IAPE Evidence Blog

HOUSTON CHRONICLE, chron.com
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Hous­ton, TX

Our stom­ach sank when we saw the head­line “More Untested Rape Kits at HPD” (August 10, Page 1). The Hous­ton Police Depart­ment, it turned out, doesn’t have a shock­ing 4,000 rape kits lan­guish­ing untested in its prop­erty room; the num­ber is actu­ally closer to 7,000.

An ugly sense of déjà vu set in. How many times, we won­dered, has the Hous­ton Police Department’s scandal-plagued crime lab turned out to be even worse than we’d pre­vi­ously believed?

Con­sider just a sam­pling of lab-related head­lines from the last decade:

July 29, 2011: “HPD crime lab faces more heat; For­mer super­vi­sor tes­ti­fies she quit over accu­racy of alco­hol tests.”

July 19, 2010: “Dis­trict attor­ney calls for emer­gency DNA lab; Houston’s back­log of cases keeps growing.”

Jan­u­ary 27, 2010: “HPD lab faces 3rd back­log prob­lem; 300 cases are in need of firearm forensics.”

Decem­ber 13, 2009: “Prints and prob­lems; HPD’s fin­ger­print scan­dal reminds us how much we need an inde­pen­dent crime lab.”

April 25, 2009: “Another crime lab bun­gle sur­faces; Pros­e­cu­tors to ask that man who has spent 22 years in prison be freed on bail. Richard could be 4th man cleared after crime lab errors.”

Jan­u­ary 26, 2008: “HPD again shuts down crime lab’s DNA unit; Move fol­lows res­ig­na­tion of division’s leader in cheat­ing probe.”

Decem­ber 12, 2007: “HPD lab ana­lyst indicted on theft, tam­per­ing charges. His sus­pen­sion trig­gered a review of 200 nar­cotics cases he’d handled.”

June 17, 2007: “‘Trou­bling’ Cases Sur­face in Report on HPD Crime Lab; 1991 con­vic­tion for rape, mur­der has drawn the most concern.”

Jan­u­ary 5, 2006: “HPD Lab Probe Details More Lapses; Rev­e­la­tions show 2 divi­sions’ prob­lems amount to ‘near-total breakdown.’”

Decem­ber 18, 2005: “HPD’s lab’s trou­bles pre­date DNA test­ing; Experts’ review finds a pat­tern of prob­lems in 1980s stud­ies of blood samples.”

June 5, 2005: “Bit­ter pills; HPD ana­lysts faked drug evi­dence in four cases. How much more fraud has gone undetected?”

Novem­ber 5, 2003: “DNA evi­dence destroyed; par­dons called possible.”

June 25, 2003: “HPD ignored warn­ings, ex-lab man says; Retired offi­cial says he cited ‘train wreck.’”

April 3, 2003: “HPD chief pro­poses inde­pen­dently run crime lab.”

June 5, 2002: “Rape Kits; HPD strives to end ‘embar­rass­ment’ of untested DNA.”

How much longer until we fix the prob­lem? Since 2003, it’s been clear that the crime lab needs to be inde­pen­dent of the police depart­ment, and recently, Har­ris County took steps to cre­ate just such a regional lab. But so far, the city of Hous­ton hasn’t put in its share of the money. So HPD’s crime lab stays where it is. And the scan­dals keep coming.

Even in a tough econ­omy, jus­tice needs to be a city pri­or­ity. How many more out­rages are we will­ing to endure? How many rapists will we let roam the streets? How many wrong­ful con­vic­tions will we tol­er­ate? How much longer will we allow jus­tice to be denied?

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

The Ari­zona Repub­lic, azcentral.com
BYLINE: Lind­sey Col­lom and Caitlin McGlade
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Pinal County, AZ

DNA evi­dence from more than 200 sexual-assault cases in Pinal County has been lan­guish­ing in the Sheriff’s Office prop­erty room, some for decades, a recent audit revealed.

An inde­pen­dent audi­tor found that only about 5 per­cent of sexual-assault kits, includ­ing DNA sam­ples taken dur­ing foren­sic exam­i­na­tions of the vic­tims, ever went to the state crime lab for testing.

The fail­ure to process DNA is not so impor­tant to pros­e­cut­ing the case where the sam­ples come from but has a sig­nif­i­cant impact on police agen­cies’ abil­ity to solve other sex crimes and link cases.

Sam­ples are added to state and national DNA data­bases, which makes crime solv­ing eas­ier, experts say.

California-based Evi­dence Con­trol Sys­tems Inc. cited the untested kits among the issues to be rec­ti­fied by the Pinal County sheriff’s evidence-and-property unit after decades of mismanagement.

“It’s unclear why more sexual-assault kits and evi­dence are not being sent to the crime lab for analy­sis in hopes of iden­ti­fy­ing a per­pe­tra­tor or link­age to other crimes,” the audit said. “You may have a rape/sexual assault case with a named sus­pect who may never have been arrested. Could this per­son be a ser­ial rapist? Could the DNA in that case match with oth­ers in the community?”

Sheriff’s offi­cials say 137 kits will now be sent to the Ari­zona Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safety’s foren­sic lab. The depart­ment is also for­mu­lat­ing a new pol­icy that man­dates tests of sexual-assault kits.

Untested kits are not exclu­sive to Pinal County.

An Octo­ber 2009 study of more than 2,000 law-enforcement agen­cies by the National Insti­tute of Jus­tice found that evi­dence from 14 per­cent of all unsolved homi­cides and 18 per­cent of unsolved rape cases had not been sub­mit­ted to crime labs.

“Not going for­ward with some of these (kits) if they can is a vio­la­tion of women’s rights, and everyone’s rights — the community’s, too, because that means the abuser is going to find another vic­tim,” said Heather Dumas, a legal advo­cate for Com­mu­nity Alliance Against Fam­ily Abuse in Apache Junction.

Ear­lier this year, the Depart­ment of Jus­tice awarded grants to researchers in Hous­ton and Wayne County, Mich., to study why such evi­dence is not tested and to develop prac­tices to improve the criminal-justice response to sex assaults.

Gen­er­ally, kits won’t get processed because a sus­pect has been iden­ti­fied, the vic­tim drops the case or inves­ti­ga­tors aren’t aware of the tech­nol­ogy, said Joe Latta, direc­tor of the audit­ing company.

“There is a nation­wide lack of under­stand­ing,” Latta said. “It’s not a Pinal County issue, and it’s not a Phoenix issue.… It’s hard get­ting every­one trained when not every­one under­stands the science.”

Just a decade ago, pro­cess­ing a kit was often use­less if the offi­cer didn’t already have a sus­pect in mind because he or she would have no DNA on file to compare.

But with the expan­sion of the Com­bined DNA Index Sys­tem, or CODIS, inves­ti­ga­tors could iden­tify sus­pects by enter­ing DNA records into the system.

Deputy Chief Harry Griz­zle was a detec­tive with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in the late 1990s, when some of the untested kits were collected.

Back then, Griz­zle said, inves­ti­ga­tors assumed that once they booked kits into the evi­dence unit, tech­ni­cians would send them to the lab so “we never fol­lowed up.”

Griz­zle recently looked through each kit col­lect­ing dust in the evi­dence room and their cor­re­spond­ing case files. He found 137 kits that should be analyzed.

“My ini­tial thought was we have some peo­ple out there that we can iden­tify as sus­pects that we have not done,” Griz­zle said.

It would not be effec­tive or prac­ti­cal to test every kit col­lected, said Todd Grif­fith, who over­sees the DPS crime lab. The ques­tion should be how many kits are from cases where DNA would be valu­able, he said.

“If you just go to a police agency and count out how many sex-assault kits are sit­ting there, you can come to a very large num­ber,” Grif­fith said. “What did the inves­ti­ga­tion show? That’s the first step.”

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

The Modesto Bee, modbee.com
BYLINE: Ros­alio Ahu­mada, rahumada@modbee.com
Link to Article

Modesto, CA

After less than 90 min­utes of delib­er­a­tion, a jury on Wednes­day after­noon con­victed Buddy Ray Gary, 60, of mur­der in the death of an 81-year-old woman beaten and raped inside her west Modesto home 35 years ago. He was found guilty of first-degree mur­der in the death of Flo­rence Mil­lard. (Stani­laus County Jail)

After less than 90 min­utes of delib­er­a­tion, a jury on Wednes­day after­noon con­victed a Modesto man of mur­der in the death of an 81-year-old woman beaten and raped inside her west Modesto home 35 years ago.

Buddy Ray Gary, 60, was found guilty of first-degree mur­der in the death of Flo­rence Mil­lard. He was arrested in early 2009 after a state Depart­ment of Jus­tice crim­i­nal­ist found semen in a rug from Millard’s home that matched a DNA sam­ple from Gary.

The jury of seven women and five men began delib­er­at­ing about 2:40 p.m. Wednes­day and returned with a ver­dict about 4 p.m. Stanis­laus County Supe­rior Court Judge John Free­land sched­uled Gary to return to court Sept. 15 for his sen­tenc­ing hearing.

“It’s a great day for Flo­rence Mil­lard, for vic­tims and for sci­ence,” said Deputy Dis­trict Attor­ney Annette Rees out­side the court­room after the ver­dict was announced. “We should never give up on cases.”

The 32-year-old slay­ing inves­ti­ga­tion is the county’s old­est cold case that has resulted in the arrest of a sus­pect, accord­ing to the Stanis­laus County dis­trict attorney’s office.

Bernard Fair­field, Gary’s defense attor­ney, declined to com­ment about the verdict.

Dorothy Winke, 75, of Modesto, who tes­ti­fied in the trial, said Mil­lard was like a grand­mother to her. Her father worked with Mil­lard, who remained a close friend after she retired.

Winke was 40 when Mil­lard was attacked, and news of the ver­dict finally put her mind at ease.

“I’ve been wait­ing almost half my life for this,” Winke said about the ver­dict. “This has been some­thing in my prayers for a long time.”

On Aug. 30, 1976, Mil­lard was found on the rug in her home nude, her hands bound, beaten and raped by an intruder. Mil­lard died from her injuries 12 days later.

“(Gary) bru­tally assaulted her, he raped her, he left her for dead,” Rees said in her clos­ing argu­ment Wednes­day before the jury deliberated.

Fair­field told the jury the 35-year-old mur­der case has too many miss­ing details, mainly because the infor­ma­tion and the peo­ple involved aren’t around anymore.

He said it’s not known how severe Millard’s med­ical con­di­tions were and whether they were a fac­tor in her death. He informed the jury there were dis­crep­an­cies in tes­ti­mony about her injuries.

“Things are miss­ing,” Fair­field said in his clos­ing argu­ment. “What you don’t know may be just as impor­tant as what you do know.”

Vic­tim was a widow with very poor vision

Mil­lard lived alone in a home in the 600 block of Third Street across from Fourth Street Park, which is now César Chávez Park. Her hus­band, James B. Mil­lard, had already died.

A neigh­bor tes­ti­fied that Mil­lard could get around on her own, but she could barely see. He said she liked to have her door open and her screen door locked to stay cool in the summer.

Author­i­ties have said Mil­lard was alone when the intruder tore open the screen door and entered her home late at night.

When the neigh­bor found her the next morn­ing, he tes­ti­fied that Millard’s head was so swollen the elderly woman’s wrin­kles weren’t visible.

Rees told the jury Millard’s injuries included eight bro­ken ribs, bruises on all sides of her head, a facial frac­ture, a con­cus­sion and inter­nal head bleed­ing. She said inves­ti­ga­tors found blood splat­tered on the walls on both sides of the home’s hall­way, where Mil­lard was found.

“He beat Ms. Mil­lard severely,” Rees told the jury. “Thirty-five years have passed since this crime, but we will not for­get what hap­pened to Ms. Millard.”

Pathologist’s tes­ti­mony can­not be verified

Fair­field called into ques­tion a pool of blood found on the wall, because the blood hadn’t run down the wall.

He also said the pathol­o­gist who tes­ti­fied based his opin­ion on infor­ma­tion that can’t be ver­i­fied with the peo­ple who treated Mil­lard at the hos­pi­tal and con­ducted her autopsy at the morgue because they’re not around.

“Unfor­tu­nately, we can’t spec­u­late what these answers would be,” Fair­field told the jury.

He ended his clos­ing argu­ment by telling the jury there is suf­fi­cient evi­dence to indi­cate that Gary is guilty of vol­un­tary manslaugh­ter, not murder.

When he was arrested in Millard’s case, Gary had been con­victed of rape twice before and was serv­ing a sen­tence of 25 years to life in prison for felony assault, author­i­ties have said.

Despite his crim­i­nal his­tory and the nature of Millard’s slay­ing, the pros­e­cu­tion couldn’t seek the death penalty or a sen­tence of life with­out parole. The state law at the time deemed such penal­ties unconstitutional.

The max­i­mum penalty for first-degree mur­der in 1976 was seven years to life in prison, so that’s what Gary is fac­ing next month.

Bee staff writer Ros­alio Ahu­mada can be reached at rahumada@modbee.com or (209) 578‑2394.

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