Criminal Defense Attorneys Must Request and Analyze Procedures for Testing, Accepted Protocols and Handling of Forensic Evidence
By: Houston Criminal Attorney John T. Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
A criminal defense attorney’s worst nightmare is that the prosecution will rely upon bad evidence to convict his/her client. Defending against relevant, admissible evidence is difficult enough, but there is no real defense against shoddy law enforcement’s collection, processing, and storage of the evidence the prosecution will rely upon in criminal cases. The Houston City Police Department (“HPD”) has a long, sordid history of destroying, botching, and even manufacturing false evidence in criminal cases. The HPD crime lab had to be shut down by the Mayor’s Office in 2002 in the wake of disclosures that lab analysts had mishandled DNA evidence, destroyed evidence, and misrepresented evidence in criminal trials. The fallout from the crime lab scandal still reverberates in our criminal justice system with the exoneration of at least six individuals.
Now the Houston Chronicle informs the public about the results of an adult released in October detailing how HPD’s fingerprint comparison unit mishandled fingerprint evidence in thousands of cases, many involving violent offenders, over the past six years. Taxpayers will now have to subsidize a review of at least 4000 violent crime cases. City Councilwoman Anne Clutterbuck told the Chronicle an amended contract with the firm that conducted the original audit, Ron Smith and Associates, could costs taxpayers between $2 million to $8 million.
This latest “bad evidence” scandal is having its own rippling effect across the political and criminal justice systems in Harris County. Houston Mayor Bill White told the Chronicle he believes criminals went free because of the deliberate mishandling and negligent ineptitude of the fingerprint comparison unit. “I think it’s unacceptable the quality of work the chief and the command staff found in the fingerprint unit,” the Mayor told the newspaper. (more…)
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