IAPE Evidence Blog

The Asheville Citizen-Times (North Car­olina)
BYLINE: Clarke Morrison

Asheville, NC

A team of for­mer offi­cers led by a retired crime scene ana­lyst is expected to begin the painstak­ing process this week of inspect­ing, cat­a­loging and pho­tograph­ing some 13,000 pieces of evi­dence in the Police Department’s dis­cred­ited prop­erty room.

Blue­Line Sys­tems will work with the State Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion to help deter­mine what evi­dence is miss­ing, if court cases have been com­pro­mised and whether crimes were com­mit­ted in the han­dling of drugs, guns and money. 

“It’s going to be quite an exhaus­tive process,” said Mike Wright, direc­tor of the com­pany he formed after leav­ing the Bun­combe County Sheriff’s Office in 2006.

“We’re going to try to come out with a very accu­rate result,” he said.

Dis­trict Attor­ney Ron Moore on April 5 ordered the evi­dence room sealed and an inde­pen­dent audit to be con­ducted after learn­ing about seri­ous prob­lems uncov­ered by a par­tial audit.

Moore requested an SBI inves­ti­ga­tion after an assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney and defense lawyer went to the evi­dence room in prepa­ra­tion for a case against a drug sus­pect and dis­cov­ered that 397 pills of the pre­scrip­tion painkiller oxy­codone were miss­ing from con­tain­ers inside an evi­dence envelope.

The dis­cov­ery prompted Moore to drop drug traf­fick­ing charges against the suspect.

The par­tial audit found that of 1,097 items audited, 27 guns, 54 con­tain­ers of drugs and 34 pack­ets of money and valu­ables couldn’t be located.

City Coun­cil approved spend­ing up to $175,000 on the new audit. Blue­Line sys­tems will be paid an hourly rate for the work.

Wright calls the project a “foren­sic inven­tory.” Two teams of four peo­ple each will wear gloves and face masks to pre­vent con­t­a­m­i­na­tion as they han­dle the items.

Blue­Line worked with the county’s infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy depart­ment to develop a spe­cial data­base for the inventory.

Wright said a bar code sys­tem will be used to iden­tify and track the items in the future. Court orders for dis­po­si­tion of evi­dence and lab reports also will be coded, scanned and cross-referenced in the database.

“As we encounter items, we will attempt to match up any paper­work with the prop­erty,” Wright said. “We’re going to exam­ine each pack­age to make sure the seals are intact and that it has the proper documentation.”

Equip­ment used in the project includes three lap­top com­put­ers, scan­ners, print­ers and dig­i­tal cam­eras to pho­to­graph each item. Wright said the equip­ment and soft­ware will remain with the city to serve as the department’s new evi­dence track­ing system.

As the inven­tory pro­ceeds, the SBI will be noti­fied of any irreg­u­lar­i­ties or tam­per­ing with evi­dence pack­ages that are uncov­ered. Items that don’t match infor­ma­tion in the department’s exist­ing data­base also will be reported.

The com­pany plans to develop an infor­ma­tion sheet on each piece of evi­dence that will be avail­able for tes­ti­mony in court cases, Wright said. He expects Blue­Line work­ers to be sub­poe­naed to tes­tify in cases for years to come.

The inven­tory will take at least three months, but the time frame is far from cer­tain, he said.

“The amount of time involved depends on how long it takes to locate each item,” Wright said. “We will pro­ceed as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble, but we’re not going to sac­ri­fice accu­racy for the sake of speed.”

Wright said he expects that some of the items that turned up miss­ing in the par­tial audit were just mis­placed and will be located with the more thor­ough inventory.

“We’re going into it with an open mind,” he said. “We’re going to do a care­ful job. The entire right to a fair trial depends on the evi­dence being han­dled properly.”

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

Gwin­nett Daily Post, gwinnettdailypost.com
BYLINE: Josh Green, Staff Writer, josh.green@gwinnettdailypost.com

Lawrenceville, GA

Police dept. main­tains chain-of-custody ques­tion a non-issue

LAWRENCEVILLE — When Lawrenceville police trans­ferred evi­dence that’s cru­cial in hun­dreds of pend­ing cases from their for­mer head­quar­ters to an upgraded facil­ity last year, they brought in Gwin­nett County Jail inmates to do the heavy lifting.

Those alleged crim­i­nals also raised the poten­tial for con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing the evidence’s chain-of-custody, the path from crime scene to cour­t­house that is crit­i­cal in crim­i­nal tri­als, offi­cials said Monday. 

While Lawrenceville police offi­cials recently con­ceded that, on the sur­face, putting every­thing from hand­guns and sur­veil­lance videos to bulk mar­i­juana in the hands of inmates — albeit in sealed boxes — may sound illog­i­cal, police fol­lowed strict secu­rity plans and never took eyes off offend­ers dur­ing the brief trans­port on June 19, 2010.

“Com­mon sense would tell you we had it pretty well cov­ered,” said Lawrenceville police Maj. Paul King. “If we ever had any doubts that (evi­dence) was going to be com­pro­mised in any way, we wouldn’t have done it.”

The three inmates’ role in trans­fer­ring evi­dence sur­faced in late April, dur­ing the mar­i­juana traf­fick­ing trial of Oronde Clay, 39, of Nor­cross. Dur­ing tes­ti­mony, Clay’s defense attor­ney, David Clark, quizzed Lawrenceville police offi­cer Eric Wiernik, the department’s evi­dence room man­ager, about the method of trans­fer­ring roughly eight pounds of pot his client was caught with.

Clay was even­tu­ally sen­tenced in the bench trial to serve five years, which Wiernik said dis­cred­its the notion that the evi­dence had been com­pro­mised. Still, Clark said the method used by police seemed “kind of odd.”

“It casts sus­pi­cions on the chain-of-custody,” Clark said. “There’s no evi­dence that the evi­dence in my case was tam­pered with, but the poten­tial is there.”

Dis­trict Attor­ney Danny Porter said he wasn’t aware that inmates were used in the trans­fer, and that he’d never heard of police inten­tion­ally putting evi­dence in the hands of inmates before, but he’s con­fi­dent the integrity and qual­ity of the proof remains.

“I would not clas­sify it as best prac­tices, but given the fact that (evi­dence boxes were) sealed up, it shouldn’t affect the cases,” Porter said.

Wiernik spec­i­fied that most evi­dence was sealed in bags, pre-boxed before the move and shrink-wrapped in lit­tle tow­ers of four. Larger items were indi­vid­u­ally sealed in more spa­cious boxes. The move lasted from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m., as dozens of boxes trav­eled in a con­voy of three police vehi­cles less than a mile around Gwinnett’s county seat. Four offi­cers watched the phys­i­cal labor and made sure inmates didn’t ride with the evi­dence, he said.

Inmate work­ers then unloaded the boxes in the $7.7 mil­lion headquarter’s new evi­dence room, a card-key-controlled area with cin­derblock walls and high ceil­ings, roughly eight times big­ger than its predecessor.

The move was kept hush-hush around the depart­ment to dis­cour­age spec­ta­tors, Wiernik said.

“In effect, we did move it our­selves,” he said. “We just used jail inmate per­sons for the phys­i­cal labor part of it. The jail is real spe­cific about who they let out.”

Sheriff’s Depart­ment spokes­woman Stacey Bour­bon­nais said minimum-risk inmates are loaned to sev­eral Gwin­nett cities which man­age and return them to jail once work details are com­plete. On aver­age, 27 inmates are loaned daily, she said.

On the day Lawrenceville police trans­ferred evi­dence, records show that eight inmates were loaned to the city. Nei­ther Lawrenceville police nor the Sheriff’s Depart­ment kept track of which three worked for police and sub­se­quently han­dled evi­dence boxes that day.

Records show that all eight inmates had been arrested mul­ti­ple times. Their charges at the time ranged from pro­ba­tion vio­la­tions and theft to shoplift­ing. While Wiernik said he couldn’t recall the inmates by name, he remem­bered them as hav­ing worked daily jan­i­to­r­ial jobs around the police department.

Porter said offi­cers who over­saw the trans­fer can expect to be sub­poe­naed to tes­tify, if the evi­dence is chal­lenged. He doesn’t antic­i­pate the inmate movers will be called to wit­ness stands.

Accred­i­ta­tion agen­cies main­tain high stan­dards at both state and national lev­els for evi­dence han­dling but nei­ther specif­i­cally pro­hibit inmate involve­ment. Lawrenceville police are not accred­ited in Geor­gia or by the national reg­u­la­tory body, the Com­mis­sion on Accred­i­ta­tion for Law Enforce­ment Agen­cies, or CALEA.

Frank V. Rotondo, Geor­gia Asso­ci­a­tion of Chiefs of Police exec­u­tive direc­tor, said courts aren’t likely to buy that evi­dence stan­dards were altered based on inmates han­dling sealed boxes for a brief time, though that case could be made.

“Lawrenceville has a lot to lose if they weren’t doing it cor­rectly,” Rotondo said. “Evi­dence is one of the high­est lia­bil­ity areas in today’s law enforcement.”

Craig Hart­ley, CALEA deputy direc­tor, said evi­dence han­dling accounts for a large num­ber of the agency’s standards.

“I can’t tell you that the (CALEA) strat­egy used to con­trol the prop­erty would pro­hibit the use of (inmates), because we don’t address it specif­i­cally,” Hart­ley said. “How­ever, I think there always has to be tight pro­to­col in place to ensure the integrity of those items.”

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

Mul­ti­me­dia Hold­ings Cor­po­ra­tion, First Coast News, firstcoastnews.com
Link to Article

St. Augus­tine, FL

Christo­pher Charles Craft-Mitchell 

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Police inves­ti­gat­ing 15 auto­mo­bile bur­glar­ies in one day have traced 12 of them back to one sus­pect, almost exactly one year later.

Accord­ing to the St. Augus­tine Police Depart­ment, the bur­glar­ies hap­pened at sev­eral North City busi­nesses on May 2, 2010.

Hair and blood sam­ples left behind were sent to the Jack­sonville crime lab, and on April 28, the DNA was matched to Christo­pher Charles Craft-Mitchell, who has 10 pre­vi­ous arrests on record with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office.

Police said his DNA match cleared 12 of the bur­glar­ies and van­dal­ism cases from that one day.

Mitchell was booked May 14 on charges of bur­glary and vandalism.

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