Federal and D.C. public defenders are calling on District officials to expand the review of past convictions involving fingerprints and firearms evidence following a series of highly publicized failures at the Department of Forensic Sciences (article available here).
In a Jan. 24 letter, officials with the Federal Public Defender Service and D.C.’s Public Defender Service, said the review of cases involving fingerprints and firearms should go back to at least 1995, which predates the creation of the independent crime lab. At that time, forensic examiners with the D.C. police department handled fingerprints and firearms cases.
In a sweeping report issued last month, a forensic consulting company commissioned by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser after the lab was stripped of its accreditation to perform forensic testing, recommended the District reexamine all cases handled by the D.C. crime lab’s fingerprints and firearms units dating back to the creation of the crime lab in 2012.
The public defenders, however, said the review of past cases should extend back even further, since many of the lab’s early employees were D.C. police employees who were “grandfathered” into the new agency without a meaningful screening or selection process to ensure they were qualified.
The defense attorneys’ letter also notes that one of the firearms examiners whose faulty work first exposed errors in the Firearms Examination Unit — by falsely linking cartridge casings from two different crime scenes to the same gun — began working at the D.C. police department in 1995.
The defense attorneys’ letter presses for a completely independent case manager with a “proven absence of conflict of interest,” meaning the person who fills the role should not have any previous or current contracts or relationships with either DFS or any of the stakeholders or be in an industry or field that competes for contracts with the D.C. government or federal Justice Department.