Yesterday, two former FBI agents issued a scathing review of 16 years of blood work done by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation's crime lab. Hundreds of convictions are now in doubt.
The full impact of the disclosure will reverberate for years to come as prosecutors and defense attorneys re-examine cases as much as two decades old to figure out whether these errors robbed defendants of justice. Some of the injustices can be addressed as attorneys bring old cases back to court. For others, it's too late: Three of the defendants in botched cases have been executed.
I mentioned this yesterday, but this is so outrageous that it demands a repost. The review by former FBI agents Chris Swecker and Mike Wolf covered 15,000 cases, and found problems with 230 cases involving 269 people. In many of these cases, analysts didn't report tests that turned up negative for blood. In the process, they may have withheld exculpatory evidence from defendants in violation of the federal Constitution and North Carolina law.
Swecker said that during the period covered by the review, the state's blood analysts operated without regard for accepted blood analysis practice.
"There was anecdotal evidence that some Analysts were not objective in their mindset," Swecker wrote.
Tests used to confirm the presence of blood never yield "inconclusive results," Swecker noted. Two analysts interviewed for the report told Swecker that despite volumes of warnings about the potential for false positives on presumptive blood tests, they didn't believe it because they had not gotten a positive result when testing plant material and bacteria known to signal false positives. Those two analysts believed that positive presumptive tests were absolute indications of blood.
Eight analysts were involved in these bad practices. Some are dead; a few are retired.
Four still work for the SBI, and another performs contract work for the agency.
Until 1997, the lab operated without written report-writing guidelines. From 1997 to 2003, it was accepted practice not to report negative or inconclusive confirmatory tests--sophisticated tests that prove whether or not a substance is blood.
One of the analysts who figured prominently in the review was Duane Deaver. His botched analysis of a substance on Greg Taylor's SUV triggered this increased scrutiny of the SBI. Back in 1992, Deaver testified that the substance was blood--but didn't tell anyone that a confirmatory test showed it actually wasn't blood. As a result, Taylor spent 17 years in jail for a murder he didn't commit. The review red-flagged five cases involving Deaver--including one that got a man executed. Deaver was suspended just before the report went public. If I were in his shoes, I'd have a lawyer on speed dial.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys are flabbergasted by this report.
"This report reveals staggering lack of competence at the lab," said Mike Klinkosum, a Raleigh lawyer who represented Taylor in February and helped discover Deaver's withheld test results. "It's an abomination of the criminal justice system and an affront to all the decent law enforcement officers out there doing their jobs."
Cooper delivered copies of the report and a list of affected cases to district attorneys across the state little more than an hour before announcing his findings to the public.
At least one met the findings with anger.
"We've been out here asserting things as fact that just weren't," said John Snyder, district attorney of Union County. "Now, when I've got jurors coming in, I've got to enter into a whole line of questioning I never should have been forced to do. They won't trust us."
"Abomination" is an understatement. While the practices detailed in the report are no longer in place, this report on top of others in the last month reveal an agency that is a clear and present danger to the rights of those accused of crime in North Carolina. I know I sound like a broken record, but it's past time for the SBI to be placed under court supervision.