States Stalled on Probing Lab Problems
Associated Press
March 24, 2007

Tackling critical problems in the nation's justice system, Minnesota , Texas and Virginia have each founded powerful oversight boards in the last two years that can investigate misconduct in crime labs.

But not one of the new boards has yet reopened a case either because they have refused to do so or because they haven't been funded.

Those pressing for improvements in forensic work, a foundation of criminal investigations and prosecutions, see the states' unwillingness to act as symbolic of the justice system's overall refusal to dig into its own failings. In their view, it's also an outright failure to follow a 2004 federal law requiring some kind of investigative entity.

"The country has to have trust that we're convicting the guilty and not the innocent," said Texas state Sen. Juan Hinojosa, a Democrat whose bill to create the Texas Forensic Science Commission became law in 2005.

The flaws in his state and elsewhere are "the tip of the iceberg," Hinojosa said. "Prosecutors are supposed to do justice. Instead, they just want notches on their belt. It permeates the whole criminal justice system." In the past two years, allegations of misconduct have arisen in death penalty cases in Texas and Virginia , including one in which a man was executed.

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The steady stream of exonerations and scandals has raised doubts about everything from the handling of DNA evidence to overly broad conclusions from hair and blood comparisons. Discredited beliefs about how to determine arson and faulty conclusions from ballistics testing have added to the questions.

An analysis of 86 exonerations found that forensic science testing errors were the second-most common factor, behind only eyewitness errors, according to a 2005 study by Michael J. Saks, a law professor at Arizona State University , and Jonathan J. Koehler, a business professor at the University of Texas . …