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 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 a 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, 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."
People are also reading…
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.
Virginia's new board, however, has rejected the only two requests for reopened investigations that it has handled, while Texas' commission simply hasn't acted — hamstrung because the governor never funded the board. He and others took more than a year to appoint all the members.
Minnesota's board held its first meeting just last month — but it's been given no money to operate, leaving some, including its chairman, wondering how they will effectively pursue wrongdoing. He and others worry about the public's confidence in the criminal-justice system.
Hinojosa's law came after widespread problems at the Houston Crime Lab led to the release of two men from prison, including one who served 17 years for a rape that new tests showed he did not commit. The department's DNA division was shut for three years.
Crime-lab problems — falsified tests, misplaced evidence, scientific mistakes — have surfaced across the country in recent years, leading to lawsuits and sometimes audits in West Virginia, Montana, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Ohio and more.
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 add 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.
The 2004 federal Justice for All Act requires that states that accept federal funding to improve DNA testing also ensure there is a government entity able to conduct independent investigations into misconduct. The law spurred the creation of Minnesota's panel; Texas and Virginia lawmakers created their boards after significant problems in their states.
The commissions have offered an unprecedented opportunity to re-examine justice as it is handed down in the nation's courtrooms. Proponents have been hoping they can strengthen trust in the evidence relied on by police, prosecutors and juries. But some have been disappointed.
"It's just one disaster after another involving bad forensic science," said William Thompson, a forensic-science expert at the University of California-Irvine. "The states try to respond to these problems by creating these commissions. But … when people raise questions that might be embarrassing, they just shut it down."
Some critics argue that problems with forensic labs are not sporadic but systemic — a natural result when forensic crime labs are part of local, state and federal criminal justice systems and get subtle pressure to back up police and prosecutors.
"The real problem we're facing is the same as we have from the beginning — law enforcement agencies have too much control over forensic science," Thompson said, and they're unwilling to look closely at errors. "Prosecutors and law enforcement people don't want to have it. They'd rather not know the answers about why we have these muckups."
