secret, were too closely tied to the FBI or law enforcement and followed no standard practices, and that such weaknesses were reflected in the variability of how individual crime labs obtain and testify about results. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont) welcomed the announcement and noted “striking similarities” between the commission and forensic science reform legislation he first introduced in 2011. “Today’s announcement is an important first step,” Leahy said in a statement, adding that he will continue to push for stronger oversight of crime labs, enforcement mechanisms and federal funding. "I will continue working to ensure that comprehensive legislation is considered and ultimately signed into law.” Barry K. Logan, incoming president of the American Academy of Forensic Scientists, whose annual meeting begins in Washington this weekend, said he hoped a commission would make legislation more likely by finding areas of common aground among competing interests. “Forensic science needs federal support for research and development just like any other discipline in science or engineering or medicine does,” Logan said. Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which advocates for prisoners seeking exoneration through DNA testing, called the measure “a very good first step” that recognized the need for a scientific agency to help set forensic standards. “We are hopeful that the White House and Congress will now step up and address the one major gap in this agreement,” funding for basic and applied research and oversight, he said.

Calls for limits on ‘flawed science’ in court are well-founded: A guest post

University of Virginia law professor Brandon L. Garrett, who has written a book on flawed forensics and wrongful convictions, titled, “Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong,” argues that the council’s report is well-founded and supports a 2009 National Academy of Sciences report that much of forensic evidence used in criminal trials is “without any meaningful scientific validation.”   Harward served 33 years in prison in Virginia before his exoneration on April 8 for a Newport News rape and murder that he did not commit. He was originally convicted based on false testimony by two experts claiming his teeth matched bite marks on the victim. If it were up to him, such unreliable forensics would be banned. In a remarkable report released this morning, the White House’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology prominently called on prosecutors to do just that: stop using unreliable forensics and stop making unscientific claims about the forensics. The administration’s recommendations are an important step toward safeguarding forensics and preventing tragic wrongful convictions. After all, at Harward’s trial, it wasn’t just that the experts were wrong. They were spectacularly wrong. Yet they told the jury that they were totally certain they were right. One dentist testified to “a very, very, very high degree of probability those teeth left that bite mark.” A second dentist testified that “there is just not anyone else that would have this unique dentition.” They were both wrong — and it gets worse. In a massive dental dragnet, police took over 1,000 molds of every Navy sailor on a ship docked at Newport News. One of those sailors was the actual culprit, but the bite experts didn’t detect him — DNA tests identified him 33 years later. Stopping the use of unreliable forensics like bite-mark evidence is just the beginning. Despite depictions on shows like “CSI,” many types of forensics can provide valuable information but can also go wrong. Jurors understandably place great weight on testimony by an expert who claims to have found a match. But jurors might think differently if they heard about the real error rates for forensics. Any human technique has an error rate, and a crucial quality control is to do testing to find out how good experts really are. It is not enough for fingerprint or bite-mark examiners to vouch for their own reliability. We must put their experience to the test. The few tests that have been done show disturbing error rates. For example, the White House report highlights a study showing a 1 in 18 error rate for fingerprint comparison and another showing a shocking 1 in 6 error rate for bite marks. Cases like Harward’s are not isolated examples. Having read trial transcripts of DNA exonerees by the hundreds, I have found that more often than not, the testimony was exaggerated, overstated and erroneous. Of the first 330 people exonerated by DNA testing, 71 percent, or 235 cases, involved forensic analysis or testimony. DNA set these people free, but at the time of their convictions, the bulk of the forensics was flawed. It has taken too long to respond to a national crisis of bad forensics. A 2009 report by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that much of forensic evidence used in criminal trials is “without any meaningful scientific validation.” Little changed. To be sure, scientists and researchers have made strides to improve forensics and how they are used in courtrooms; I have taken part in such efforts. However, the White House is right that seven years later, it is time for the use of flawed forensics to come to an end. Here is the full report:

District seeks improved services for young victims of sex assault

A task force set up by the D.C. Council to improve services for young rape victims in the city will recommend that 12- to 17-year-olds be provided with a new, confidential hotline and, in some cases, independent advocacy experts to accompany them during police interviews. The council is expected this week to receive the task force’s report urging it to approve and fund the measures, which emerged out of concerns over mishandled cases and a fear that many juveniles don’t come forward to report sexual assaults, according to members of the task force. One girl’s case that was highlighted by The Washington Post helped influence the task force as it drew up its recommendations — even though that case is far from resolved. Danielle Hicks-Best was 11 when she reported to D.C. police in 2008 that she had been raped by older youths in her neighborhood. Despite hospital reports detailing her injuries and a witness being questioned, she was the only one arrested — on charges of lying to police. She was ultimately convicted and made a ward of the District, and her family has spent more than seven years campaigning for belated justice. After The Post brought details of the case to the attention of police officials in the fall of 2014, Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier acknowledged that errors had occurred on her watch and ordered a reinvestigation. Hicks-Best, who is now an adult and chose to identify herself in the hope of helping other young rape victims, would not have been directly affected by any changes because she was 11 at the time she was assaulted. But she said she thinks access to a trained advocate would benefit other young victims. “I think it would have made a big difference to have had someone advising me, because I felt frightened and bullied,” she said. Police records show she was interviewed by a detective who was hostile and skeptical of her account. In October, a year after the new investigation was ordered, evidence collected in a forensic rape kit in 2008 but never tested was analyzed, according to her family. Hicks-Best and her family said they were told by police that the analysis revealed the DNA profile of a man who investigators now think held Danielle down while she was being raped by two others in a basement apartment in the Northwest Washington neighborhood where she lived at the time. But by the time police identified the DNA, they discovered that the suspect had been fatally shot several months earlier. A police official familiar with the investigation confirmed the family’s account. Hicks-Best’s mother, Veronica Best, called the discovery that the man had been identified but was dead infuriating because he could have provided vital information as a witness and accomplice. She said that her daughter had pointed out the suspect to police in 2008, as part of a group who hung out on the streets of their neighborhood, but that the information did not lead to him being questioned then or when the reinvestigation began almost seven years later. Police said the investigation is ongoing, but the family is skeptical anyone will ever be charged. “I’ve given up on justice. I’m at the point where I no longer hope for anything to come out of this case,” Hicks-Best said. But the family is pleased that the task force has proposed changes that they think could lead to more crimes being solved. “Six months into this whole thing in 2008, I realized it was about something bigger than just Danielle’s case. Now I think it’s absolutely wonderful that the task force supports these new measures that will protect other children,” Best said. The task force’s mission was to suggest what further legislation was needed to expand the reach of the District’s Sexual Assault Victims’ Rights Amendment Act of 2014, which deals with adult cases only. The main provisions of that act were a new system of external oversight of law enforcement’s handling of adult sexual assault cases and the right to an independent, trained advocate to accompany victims and apprise them of their rights during interactions with police and prosecutors, among others. Now the task force is proposing legislation that will allow youth aged 12 to 17 also to be offered an advocate in certain situations, according to members who described the report. The task force recommends independent advocates for youths who report being sexually assaulted by an acquaintance, friend, sexual partner or stranger who is within four years of their age, or a stranger who is more than four years older. That advocate would not be legally bound to tell either the victim’s parents or the authorities without the child’s permission. Victims under the age of 12 or those who report being sexually assaulted by a parent or caregiver or someone in a position of trust and authority, such as a teacher, pastor or coach, should not be offered an independent advocate but continue to be dealt with by the multi-agency system now handling such cases, which includes police, child services and other agencies, the panel concluded. The task force members could not agree whether to include 11-year-olds in their recommendations, and they held months of debate about whether 12 was too young for a victim who reports sexual assault to be offered confidential services but came to an agreement in recent weeks, members said. “I think the need for these resources could be enormous, because we believe a high number of youths who are being sexually assaulted in the District are not reporting that to anyone currently,” said Elisabeth Olds, a task force member appointed in the role of independent expert consultant. She said members had been motivated to agree on the recommendations after hearing about the experiences of young rape survivors, including Hicks-Best. Task force member Nikki Charles, co-executive director of the Network for Victim Recovery of DC, said the consideration of confidential professional advocacy for some youth victims had proved a controversial topic during task force deliberations and would probably prove so when the report is debated by the council’s judiciary committee. “There was pushback, and as a parent I, too, had questions. But as an advocate, I had to go in favor of the measure. It helps me to know that Danielle and her family are supportive of the recommendation. Her case was one of the major reasons it became an issue on the task force’s agenda,” she said. Charles said that the presence of advocates is designed to build trust and teamwork between a victim and law enforcement that is about more than the victim’s feelings. “If clients are less worried about whether they are going to be believed, they will be more likely to disclose important facts about their experience, which could ultimately increase law enforcement’s ability to solve the crime,” she said. Task force members said one option for setting up a confidential hotline for young victims is to run it through Safe Shores — the DC Children’s Advocacy Center. The recommendations will be considered by the council, although there is no specific timetable for when it might act. D.C. Assistant Chief Peter Newsham had previously told The Post that Hicks-Best’s experience with law enforcement was “unfortunate” and that her arrest on a charge of lying to the police, and her subsequent handling by D.C. agencies, was “tragic.” “I believe she was sexually assaulted,” he said recently. Hicks-Best and her mother urged D.C. police not to close the case. “The rapists are still out there,” Best said.

These Washington restaurants are closed for the ‘Day Without Immigrants’ protest

Immigrants in Washington are participating in the “Day Without Immigrants” protest on Thursday, and the list of area restaurants closing out of solidarity or necessity continues to grow. The nationwide effort, buoyed by social media, is meant to highlight the impact immigrants have on the country on a daily basis. It's a response to President Trump's efforts to crack down on undocumented immigrants, enact “extreme vetting” and build a wall along the border with Mexico. Participants are encouraged to stay home from school and work, which includes many restaurants and bars. Here's a list of the closings and service changes announced so far. A Baked Joint: limited menu Acqua al 2: closed Anxo Cider & Pinxtos Bar: limited menu of pintxos only Arepa Zone: closed Ari's Diner: closed Bad Saint: closed Bangkok Golden: closed BBQ Bus: closed Belga Cafe: closed Boundary Road: kitchen closed Boundary Stone: kitchen closed, limited menu from 5 to 9 p.m. Brookland's Finest: closed Brookland Pint: kitchen closed, bring your own food B Too: closed Bub & Pop's: closed Burger Tap & Shake: limited menu Busboys and Poets, 14th Street, Brookland, City Vista, Hyattsville, Shirlington and Takoma locations: closed Central Michel Richard: limited menu Chopt Rossyln and 16th Street locations: closed Clare and Don's Beach Shack: closed Co Co. Sala: closed Columbia Room: limited menu Comet Ping Pong: closed Cork: limited menu Daikaya: closed DC Empanadas, Union Market and food truck: closed DC Taco Truck: closed Denson Liquor Bar: closed District Commons: limited menu District Fishwife: kitchen closed Dock FC: closed Eat the Rich: kitchen closed El Camino: kitchen closed, bar offering limited food El Chucho: top floor closed, limited menu Ella's Pizza: closed El Sol: closed Espita Mezacaleria: closed for lunch; kitchen closed for dinner Etto: closed Flight: closed Ghibellina: closed Hank's Oyster Bar, Capitol Hill, Dupont and Old Town locations: closed Hank's Pasta Bar: closed Harold Black: closed Himitsu: closed Ivy and Coney: kitchen closed Jaleo, Penn Quarter, Crystal City and Bethesda locations: closed Jetties, Chevy Chase, Penn Quarter, Foxhall, Macomb and Bethesda locations: closed; downtown open Johnny's Half Shell: closed Justin's Cafe: kitchen closed La Puerta Verde: closed Le Caprice Bakery: closed Mellow Mushroom Adams Morgan: limited menu Meridian Pint: kitchen closed, bring your own food Mezcalero: closed Mockingbird Hill: kitchen closed Momofuku: limited menu Oyamel: closed PassionFish Reston: limited menu Peacock Cafe: closed Pepe: closed Pizzeria Paradiso, Old Town and Georgetown locations: closed Pow Pow: closed Pupatella: closed Rappahannock Oyster Bar: closed RedRocks Columbia Heights: closed for lunch; limited menu 5 to 11 p.m. Right Proper Brewing Co.: limited menu Room 11: kitchen closed Sakuramen: closed SEI: closed Shouk: closed Smoke & Barrel: kitchen closed, bring your own food Sotto: closed Southern Efficiency: kitchen closed Stomping Ground: closed Surfside: closed Sweetgreen: 18 locations closed Taco-ma Yucatan chicken: closed TaKorean, Union Market, the Yards and National Place locations: closed Taqueria Nacional: closed Ted's Bulletin 14th Street: closed Ted's Bulletin Capitol Hill: closing at 4 p.m. TenPehn: limited menu Thally: limited menu Thip Khao: closed Toki Underground: closed Two Amys: closed Veloce: closed Zaytinya: closed

Report: Test-security problems at a D.C. school

At least one teacher at the Noyes Education Campus coached students toward correct answers on standardized tests in 2010, according to a D.C. inspector general’s report released Wednesday that found a number of testing-integrity problems at the Northeast Washington school. Investigators for D.C. Inspector General Charles J. Willoughby interviewed dozens of school employees and parents to reach that conclusion. But there was “insufficient basis” to warrant examining other schools in the same intensive manner, according to the report, which concluded that there was no evidence of widespread cheating across the city from 2008 to 2010. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said in a statement that she hopes the report will put to rest suspicions of cheating on the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System, which is used to measure student achievement and teacher effectiveness. She expressed dismay, however, at the revelations about Noyes, where the teacher who admitted coaching students told investigators that it “seemed” it was “understood” that this was how testing was conducted at the school. “It is disappointing that a handful of staff would think so little of their profession and of their students that they would do anything to compromise results,” Henderson said. “We employ the best teachers in the world. I am proud of them day after day, but the staff implicated in this report do not represent what we stand for as a school system.” Henderson requested the inspector general’s probe in 2011 after USA Today published a story detailing unusually high numbers of erasures from wrong to right answers at Noyes and more than 100 other D.C. public schools from 2006 to 2010. Caveon, a firm hired by D.C. public schools, also found evidence of cheating at Noyes in 2010. But the firm found no evidence of widespread cheating that year or the year before. Critics questioned whether those probes were rigorous enough to root out the truth after Caveon officials said they had not been asked to use all the forensic tools at their disposal. Noyes had come under scrutiny for dramatic gains in reading and writing from 2006 to 2009 under then-Principal Wayne Ryan. In 2009, the school was named a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education. Ryan was promoted to a supervisory position after the 2009-10 school year. He resigned in 2011 without offering an explanation. Amid questions about cheating, Noyes’s test scores fell. From 2009 to 2011, math proficiency fell from 63 to 28 percent of students. Reading proficiency fell from 84 to 32 percent. Willoughby and his staff examined testing at Noyes during the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. They interviewed Henderson, former schools chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, 32 current and former school staff members, and 23 parents of Noyes students. None of the parents said their children had reported receiving assistance from teachers. But the same Noyes teacher who admitted coaching students alleged that a test coordinator had instructed staff members to ensure that struggling students sat near the back of the classroom during tests. That way, the teacher alleged, test monitors peering in from the hallway would not see teachers offering help. The teacher no longer works at the school, according to the report. The test coordinator denied the allegations. Another teacher said copies of the test had been distributed before exam day, and teachers were told to “go over the test with students.” That teacher said the principal had prohibited monitors, whose job is to ensure test integrity, from entering classrooms. The principal disputed the claims, but several monitors said they were told to stay out of classrooms. Investigators said they discussed irregularities at several other schools — such as J.O. Wilson Elementary, where more than 80 percent of classrooms were flagged for high erasure rates in 2009 — with Henderson. Based on those discussions, as well as other interviews and the Caveon probes, there was not enough concern about those schools to warrant further investigation, they wrote. An elevated number of wrong-to-right erasures is not by itself evidence of cheating, they added.

Holder says CIA prison probe is winding down

The Justice Department’s investigation into the deaths of two detainees in CIA custody, including one who died at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison, is winding down, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. signaled Thursday. In testimony before a House committee, Holder said the controversial probe “has run its course. We are at a point where we are about to close those investigations.’’ He did not say whether CIA operatives would face criminal charges, and Justice Department officials declined to elaborate. Prosecutors often use such terminology to describe investigations that are not expected to yield charges. If the probe is indeed ended, it would close the book on inquiries that examined the harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects and related matters — one of the George W. Bush administration’s most fraught legacies. Holder announced in late June that the department had opened a full criminal investigation into the deaths of two detainees. He did not cite the cases, but U.S. officials said they involved an Afghan, Gul Rahman, who died in 2002 at a prison known as the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, and an Iraqi, Manadel al-   Jamadi, who was questioned by three CIA officers at Abu Ghraib in 2003. A federal grand jury in Alexandria had been hearing testimony since at least July concerning three agency employees linked to the cases, people familiar with the probe said. Two of the men are employed by the CIA; another is retired from the agency but works under contract, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is not public. Even as Holder made his announcement in June, the Justice Department said a federal prosecutor had declined to pursue criminal charges in 99 other cases in which CIA officers and contractors interrogated suspected terrorists in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The interrogation techniques — including, in three cases, waterboarding, which simulates drowning — provoked divisive national debate, with some calling the methods necessary and others saying they were government-sanctioned torture. Holder in 2009 ordered a preliminary review by Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham of whether unauthorized interrogation techniques were used at overseas locations. At the time, Durham was investigating the destruction of videotapes of the interviews of high-value detainees at overseas sites, which yielded no criminal charges. Holder’s expansion of Durham’s mandate to include the treatment of detainees sparked rancorous debate. He defended that decision before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday, saying things “were done during the course of those interrogations that were antithetical to American values.’’ Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

‘AMBER Alert’ Web site down, but system still running

The Department of Justice Web site that provides information on the AMBER alert program is off-line because of the federal government shutdown, but the program itself, which alerts communities to serious child abductions, is still up and running. "It’s all functioning," Patti Davis, communications director for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said in an e-mail. "Only the DOJ Web site, which is informational, is down. The states run AMBER Alerts, and NCMEC does secondary alerts. Service has not been impacted. " The AMBER Alert Program, which was named for 9-year-old Amber Hagerman who was abducted while riding her bicycle in Arlington, Tex., uses radio, television, the Internet and road signs to assist law enforcement agencies in the search for abducted children. Conservatives are criticizing the Obama administration for allowing the Web site to lapse -- accusing them of shuttering an essential service to make a political point about the shutdown. Here's the front page of the Drudge Report, as of this posting: