14A The Denver Post g
Monday, July 23, 2007
TRASHING THE TRUTH
EVIDENCE: Storage can be primitive
< CONTINUED FROM 1A
“It’s like that,
I guess. One
man’s garbage
could be
another man’s
salvation.”
Shirley Clemons,
whose fiancé, Willie
Grimes, is unable
to appeal his
North Carolina rape
conviction because
a court clerk tossed
his evidence
“Callous
injustice”
“While the practice
of destroying old
evidence in closed
criminal cases was
a routine and benign practice prior
to the widespread
forensic use of
DNA, the current
practice of destroying biological
evidence, with full
knowledge of its
potential use to
exonerate the
wrongly convicted,
is a cruel and
callous injustice.”
CYNTHIA JONES, from
the American Criminal
Law Review, 2005
ABOUT THE
SERIES
Trashing
the truth
In the absence of
governmental
statistics on
evidence
destruction and
loss nationwide,
The Post tallied
cases from public
documents,
estimates of lawenforcement
officials, and data
from DNA grant
correspondence
between states
and the federal
government. Also
figuring into our
totals is
information from
lawyers handling
innocence claims
and other legal
actions across the
country.
B B B
“Rats don’t bother me none.”
So says clerk Warren Spears as he unlocks the attic to Louisiana’s Orleans Parish courthouse where he stores evidence
for the community with the highest murder rate in the nation.
Inside, he has piled dozens of guns into a
shopping cart. A bloody shirt and two rape
kits lie under a bicycle wheel. And strewn
everywhere are marijuana leaves, gnawed
by rodents whose carcasses workers remove twice weekly from sticky traps.
“Somewhere between prehistoric and
18th-century,” as Spears’ boss describes it,
the Orleans Parish evidence room is a
dump, a case study in the chaos that often
rules evidence storage across the U.S.
The problem stems partly from stark
economics.
Cash-strapped police departments and
court systems struggle to keep cops walking their beats and judges presiding over
busy dockets. Paying to improve evidence
vaults unseen by the public typically isn’t
a high priority, experts say.
Adding to the chaos is a lack of oversight.
Reluctant to cross over jurisdictional
boundaries, federal and state governments have given local police and courts
free rein to handle — and even mishandle
— criminal evidence.
After four years of debate, Congress in
2004 passed language in the Justice For All
Act requiring that biological evidence be
preserved in federal cases.
Still, two decades after genetic fingerprinting first was used in U.S. courtrooms,
no national standards regulate the handling of DNA from the outset of major
crime investigations in state cases, which
outnumber those in the federal system by
more than 15 to 1.
“We need some kind of uniform way of doing it,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Nobody has stepped up to the plate and
said, ‘This is the way it has to be,’ ” added
Joe Latta, head of the International Association of Property and Evidence. “When I
was at the FBI academy, 20 years ago, I
looked in one of best libraries in the world
and there was nothing in there about evidence standards.
“Now, I look around today and there
still are almost no standards whatsoever.”
It would help, experts agree, to reach a
common understanding about what biological evidence even is.
In Houston, courthouse officials are confused by the most basic terminology.
“Biological evidence? That would include tree bark, right?” a spokesman asked.
A 2005 Washington State University
study found that 27 percent of police officials didn’t fully grasp how DNA could
help their cases.
Ignorance stems largely from a lack of
training.
Police accreditation agencies don’t require instruction or even college degrees
for custodians storing evidence for police
departments. Too often, cops break a leg
or bad-mouth the police chief and get
“stuck down in the basement,” banished to
run evidence, said Dennis Davenport, evidence director in Commerce City.
In courthouses, clerks elected to manage evidence rooms usually have no education specific to that job.
Al Jean Bogle had worked as a congressional staffer before taking office as Superior Court clerk in Catawba County, N.C.
WILLIE GRIMES
Because a court clerk threw away the evidence from his case, Grimes is unable to appeal his rape conviction as
he serves a life sentence at Caledonia Correctional Institution in Tillery, N.C. He was convicted 19 years ago,
largely on the basis of pre-DNA-era analysis of a hair — a method that many now call junk science. Grimes, 60,
insists he is innocent.
Photo by RJ Sangosti The Denver Post
Lost hope in North Carolina
In an evidence room packed to its brim,
Bogle was flummoxed to discover that her
predecessor had destroyed the only DNA
samples that could have freed Willie
Grimes before he dies in prison.
Grimes, 60 and recovering from cancer,
was convicted of rape largely on the testimony of a state forensic chemist analyzing
one of 100 hair fragments collected from
the rape victim’s bed. Using a form of
pre-DNA analysis now debunked by many
as a junk science, the chemist found the
hair was “microscopically consistent”
with Grimes’ hair.
Nineteen years later, DNA testing likely
could confirm or refute that analysis. But
the hairs, the victim’s panties and a rape
evidence kit from the case were destroyed
by Bogle’s predecessor in 1990, according
to a “While You Were Out” note Bogle recently found in her office.
“I’ve been clerk for almost eight years.
We’ve got four truck tires in the evidence
room. We’ve got bales of marijuana that
have been in there since I became clerk.
And Mr. Grimes’ evidence, evidence in a
life case, is gone. I hate it,” she said.
“There’s no political or financial imperative to keep evidence from old cases where
they’ve got a guy locked up and long gone,”
added Orleans Parish’s Morrell.
In many evidence rooms, car parts,
bikes, lawn mowers, computers, backpacks, six-packs, suitcases and even tree
limbs from nonviolent cases sit mixed in
with delicate biological samples from the
most heinous rapes and murders.
Piles accumulate in cramped and aging
rooms often not built to store evidence.
Items flow in faster, and at more unpredictable rates, than they can be removed,
spilling into closets, trailers and rented
storage sheds.
More than 70 percent of the police departments responding to the WSU survey
noted that they face “highly critical” storage problems.
In Florida, Bob Wesley, the Orange-Os-
ceola public defender, was especially surprised to stumble across Union County’s
answer to evidence overcrowding.
“I walked into the men’s room to take a
leak, and it was full of evidence files,” he
said. “You had to aim to miss the files.”
Closer to home, cramped conditions led
Colorado Springs police to a slash-andburn approach believed unprecedented in
Colorado history.
Taxpayers there paid more than $1.24
million expanding evidence storage space
in 2002. But within three years, the facility
was overloaded with stockpiles from floor
to ceiling. Police workers spent months
trashing evidence in 500 cases, including
at least three sex crimes and several homicides or suspected murders.
“My take is that the day we unlock the
door on a new facility here, it’s woefully inadequate. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was
an obsolete-when-you-open-the-door kind
of situation,” said Police Chief Richard Myers, who took over this year after the purging scandalized that department.
Colorado Springs has hired evidence expert Latta, who advises that training — not
bulk purges — is the antidote to overcrowding. As Latta tells it, evidence custodians need to do better triage and work to
RICHARD MYERS
The Colorado Springs police chief took over in January after a massive
evidence purge scandalized the department. He fears that any storage
upgrade will instantly be obsolete.
Photo by Helen H. Richardson The Denver Post
save space, say, by cutting out the bloodstain from a bed of a murder victim and
throwing out the rest of the mattress.
Successes in Dallas, Charlotte
The Dallas Police Department has set an
example, preserving DNA specimens
from rapes, murders and other major
crimes since the 1970s. The idea: Store
tiny lab slides on at least a portion of biological evidence collected from all major
cases over the years.
As a result, the department has flushed
out culprits in decades-old crimes, including the man who raped Dallas resident
Debbie Shaw in 1986.
Sgt. Patrick Welsh pulled the slide for
testing, which led to a national database
hit with Johnny Ray Patton, already serving a 50-year sentence in a Texas prison
for burglary and other offenses.
“I broke down sobbing when I found out
who did this to me,” Shaw said. “I’m
blessed that my evidence wasn’t destroyed. I can try to keep him behind bars.”
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department vastly expanded its evidence
storage since North Carolina began suffering a rash of highly publicized wrongful
convictions and scandals in which prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence.
The department has frozen biological
specimens such as clothing cuttings and
rape kits, and it takes the initiative to notify prisoners when it finds DNA for possible appeals. It also has bar-coded evidence
dating from 1978 so that detectives and
lawyers don’t have to sort through endless
stacks just to locate pieces from a single
case.
“It’s the 21st-century model,” said Rebecca Brown, policy analyst for the New
York-based Innocence Project, who visited Charlotte’s evidence room for ideas in
crafting proposed model legislation.
> See EVIDENCE on 15A