Transcripts of the Attorney General's Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs (AGID-LAB) Working Group
Monday, October 21, 2002
LOCATION OF EVIDENCE
MR. SCHMITT: Let's move to the No. 4 topic on our list of discussion items. We have thrown out some issues here that come up in our discussions. We wanted to make sure that we have the benefit of your views on this. Let's start with the second one, if you don't mind, which is location of evidence.
Where we're going on this is are there problems with evidence storage, evidence retrieval, chain of custody issues, just merely space issues, and other than give us more money, which I realize is the answer to all of my questions, what can we do to help on this? Is it that our funding streams are not robust enough to allow you to do that? There is just not enough money to allow you to solve that problem and do the other things?
Let's start off with location of evidence. Who has problems? Paul, do you have any problems with location of evidence?
MR. FERRARA: As part and parcel I think probably most states as they've developed postconviction statutes, part and parcel of those are requirements for the retention of evidence even after a conviction for some period of time. Those kinds of statutes obviously cause a problem depending upon where the statute requires the evidence be retained.
In Virginia that dubious honor fell on the Division of Forensic Science to retain the evidence of all felony convictions for 15 years or the length of the sentence or until the sentence is executed. Obviously that's going to be problematic from a storage standpoint, but, on the other hand, it does assure that evidence will be available for postconviction testing in the future should it be necessary.
But clearly storage of evidence and the space associated with it are going to continue to grow as well as everything else about this technology.
MR. GIALAMAS: I guess being from Los Angeles, I can't help but comment about some evidence issues. I take it you're all familiar with our evidence issues. I guess once again we're the stepchild, and I guess I'm representing L.A. because it's both the sheriffs department and the PD that have gotten pretty beaten up in the media.
But we do have issues in California. Much like Paul does, we have a requirement that all evidence be retained as long as a person is incarcerated. There is a hook that allows you to dispose of the evidence as long as you can show the disposition of the person's incarceration status, which again we go back to the information sharing, communication issues.
One of the things that I would like to throw out maybe not to complicate things, but just as a point of discussion is having been on the State Attorney General's task force on this very issue about evidence, one of the biggest things are comments I get back from agencies complaining about direction is how evidence really needs to be stored. The idea of is it critical that the evidence absolutely be frozen, and that frozen condition makes a big difference for a lot of agencies.
That may be something that we as scientists have to really address and answer for our clients, our criminal justice community, because at the sheriff's department we have three 800 square foot walk-in freezers. They're stacked floor to ceiling. We are in the midst of building two more. If we continue at the rate we're growing, we're going to have to change our 30,000 square foot warehouse to a bilevel freezer of the entire space, and if we're going to be keeping this evidence forever, and that seems to be the indication, there has got to be a better way to keep it than at four degrees centigrade. There has got to be a way that we can maintain it perhaps in a refrigerated environment. A cool room with no humidity, for example, is just an idea that we talked about.
That may be something that we ought to pursue, giving guidance to agencies on how to keep their evidence because the burden may not be on the crime labs; that burden may be on the agencies themselves.
MS. HART: Would it helpful to have kind of almost some best practice information disseminated about kind of using your limited storage resources wisely to kind of get what is the most cost effective use? One of the other things that I recall from Los Angeles that was mentioned to me was this whole issue about how the paperwork trail went about and that in Los Angeles it became easier to get the evidence destroyed because you didn't have to have a signature of a higher up, but to hold the evidence you had to get a signature of a higher up.
MR. GIALAMAS: That's exactly the way it happens.
MS. HART: So part of this, too, would also be encouraging states to look at kind of the paperwork trail and how this works and make sure that it's serving the needs that they want met.
MR. GIALAMAS: Absolutely. I can tell you from our end one of the things we experienced in our agency was that as different investigative units take over, for example, we have a unit called the Family Crimes Bureau. They're the ones that take care of the sexual assault evidence. So at its local station level it gets collected, and that station detective is tagged as the detective. It then gets transferred to the Family Crimes Bureau. The disposition notice doesn't get changed in the information trail, so it goes back to the detective. He says I'm not handling this case; it's someone else and could easily sign off on it without realizing that the evidence is being dispositioned or discarded.
The same thing at the Los Angeles police department. I'm sure many of you heard of these 1,000 DNA cases that were discarded. That particular issue had to do with a miscommunication within the department as to the investigative status of those cases. So we need the information base there to absolutely prevent this from happening anywhere else. We've seen it happen in L.A. I wouldn't wish it on anyone else.
MS. GUIDO: I was just going to say that one of the things that I think is a real problem in terms of evidence storage is, depending on your state, for example, in Pennsylvania ours is pretty much county by county how that evidence is going to be stored, it can cause real problems for you not only in your criminal case, but later in your civil case should something go wrong.
We have a case right now that's becoming pretty famous. In fact, Johnny Cochran was out to see me about two weeks ago about our case, a guy that did 28 years in prison and then was released on a Postconviction Relief Act petition. The DA decided not to prosecute, but it all centers around the work that was done in our State Police crime lab. The technician and everybody else is now going to be sued over what she did.
It centers around a print that supposedly had blood on it, and there is some question now about whether or not the print did have blood on it. The print can't be found. You know, county by county they decide how to take care of their evidence. In Dauphin County where this happened they are keeping their evidence from their old cases out in the basement of a local nursing home, which isn't uncommon because I'm from another county, and back when I was a prosecutor, we kept our evidence out in the county nursing home in really deplorable conditions actually.
So I just point out that it can be not only a problem for the prosecutors, but may be a problem for your lab personnel later on down the road. We're looking at millions and millions of dollars here in that suit when it seems that maybe the lab director did nothing wrong. She may have been absolutely accurate, but we just can't find the prints anymore.
