IAPE Evidence Blog

South­side Pride ‚southsidepride.com
BYLINE: Ed Felien
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Hen­nepin County, MN

The con­tro­versy sur­round­ing the Metro Gang Strike Force (MGSF) will not go away.

Hen­nepin County Attor­ney Mike Free­man decided there was not enough evi­dence to bring crim­i­nal charges against mem­bers of the Strike Force. There were three areas where there could have been crim­i­nal mis­con­duct: theft and other related offenses; mis­con­duct by a pub­lic offi­cer; and fail­ure to pro­tect prop­erty and data.

Per­haps the most con­tro­ver­sial aspect of the charge of theft against the MGSF is the claim that they seized prop­erty with­out a valid law enforce­ment purpose.

Accord­ing to Freeman’s report: “Inves­ti­ga­tors also found a num­ber of cases where some doc­u­men­ta­tion was miss­ing con­cern­ing for­fei­ture of seized cash. This is con­sis­tent with the Leg­isla­tive Auditor’s Report which says: ‘The strike force did not have doc­u­men­ta­tion to show that it served seizure notices for 202 of 545 cash seizures we tested, total­ing about $165,650. By not serv­ing the required notice of seizure, the strike force vio­lated the statu­tory admin­is­tra­tive for­fei­ture process and may not have a legal right to retain the seized cash.’”

It is impor­tant to note that the above cash was deposited in the MGSF evi­dence room and even­tu­ally in an MGSF bank account. There is no evi­dence that MGSF offi­cers took cash from sus­pects for their per­sonal use.

The Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union is very crit­i­cal of Freeman’s deci­sion not to pros­e­cute mem­bers of the MGSF. In their state­ment they say they oppose “the power of law enforce­ment to seize and for­feit prop­erty with­out crim­i­nal charges. This power, known as admin­is­tra­tive for­fei­ture, gives police the power to decide guilt and pun­ish­ment. Under admin­is­tra­tive for­fei­ture, the prop­erty owner must pay to sue to have their prop­erty returned, and the police do not need to charge or even arrest some­one to pun­ish them with forfeiture.”

Freeman’s crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion looked into claims that MGSF employ­ees took and used prop­erty from the evi­dence room, but these reports could not be sub­stan­ti­ated. Some prop­erty that was taken by employ­ees was alleged to have been marked for destruc­tion and was per­mit­ted by the com­man­der to be con­verted to the per­sonal use of employ­ees, but the com­man­der refused to speak with inves­ti­ga­tors regard­ing these claims. As a result there was insuf­fi­cient evi­dence to sup­port crim­i­nal charges.

The Spe­cial Review Panel begun by Min­nesota Commiss-ioner of Pub­lic Safety Michael Cam­pion found that “offi­cers stated that they used lap­tops removed from the evi­dence room for offi­cial pur­poses.” But Free­man con­cludes “absent proof that spe­cific com­put­ers were con­verted to per­sonal use, there is insuf­fi­cient evi­dence that any of the employ­ees ‘took’ the prop­erty as required by the inter­fer­ence with prop­erty in offi­cial cus­tody statute 609.47.”

An ice auger was seized as part of a nar­cotics case. It went miss­ing from the evi­dence room. The case offi­cer let it be known he was look­ing for the auger, and then the auger mys­te­ri­ously reap­peared. Twenty watches dis­ap­peared and never reappeared.

Many seized items were sold to MGSF mem­bers or their fam­i­lies. A pair of trail­ers were sold to the commander’s son. They were located on the commander’s vaca­tion prop­erty in north­ern Min­nesota. One was a 7-foot by 9-foot flatbed trailer that cost $1,300 in 2005 when it was bought from Gan­der Moun­tain. The son paid $500 for it. Free­man con­cludes: “There is insuf­fi­cient evi­dence that the prices paid were so far below the mar­ket value for these used trail­ers that the trans­ac­tion could be deemed a swin­dle of the MGSF.”

There was cer­tainly sloppy book­keep­ing. Free­man and the leg­isla­tive audi­tor agree “that the state of the records and the lack of inter­nal con­trols made it impos­si­ble for us to con­clude that all seized cash was either held in the prop­erty room or deposited with the fis­cal agent.” The com­man­der said he recalled pay­ing a MGSF worker $5,000 as an advance until they could be put on the Ram­sey County pay­roll, and he used money to pay con­fi­den­tial informants.

Some money was also used for travel. Free­man con­cludes, once again, there are insuf­fi­cient grounds for pros­e­cu­tion of crim­i­nal wrong­do­ing. How­ever, on Wednes­day, Aug. 25, 2010, a fed­eral court awarded $3 mil­lion in a class action law­suit to vic­tims of abuse by offi­cers of the MGSF. Accord­ing to Mara Got­tfried in her piece in the Pio­neer Press, Thurs­day, Aug. 26, the Fed­eral Dis­trict Court ruled that some MGSF offi­cers would stop peo­ple not sus­pected of gang activ­ity and seize their money. A Strike Force Review panel found “These encoun­ters almost always involved a per­son of color.”

The law­suit also claimed that strike force mem­bers “engaged in a pat­tern and prac­tice of using their appar­ent author­ity as police offi­cers to extort cash and prop­erty … par­tic­u­larly from those con­cerned about their immi­gra­tion sta­tus who would nat­u­rally per­ceive that they had no abil­ity to assert legal rights.” One of the attor­neys for the vic­tims said, “Every­body was failed here in the Twin Cities, every­body had a loss here. The Con­sti­tu­tion didn’t work for all of us when this rogue task force was run amok out there, vio­lat­ing people’s rights. … This is an ugly chap­ter, I’m sorry to say, in the life of the Twin Cities. But it ends pos­i­tively, it ends on a good note.”

Once again, the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem can­not act because dis­trict attor­neys believe they can­not prove guilt beyond a rea­son­able doubt, and civil courts have issued a $3 mil­lion set­tle­ment based on a pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence. And the offi­cers respon­si­ble for this bleed­ing of the pub­lic trea­sury con­tinue to be paid by the City of Min­neapo­lis and other juris­dic­tions that were part of the now defunct MGSF.

Freeman’s report con­tin­ues: “On May 20, 2009, the day MGSF oper­a­tions were sus­pended; sev­eral MGSF offi­cers were seen shred­ding doc­u­ments.” “The Offi­cial Records Act requires pub­lic offi­cers to ‘make and pre­serve all records nec­es­sary to a full and accu­rate knowl­edge of their offi­cial activ­i­ties.’ ” But, once again, with­out direct evi­dence that the offi­cers were delib­er­ately try­ing to destroy evi­dence that would impli­cate them in a crime, there is not suf­fi­cient evi­dence to bring crim­i­nal charges. The offi­cers claimed they were told by their home depart­ments to “clean out their files,” and they needed to destroy files to pro­tect under­cover offi­cers and informants.

The MGSF has dis­banded. The com­man­der has retired after 40 years as a St. Paul police officer.

Charles Samuel­son, the direc­tor of the ACLU-MN, wants Free­man to con­vene a Grand Jury to hear evi­dence and deter­mine if crimes have been com­mit­ted and whether offi­cers should be indicted: “The County Attor­ney has shown there is no pun­ish­ment for abuse of for­fei­ture power. We are shocked that he would make this deci­sion with­out input from the pub­lic. Again, we urge him to call for a grand jury inves­ti­ga­tion, and let the com­mu­nity decide whether any crimes were com­mit­ted.” Randy Hop­per, the attor­ney who won the $3 mil­lion set­tle­ment in Fed­eral Dis­trict Court against the MGSF, wants the Min­nesota Attor­ney Gen­eral to inves­ti­gate, because he believes the Hen­nepin County Attor­ney works too closely with the offi­cers and has a con­flict of interest.

In all prob­a­bil­ity, the mat­ter will sim­ply rest, and the events will fade into mem­ory.
One of the last actions of the MGSF was to clean out the Rolling 30’s gang from South Min­neapo­lis. They got con­vic­tions for more than a dozen gang mem­bers and made a major con­tri­bu­tion to peace and quiet in the Pow­der­horn and Cen­tral neigh­bor­hoods of South Minneapolis.

When Offi­cer Jerry Haaf was mur­dered by the Vice Lords almost 20 years ago, the police put tremen­dous pres­sure on the African-American com­mu­nity in South Min­neapo­lis to the point that Mayor Sharon Bel­ton pub­licly called for restraint. But they got one of the shoot­ers to con­fess and tes­tify against the oth­ers, and, even­tu­ally, they elim­i­nated the Vice Lords as a scourge to South Min­neapo­lis.
It must be that every cop wants to be Clint East­wood as Dirty Harry or Charles Bron­son in Death Wish. The abuses of power by the MGSF were an exam­ple of that kind of Hol­ly­wood vig­i­lante jus­tice. If we believe in the rule of law, if we believe in equal rights for all our cit­i­zens, then we have to move beyond this kind of thuggery.

Clearly, we need a bet­ter way to deal with the social prob­lems in our com­mu­nity, but until we find a way that we can all agree on, we’ll still need some­one to take out the garbage, and when they do, they’ll get their hands dirty.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

The Kansas City Star, A; Pg. 1
BYLINE: CHRISTINE VENDEL; The Kansas City Star

Kansas City, MO

Start­ing in the 1970s, Kansas City crime lab work­ers metic­u­lously pre­served hairs on glass slides in file cab­i­nets and stored blood and bod­ily fluid sam­ples in envelopes in freezers.

Many other labs across the coun­try reg­u­larly sent such evi­dence back to police, where it was later lost, destroyed or left to degrade in improper stor­age facilities.

“Other labs wrin­kled their noses at us,” said John Wil­son, a Kansas City Regional Crime Lab chemist at the time. “Why would you want to save all that stuff? It wasn’t seen as valuable.”

Now, with advance­ments in DNA test­ing, those archived sam­ples have become a vir­tual gold mine. The lab boasts evi­dence from more than 4,300 crimes dat­ing to 1972 that can be tested for DNA.

Since the early 2000s, police have reopened hun­dreds of old inves­ti­ga­tions using some of that evi­dence. Jack­son County pros­e­cu­tors, mean­while, have won con­vic­tions in 106 old mur­der and sex­ual assault cases — includ­ing putting away at least two ser­ial killers and four ser­ial rapists. “We’re the best in the coun­try,” said Ted Hunt, Jack­son County chief trial assis­tant. “No one else cranks out cold cases like we do.”

The old sam­ples are even prov­ing valu­able in new inves­ti­ga­tions. As police ear­lier this year closed in on a sus­pect in a series of Waldo-area sex­ual assaults, they asked the crime lab to run DNA tests on evi­dence from a string of sim­i­lar attacks in the 1980s.

DNA linked con­victed rapist Bernard Jack­son to the old cases, accord­ing to court records. That allowed police to arrest and hold him while con­tin­u­ing to ana­lyze the com­plex evi­dence in the cur­rent inves­ti­ga­tion. Police are wait­ing for com­plete lab results before seek­ing charges, which they hope to do later this year.

Hunt cred­its sev­eral fac­tors for help­ing Kansas City become a cold-case leader: wise deci­sions by police to col­lect the evi­dence and lab offi­cials to store it; a large num­ber of unsolved vio­lent crimes; and hav­ing one of the first rape trauma cen­ters in the country.

“A lot of it was fore­sight, and a lot of it was for­tu­itous,” Hunt said.

The Miami-Dade Police Depart­ment in Florida was the first in the nation to form a cold case unit in the 1980s. Most other depart­ments did not start one until 2000 or later.

Labs with rep­u­ta­tions for retain­ing large stashes of old bio­log­i­cal evi­dence include St. Louis County in Mis­souri and Dal­las County in Texas.

Kansas City and Jack­son County are con­sid­ered “excel­lent per­form­ers,” said Chuck Heurich, who man­ages the cold case pro­gram at the National Insti­tute of Justice.

“I can con­fi­dently say that they are in the upper tier of cold case units that I have encoun­tered,” Heurich said.

Despite the sci­en­tific advances of recent years, evidence-retention prac­tices still vary widely across the coun­try, said Rebecca Brown, pol­icy advo­cate for the Inno­cence Project, a group that seeks to exon­er­ate wrong­fully con­victed peo­ple though DNA testing.

“Kansas City absolutely ought to be applauded,” she said. “If every juris­dic­tion were doing that we’d be in much bet­ter shape. The fact that the Kansas City crime lab antic­i­pated the value of this evi­dence — it’s a suc­cess story.”

Fore­see­ing the future

In the 1970s, sci­en­tists at the Kansas City crime lab ana­lyzed hairs under a micro­scope and tested evi­dence for blood type. They were just start­ing to use a new enzyme test that could nar­row down a sus­pect pool beyond blood type.

They did not know exactly what the future would bring, but they could fore­see more enzyme tests with even more dis­crim­i­na­tory power.

So Wil­son sug­gested that the lab keep sam­ples from every piece of evi­dence. That way, work­ers could retest the evi­dence later, using newer tech­nol­ogy as it became available.

“It seemed like the log­i­cal thing to do,” said Wil­son, who was in charge of bio­log­i­cal evi­dence at the lab from the late 1970s until retir­ing in 2003.

If the lab received a pair of bloody jeans, for exam­ple, work­ers would cut out the bloody patch and return the rest of the jeans to police.

Police were noto­ri­ous for throw­ing prop­erty away, Wil­son said. Unaware of the future pos­si­bil­i­ties, they resented “civil­ian sci­en­tists try­ing to tell them how to do things.”

“We had scream­ing con­tests with police about sav­ing evi­dence,” Wil­son said.

Many other labs did not want to be both­ered with stor­ing evi­dence for police, he said. Some police agen­cies lacked proper stor­age facilities.

“If the sam­ples sat in a police prop­erty room in an old sub-basement with the mois­ture and heat­ing and freez­ing, the sam­ple would degrade,” said Gary How­ell, a chemist who became the Kansas City lab’s direc­tor in 1976.

That not only would pre­vent retest­ing by lab work­ers, it could pre­vent retest­ing at the request of defense attor­neys, How­ell said. Defense attor­neys could send a degraded sam­ple to another lab to double-check Kansas City’s results and not find any DNA.

“What would that look like in court?” asked How­ell, now the direc­tor of the John­son County crime lab.

In Kansas City, lab work­ers put sam­ples into freez­ers, pre­serv­ing the sam­ples’ integrity.

One year, short on freezer space, Wil­son begged police for $600 to buy a sec­ond freezer. Police balked, ask­ing: Don’t you have enough space for your lunches?

Today, evi­dence once stored in those small freez­ers now is stacked neatly inside envelopes set in plas­tic bins inside a huge walk-in freezer.

The Kansas City lab has sam­ples from as far back as 1972, but old test­ing pro­ce­dures often con­sumed the sam­ple, leav­ing noth­ing to store. By 1978, as pro­ce­dures improved, the lab resolved to retain a “left­over” sam­ple for future tests.

Police also started col­lect­ing more evi­dence from sex­ual assaults in the mid-1970s, after ask­ing St. Luke’s Hos­pi­tal to be the cen­tral coor­di­nat­ing entity and to han­dle all vic­tims. The hos­pi­tal became the first pri­vate sex­ual assault cen­ter in the country.

“Prior to that, they (vic­tims) didn’t have a good place to go,” said Michael Weaver, who was direc­tor of the emer­gency room in 1981.

The hos­pi­tal saw 139 vic­tims the first year. The num­ber tripled the fol­low­ing year.

The lab asked the hos­pi­tal to swab vic­tims for evi­dence then wipe smears on glass slides before pack­ag­ing each swab.

The hos­pi­tal sent each kit to the lab, where sci­en­tists looked at the slides for sperm before test­ing the cot­ton swab.

The lab kept all the slides.

Older test­ing pro­ce­dures often con­sumed the swab’s cot­ton tip, leav­ing just a wooden stick. Wil­son kept the sticks.

“He saved every lit­tle piece of the sam­ple,” said Linda Net­zel, the lab’s cur­rent direc­tor. Lab work­ers have retrieved DNA pro­files from some of the sticks, she said.

Lab work­ers recalled Wilson’s mantra: Don’t destroy evidence.

“He dic­tated how we pre­served evi­dence,” Net­zel said. “John was very par­tic­u­lar about what the law defined as evidence.”

Along comes DNA

Kansas City police started using DNA as an evi­dence tool in 1992, first in a rape case and later that year in a “sex­ual homi­cide” case in which the sus­pect left behind a cig­a­rette butt.

As DNA test­ing advanced into the 1990s, the true value for using it to solve cold cases emerged, Wil­son said.

“We said: ‘Hey! Let’s go back and do DNA test­ing on some of these noto­ri­ous cases,’ ” he recalled.

Police grew excited “once they real­ized what we had,” Wil­son said.

Retired detec­tives called in from across the area to inquire about new test­ing on old cases.

In 2002, Kansas City police started a homi­cide cold case squad.

Sam­ples at the lab had been stored under crime report num­bers. Police helped the lab iden­tify the homi­cide cases first.

Over the years, the lab won a series of grants to pay for over­time and equipment.

By 2008, police had started a cold case sex crimes unit, using fed­eral grant money. Soon after­ward, Jack­son County pros­e­cu­tors won a grant to start their own cold case unit.

Now, all three work together.

Pros­e­cu­tors review cases against the statutes of lim­i­ta­tions to ensure they could file charges if the case were to be reopened. Hunt said there would be no rea­son to waste police and lab work­ers’ time if a case could not be prosecuted.

The cold case efforts achieved suc­cess quickly.

The most notable sus­pect caught was Lorenzo Gilyard, believed to be Missouri’s most-prolific ser­ial killer. Police arrested him in 2004 after the lab linked his DNA to the bod­ies of 13 women killed between 1977 and 1993.

DNA also helped police iden­tify sus­pects in sev­eral unsolved ser­ial rape pat­terns in the West­port area in the mid-1980s.

Shy Bland was con­victed in 2008 for 13 attacks, and Gary Jack­man was con­victed in 2006 after admit­ting 32 attacks.

Police said they have reviewed all the unsolved homi­cide cases, so find­ing another ser­ial killer may be unlikely. But lab work­ers said they may be able to use new tech­nol­ogy to get DNA from fin­ger­prints col­lected at crime scenes.

The lab kept those, too.

Mean­time, police and pros­e­cu­tors still have a back­log of about 1,400 sex crimes to review for pos­si­ble testing.

Many cities now rou­tinely save evi­dence, but ques­tions remain on how, how much and how long evi­dence should be retained. The National Insti­tute of Jus­tice started a work group ear­lier this year to answer those questions.

“States are des­per­ate for infor­ma­tion on how to best retain evi­dence,” said Brown of the Inno­cence Project. “They need the nuts and bolts of how to approach it respon­si­bly. We hope the work group will pro­vide the long-sought-after best practices.”

The num­bers 9,611 KC Regional Crime Lab cold cases 4,326 Crimes that yielded bio­log­i­cal evi­dence with DNA poten­tial 905 Cases worked so far by lab’s trace evi­dence unit 253 DNA hits so far

To reach Chris­tine Vendel, call 816 – 234-4438 or send e-mail to cvendel@kcstar.com . Source: Kansas City Regional Crime Lab

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

Spring­field News-Leader (Mis­souri), BREAKING
BYLINE: Amos Bridges, abridges@News-Leader.com

Chris­t­ian County, MO

Clay­ton — Defense attor­neys this after­noon called sev­eral wit­nesses who said they didn’t see Ger­ald Carnahan’s truck near the 7-Eleven in Nixa the night Jackie Johns dis­ap­peared in 1985.

They also ques­tioned a man who said he saw three peo­ple stand­ing around a car and truck on U.S. 160 that day, although his tes­ti­mony indi­cated the sight­ing was about 5:30 – 6 p.m., much ear­lier in the evening than the 10 – 11 p.m. time frame when Johns last was seen.

Car­na­han is charged with first-degree mur­der and rape.

The fourth wit­ness called today, Rita Sanders, described deplorable evi­dence han­dling prac­tices at the Chris­t­ian County Sheriff’s Office.

Sanders, a for­mer Spring­field police offi­cer, worked as an inves­ti­ga­tor at the sheriff’s office from 1994 – 1997.

Sanders said she saw about a dozen boxes labeled “Jackie Johns” kept in the swel­ter­ing prop­erty room at the sheriff’s office in the old County Cour­t­house in Ozark.

She never looked in the boxes, she said, but said she at one point took pho­tographs of some other evi­dence handling.

“I was very con­cerned about the lack of care for the evi­dence and the chain of cus­tody and the pos­si­bil­ity of tam­per­ing, so I did take pho­tographs …,” she said.

Greene County Pros­e­cu­tor Dar­rell Moore noted in cross exam­i­na­tion that Sanders “had no idea” what was in the boxes.

Pros­e­cu­tors and other wit­nesses have said crit­i­cal phys­i­cal evi­dence in the case was kept by Spring­field police.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org