Seeking Justice in Military Crime Lab Mess

Innocent soldiers and sailors might be sitting in prison and guilty people might have gone free because of mishandled criminal evidence.  This troubling fact is the upshot of a scandal at the military’s top crime lab.

The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory in Georgia analyzes criminal evidence in military crimes, including sexual assault and murder.  A few years ago, a long-time analyst was pressured to resign after allegations of botching evidence in hundreds of cases – confusing samples, misreading results, and using too much evidence for testing, which often made retesting impossible.  When evidence could be retested, lab officials disagreed with his DNA results 55 percent of time.  Evidence was already was destroyed in 83 percent of his cases. Those 388 cases included rape and other serious crimes.

The Army is accused of trying to cover up the situation by tightly controlling an internal review to try to minimize the public relations damage.

Thanks to the work of investigative newspaper reporters, these problems just came to light.  The journalists sought my reaction because of my prior work on crime lab cleanup.  In the 1990s, I helped a whistleblower at the Federal Bureau of Investigation crime lab who’d been retaliated against for speaking out about sloppy procedures there.  Ultimately, an independent review proved him right in many instances, and the FBI has worked to reform the lab.

I’m looking for an independent review of everything that happened at the Army lab, the Army’s response to it, and the consequences for the criminal defendants and victims involved in the criminal cases handled by the lab.  So far, the only independent review was narrow and superficial.  The Defense Department inspector general looked only at the way the Army conducted its internal review of the lab mess. 

Serious questions remain.  Were innocent people convicted and criminals exonerated because of sloppy lab work?  Are wrongly convicted individuals sitting in prison, unaware that the evidence in their cases might be tainted?  To what extent did lab supervisors fail to address the situation in a timely, thorough, and transparent way?  Was key evidence destroyed even as Army supervisors were aware of serious problems in the lab?  Did supervisors cover up the alleged problems to spare themselves embarrassment, to the benefit or detriment of criminal defendants? 

I intend to ask the Defense Department inspector general to conduct an investigation of how the Army handled the alleged misconduct itself and the effects of the alleged misconduct.  The way an agency responds to reports of malfeasance is a measure of competence, integrity, and accountability.  In this case, it directly involves whether justice is served for dozens of individuals and victims.