Criminal Law Blog by Defense Lawyer John Floyd and Mr. Billy Sinclair
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…)
Fabricating Fake DNA, Defending the Accused in the New World
By: Houston Criminal Defense Attorney John Floyd and Billy Sinclair, Paralegal
We have blogged on several occasions in the recent past about the fallibility of forensic evidence, sharing the opinion of others that more often than not it’s “junk science.” However, DNA evidence has generally remained insulated from the ever increasing scientific indictment of forensic evidence in general. Not any more. The New York Times recently reported (August 18, 2009) about a paper published online by the journal Forensic Science Internal: Genetics. Citing this authoritative paper, the Times reported that scientists in Israel have established that it is now possible to fabricate DNA evidence, “undermining the credibility of what has been the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.”
Times reporter Andrew Pollack wrote that “the scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.”
That’s scary Orwellian kind of stuff. The Harris County criminal justice system has suffered through nearly a decade of revelations about how the Houston City Police Department’s Crime Lab routinely fabricated forensic evidence to secure convictions and long term sentences in sexual assault and capital murder cases. DNA evidence was the “silver bullet” that frequently came to the rescue in these cases and resulted in the exoneration of innocent individuals framed by the Harris County District Attorney’s office and the Houston crime lab. There have been at least six such cases, and defense attorneys say there are probably hundreds more in the Texas prison system.
We know the Government not only lies but routinely suborns perjury on a regular basis, especially in terrorism, narcotics and organized crime cases. Defense attorneys must now face the very real prospect that in high profile criminal cases, such as those involving “terrorism” and national security, the Government could literally manufacture a crime scene with the fabricated DNA evidence to convict suspected “home-grown” terrorists, drug cartel kingpins, and Mafia bosses. This is not just idle speculation by a criminal defense attorney with a vested interest. (more…)
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