IAPE Evidence Blog

The Den­ver Post
BYLINE: Susan Greene Den­ver Post Columnist

Den­ver, CO

Clarence Moses-EL may spend the rest of his life behind bars as the face of a national prob­lem that too long has gone ignored.

From prison, the Col­orado inmate won a judge’s per­mis­sion to test the DNA evi­dence from a rape for which he says he was wrong­fully con­victed. He man­aged to raise $1,000 from fel­low inmates to pay for the lab work. Den­ver police wrapped up the evi­dence and labeled the box, “DO NOT DESTROY.”

Nev­er­the­less, it got tossed in the trash.

Nearly 25 years since the dawn of the DNA era, there still are no fed­eral safe­guards pre­vent­ing local author­i­ties from destroy­ing traces of human biol­ogy that can free the wrong­fully con­victed or help crack unsolved cases. Nobody on a national level has taken a mean­ing­ful look at preservation.

Until now.

The Obama admin­is­tra­tion this month is launch­ing a fed­eral work­ing group to rec­om­mend stan­dards for pre­serv­ing foren­sic evidence.

“The aim is national guide­lines that can be adopted by law enforce­ment, courts and any­one else who’s respon­si­ble for stor­ing evi­dence, espe­cially long term,” says Mark Stolorow of the National Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Technology.

A Den­ver Post series, “Trash­ing the Truth,” found author­i­ties across the coun­try have lost or destroyed tens of thou­sands of DNA sam­ples since genetic fin­ger­print­ing rev­o­lu­tion­ized crime solving.

In a nation where TV shows glo­rify DNA foren­sics, all too many real-life evi­dence rooms are mis­man­aged and under-funded, rou­tinely fail­ing to track valu­able items from crime scenes.

Pros­e­cu­tors and police nation­wide have cited costly stor­age space among rea­sons to jus­tify toss­ing DNA sam­ples, includ­ing rape kits.

Tax­pay­ers in Col­orado Springs paid $1.24 mil­lion to expand evi­dence rooms in 2002. But the space was cramped with unor­ga­nized piles within three years. So the Police Depart­ment trashed evi­dence from 500 cases, includ­ing sev­eral cold-case sex crimes and sus­pected murders.

One of those cases was the dis­ap­pear­ance of Glo­ria Berreth in 1994. Police didn’t tell her fam­ily they had burned the evidence.

Her daugh­ter learned about the purge months ago from an archived ver­sion of a 2-year-old arti­cle. She was stunned that police let her mom’s case go so cold.

Funded for at least a year by the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment, the new fed­eral work­ing group will include sci­en­tists, legal experts and evi­dence cus­to­di­ans who have yet to be appointed. They’ll rec­om­mend pro­to­cols on what types of evi­dence should be pre­served, how and for how long, Stolorow says. They’re likely ulti­mately to ask Con­gress for funding.

The Bush admin­is­tra­tion killed pre­vi­ous attempts to address the prob­lem. “States have been need­ing guid­ance in this area for quite some time. This is a crit­i­cal step for­ward,” says Rebecca Brown, pol­icy advo­cate for the New York-based Inno­cence Project.

Col­orado imple­mented some reforms in 2008. But those efforts and the fed­eral work­ing group come too late for Moses-EL, 55, who remains locked up serv­ing a 48-year sen­tence. The DNA rev­o­lu­tion passed him by when Den­ver took the bio­log­i­cal proof of his guilt or inno­cence and threw it in a Dumpster.

“Some­one needs to set this straight,” he has writ­ten from the Kit Car­son Cor­rec­tional Facil­ity in Burling­ton. “If not for me, then for the next guy.”

Susan Greene writes Sun­days, Tues­days and Thurs­days. Reach her at 303 – 954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com