Today's News & Observer of Raleigh carries the editorial, "DAs on board."
Even though a News & Observer series and a shocking audit of cases handled by the State Bureau of Investigation's crime lab have demonstrated that SBI analysts have long seen themselves as members of the prosecution "team" in court, those prosecutors recognize that tainted evidence undermines the entire system of justice. Therefore, the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys now has called for an independent audit of all parts of the SBI's forensic lab, which finds its credibility in tatters.
There should be no question of, or resistance to, such an audit. Already, more than 200 cases have been identified where SBI blood analysts didn't tell the whole story. The SBI lab's treatment of ballistics evidence also has been called into question.
And:
The manipulation of lab tests results naturally doesn't mean that in all the prosecutions involving tainted SBI lab work the defendants were innocent. But problematic evidence, before or after the fact, does damage a prosecutor's case. It also can affect plea bargains and sentences.
No wonder, then, that the state conference of district attorneys has in effect linked arms with defense attorneys and some judges who have questioned the SBI's lab work in the past.
The justifiable controversy that has arisen because of the mess in the SBI lab and the testimony based on that mess isn't in the end just about whether the lab is functioning as it should. It's about the integrity of the agency and the people who work in this critical area of investigative science. (And yes, it's unfortunate that those who are competent and do not see themselves as arms of the prosecution are hurt by recent reports, but they are.)
It is about the need to draw a line between prosecutors and laboratory science so that the first does not control the second.
Anne Blythe writes, "Put off some executions, DA agrees," also in today's News & Observer.
The president of the N.C. Conference of District Attorneys said Monday that he supported a moratorium on the execution of any death-row inmates whose cases include evidence from the State Bureau of Investigations crime labs.
Seth Edwards, head of the organization of prosecutors and a district attorney in Eastern North Carolina, said he still had faith in the North Carolina justice system. But he acknowledged that some might have doubts after a recent blistering audit of the SBI's blood analysis unit highlighted a common practice of withholding test results that might have helped defendants.
"Personally, I do feel like from a justice standpoint, we need to make sure the issues are resolved in the SBI crime lab," Edwards said. "I just feel like the public right now is skeptical."
Edwards comments came the same day that defense lawyers, scholars, a rape victim and two men who served time in prison for crimes they did not commit came together in Raleigh to talk about problems plaguing the justice system.
By highlighting the findings of the SBI crime lab audit and recent studies showing racial disparities in jury selection and sentencing in capital cases, the advocates for the wrongly convicted suggested a sweeping conversation about the role of race in the justice system and an overhaul of the SBI system.
The group announced that its members had joined the legal battle of Melvin Lee White, one of 152 death row inmates using the state's fledgling Racial Justice Act to challenge his sentence.
The year-old law, one of only two in the country, allows judges to consider statistics and anecdotal trends of racial disparities in death sentences, as well as testimony, to change a death sentence to life in prison without parole.
The editorial touched on the case of Derrick Allen, the latest case of injustice exposed by the News & Observer. "'Bloody' evidence put man in prison 12 years," by J. Andrew Curliss, is via sister-paper the Charlotte Observer.
In the summer of 1999, prosecutors were seeking the death penalty for high school dropout Derrick Michael Allen when they switched course and offered him a deal.
In exchange for guilty pleas to the murder and sexual assault of his girlfriend's 2-year-old daughter, they would spare his life but ensure he was in prison into his 60s.
The prosecutors trumpeted two powerful pieces of evidence: a pair of bloodstained panties and bloody pajamas, certified as such in a lab report by the State Bureau of Investigation that supported their theory that the girl was violently assaulted.
But records show that the SBI performed crucial, confirmatory tests on the clothing three times, and all tests were negative for blood.
A review of the case against Allen, which was built in large part on the work of the SBI, is a window into one of more than 200 criminal files across North Carolina in which the state agency's blood analysis work is in doubt.
A blistering audit made public Aug. 18 says that SBI lab agents misstated or overstated blood test results from 1987 until 2003, when their methods changed with new testing procedures.
Further, a series of reports in The News & Observer in early August showed that lab analysts have bent rules and pushed past the bounds of accepted science to deliver reports that bolstered prosecutors' cases.
The Rocky Mount Telegram combines a number of AP items under the headline, "Crime lab."
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