Disclosing
evidentiary procedures that two defense lawyers contend are deficient, two St.
Paul police criminalists testified Monday, July 16, that their lab has few
written guidelines, little accountability and scant oversight.
Yet the evidence
their unaccredited crime lab analyzes can help send people to prison or clear
those suspected of crimes.
Attorneys in the case
said the judge's ruling in an unusual evidentiary hearing could affect perhaps
thousands of cases.
In a First Judicial
District court in Dakota County, two public defenders are contending that the
drug evidence against up to eight of their clients should be thrown out because
the St. Paul crime lab's procedures for analyzing seized narcotics lack any
firm basis in science.
The hearing's outcome
could affect the cases of the eight defendants, a group led by Matthew David
Jensen, 29, of Rochester, a six-time felon who has pleaded not guilty to heroin
possession in a 2009 Dakota County case.
But the result could
affect many cases whose evidence was processed by the lab.
"They don't
follow generally accepted principles in the scientific community," one of
the lawyers, Lauri Traub, said of the lab. "They don't have written
standard operating procedures; they don't do validation studies; they have
nobody coming in from the outside to say they're doing something right or
wrong."
The hearing before
District Judge Kathryn Davis Messerich in Hastings was expected to continue
Tuesday and
Wednesday.
Traub and co-counsel
Christine Funk, a public defender, are expected to call experts in drug testing
and crime lab procedures.
Aside from testing
the drugs seized by its officers, the St. Paul police lab also examines
narcotics confiscated by sheriff's offices in Ramsey, Dakota and Washington
counties, as well as the Minnesota State Patrol.
"We've asked
them for the complete drug testing files, but they don't print them out,"
Traub said of the lab. "They go back in their computer and click-and-drag,
and we have noticed on some of our cases, the top printout may be from one of
our cases, and sometimes the bottom isn't one of our cases. Do they lack an
attention to detail, or are they making this stuff up? It's astounding."
The crime lab is
involved in thousands of cases a year; police spokesman Howie Padilla said he
couldn't provide an exact number Monday.
Until the judge has ruled,
Padilla said, he would not talk about specific issues that have arisen in the
case.
"However, I can
tell you that, if there are improvements that need to be made in the work that
our crime lab does, obviously we're going to make them," he said.
"Chief (Thomas)
Smith has never made it a secret that if there are improvements to be made with
what we do, we're going to explore what we can do in order to make those
improvements happen."
Jennifer Jannetto,
who supervises three workers in the lab, testified that the facility had no
"formalized training program" in writing and that she has had no
training in drug chemistry or in using or interpreting the main device the lab
uses to test drugs, an instrument known as a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer.
Funk asked her if the
lab had a written code of professional conduct, and Jannetto said those in the
lab follow the police department's code of ethics.
"There's a rule
of thumb in the lab that what we report out is true and accurate," she
said.
"But that's not
written down, is it?" Funk asked her.
"No, it
isn't."
She acknowledged
there was no written protocol for the safekeeping of evidence, nor does the lab
track when the equipment is cleaned. The lab also has no method to review a
criminalist's work after the first year or so of training, and there are no
internal audits or proficiency testing.
Traub and Funk intend
to show that the lab doesn't meet minimum standards for crime labs. The lab
lacks certification from the American Board of Criminalists, the national body
that establishes and monitors the work performed in crime labs.
The proceeding before
Messerich is what is known as a second-prong Frye-Mack hearing, used to
establish if evidence obtained through a particular technique is based on a method
that is scientifically reliable.
Dakota County
prosecutors called Roberta DeCrans, a criminalist in the lab, to testify about
the methods she used to analyze the suspected heroin seized by the Dakota
County Drug Task Force when Jensen was arrested. But under questioning by
Assistant County Attorney Vance Burns Grannis III, she acknowledged lab
procedures aren't what they are in other crime labs.
Much of the testimony
involved use of the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, often referred to as
GC-MS or "GC-mass spec." It is a two-stage procedure. First, a sample
of the substance to be analyzed is turned into a liquid, injected into the
chromatograph and heated. The heating breaks the compound into its individual
components.
Much like a prism
breaks sunlight into its seven constituent colors, each of the components emits
a unique signature when analyzed by a mass spectrometer, the second stage of
the process. By reading those signatures, the process tells what individual
chemicals exist in the sample, and how much of them there are.
The results are
printed out on a graph where the individual components show up as peaks; each
component has a unique peak, which criminalists compare against peaks on graphs
prepared by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and Monday's
hearing featured many of them as exhibits.
In Jensen's case,
among the samples tested was a cotton ball containing a brown residue that cops
suspected was heroin. DeCrans testified how she prepared the sample for
testing, and her testimony disclosed that the St. Paul crime lab had few
written procedures dictating what she was to do -- and kept few records
documenting what she actually did.
Under
cross-examination by Traub, she described cutting brown strands off the cotton
ball to put in the solvent used to turn the sample into a liquid.
The public defender
asked her if the lab had any standard operating procedure that told her what
part of the cotton ball to cut.
"I guess I don't
know word for word if it tells me where to take it from," the witness
replied. She said the lab was working on establishing written procedures.
"It's been
brought to our attention that it should be done," she said.
The criminalist
didn't record how much solvent she used in her analysis, among other steps,
prompting Traub to note that there was no way for anyone to replicate her test
results.
"I guess that's
accurate," DeCrans replied.
She revealed that
even when her findings were questionable, nobody at the lab questioned them.
The substance she was
testing for was heroin, or diacetylmorphine. Its peak molecular ion is 369, and
if a scientist sees that peak in the graph, they know the substance is heroin.
But DeCrans' test of Jensen's substance had a peak molecular ion of 405.
"But if it truly
is heroin, there shouldn't be a 405 peak. You know that?" Traub asked her.
DeCrans studied the
report for several seconds, before looking up. "Yes, I know there
shouldn't be a 405," she replied.
She said the drugs
often seized are "rude, crude product."
But Traub said the
results showed that either the sample wasn't heroin, or it was contaminated
before it went into the machine or was tainted by leftover residue from other
tests.
"You called it
heroin and would come in to court and testify to that?" Traub asked her.
"I'm not saying
I didn't consider it, but with my training, I thought it was heroin."
"Heroin isn't
just going to have another ion attached to it?" Traub asked her.
"Correct,"
DeCrans said, saying that it could be some other compound.
"And if it's a
different compound, it's not diacetylmorphine," Traub asked.
"Yes,"
DeCrans said."
She said she couldn't
recall if she had somebody else look at the results, but acknowledged that if
someone wanted to replicate the test, they'd have to use the same procedures
she used, and those weren't written down anywhere. The procedures were told to
her by her superiors when she was in training.
"They'd have to
rely on this oral tradition," Traub said.
"Yes,"
DeCrans said.