IAPE Evidence Blog

The Asso­ci­ated Press, The Jour­nal Gazette, Cox Media Group, ktvu.com
BYLINE: DOMINIC ADAMS
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Fort Wayne, IN

FORT WAYNE, Ind. — Capt. Shane Lee’s task is to make sure the Fort Wayne Police Department’s move from its Creighton Avenue head­quar­ters to its new home in the City-County Build­ing doesn’t jeop­ar­dize any crim­i­nal cases.

Lee is over­see­ing the move of the department’s evi­dence stor­age on the sixth floor of Creighton Avenue to its more mod­ern home on Main Street. The ren­o­va­tions to the City-County Build­ing cost more than $4.8 mil­lion and included remov­ing the esca­la­tor and beef­ing up build­ing security.

Every box, folder, pool cue, com­puter, stuffed ani­mal, tire, gun, drug and other item con­sid­ered evi­dence in a crim­i­nal case must never leave the sight of an offi­cer or some­one who works in the prop­erty room.

An offi­cer watches the movers pack the boxes, fol­lows them to the mov­ing truck, watches the evi­dence loaded onto the truck, locks the truck after it’s loaded, fol­lows the truck to the City-County Build­ing and then watches it get unloaded.

The process will be repeated until all 400,000 boxes of evi­dence are moved.

“For a suc­cess­ful pros­e­cu­tion of a crim­i­nal case, we have to show that the con­ti­nu­ity of evi­dence was strictly fol­lowed,” Lee said.

If an item is left unat­tended, a defense attor­ney could argue the evi­dence is no longer in the same state it was when police ini­tially seized it, Lee said.

That could mean a judge could bar the evi­dence from being used in a trial.

Movers recently started the month long process of mov­ing the police depart­ment head­quar­ters down­town — some­thing the depart­ment has been plan­ning for the past year and a half.

“We’ve made do with this build­ing for 15 years, but it was never made for pub­lic safety,” Chief Rusty York said.

Movers snaked carts in between rows of shelves stacked to the ceil­ing with boxes.

One box is labeled “death inves­ti­ga­tion,” while another con­tains items col­lected in a stab­bing inves­ti­ga­tion and a third box is labeled “sex­ual assault.”

As the carts are loaded with evi­dence, an offi­cer watches nearby and waits until the movers fill a cou­ple of carts.

The three snake back through the aisles, into the hall­way and onto the elevator.

Once in the lobby, the carts are pushed out the front door and across a makeshift bridge to the side door of the mov­ing truck, then loaded inside.

Another offi­cer watches from his unmarked police cruiser and read­ies to fol­low the truck to its new home at the City-County Building.

“It’ll be com­pa­ra­ble in size, but orga­nized dif­fer­ent,” Diane Spiller, the department’s evi­dence man­ager, said of the new loca­tion in the City-County Building.

Each piece of evi­dence is placed in a sealed bag, labeled with a bar­code and put in a box that also is labeled with a barcode.

Spiller said the evi­dence in the new room will be stored on move­able shelves.

Offi­cials had to make room to store evi­dence for a long period — Spiller said, for exam­ple, that evi­dence in child molest­ing cases must be kept until the child turns 31 years old.

There are dif­fer­ent areas of stor­age for DNA, firearms, nar­cotics and homi­cide evi­dence, Lee said.

“They have been dili­gently work­ing for a num­ber of months to pre­pare for the move,” he said of the evi­dence room workers.

Spiller said large tools that have been seized are dif­fi­cult to move because often they can’t be stored in a tra­di­tional box.

Begin­ning this week, offi­cers with crim­i­nal evi­dence or other prop­erty have been tak­ing it to the City-County Building.

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Infor­ma­tion from: The Jour­nal Gazette, http://www.journalgazette.net

Copy­right The Asso­ci­ated Press

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

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Amer­i­can Press, The Repub­lic, a divi­sion of Home News Enter­prises, therepublic.com
BYLINE:
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Cal­casieu Parish, LA

LAKE CHARLES, La. — A judge has ordered a for­mer Cal­casieu Parish deputy to pay close to $100,000 in resti­tu­tion to make up for money miss­ing from the sheriff’s office evi­dence room.

The Amer­i­can Press reports (http://bit.ly/qjfACs) Troy Hugh Tay­lor pleaded guilty Tues­day to felony theft, malfea­sance and drug pos­ses­sion. Pros­e­cu­tors said he stole prop­erty, drugs and money from the evi­dence room.

Inves­ti­ga­tors report­edly found some of the items at his home, includ­ing a lap­top com­puter, fish­ing poles and iPods.

Tay­lor was charged with sev­eral counts of drug pos­ses­sion after detec­tives report­edly found more than 3,000 pills in a safe in his office.

Carter pre­vi­ously sen­tenced Tay­lor to five years in prison on each count, but sus­pended the time. He ordered Tay­lor to make monthly pay­ments of $400 toward the balance.

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Infor­ma­tion from: Amer­i­can Press, http://www.americanpress.com

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

The Sara­sota Herald-Tribune, heraldtribune.com
BYLINE: Tom Lyons
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Sara­sota, FL

A local attor­ney called last week to say he had a news­wor­thy report in hand, but didn’t want to say where he got it, and wanted to remain name­less when he passed it to me.

It was about evi­dence stor­age issues at the new Sara­sota Police head­quar­ters, the kind of thing that might cause chain-of-custody prob­lems for pros­e­cu­tors han­dling crim­i­nal cases.

Local crim­i­nal defense attor­neys could be all over it, given the chance. And they were all about to get that chance, because the report was being handed to some of them, too, the attor­ney said.

Think­ing I was about to be handed some­thing that had some­how been kept under wraps until it was smug­gled out of the bow­els of the city bureau­cracy, I had to chuckle when I got my first look at it.

It was a per­fectly ordi­nary audit report that had been com­pleted in May 2011.

“You can obtain copies of this report by con­tact­ing us at Office of the City Audi­tor and Clerk,” it said on page two, fol­lowed by the address and phone num­ber for Sara­sota City Hall.

And, actu­ally, you need not bother. You can read it online at the city’s web­site. Just look up recent inter­nal audits and click on the “Sara­sota Police Depart­ment Prop­erty Evi­dence” audit, also known as #EX 11 – 01.

It won’t be as much fun doing it that way, with­out the intrigue and hype. But the report, signed by Sarasota’s inter­nal audit man­ager Heather Riti and City Clerk Pam Nadalini, says after evi­dence and other tagged-and-stored, investigation-related prop­erty was moved to the new police head­quar­ters build­ing late in 2010, at least three pack­ages were dis­cov­ered to be lost or at least tem­porar­ily misplaced.

One is a box con­tain­ing a few small pieces of crack cocaine. Another holds a hand­gun that was sched­uled for destruc­tion and may have been, though the records don’t make that clear. And the last is listed as “$14.49 in change.”

Not too excit­ing so far.

But, as the report added in pos­i­tive sound­ing government-speak, “oppor­tu­ni­ties exist to enhance phys­i­cal secu­rity” of the evi­dence stor­age rooms. The list of flaws there is where crim­i­nal defense lawyers will be shop­ping for things that could worry a jury.

For instance, key­pad entry to one evi­dence stor­age room is less than ideal, it says, because “all offi­cers know the key­pad com­bi­na­tion” even though the room “should not be acces­si­ble to any­one except Prop­erty and Evi­dence Unit staff.”

Alarms that went off at the old build­ing when any­one came and went through an evidence-room door weren’t in place in the new build­ing, the audit says.

And though the sys­tem can use bio­met­ric iden­ti­fi­ca­tion to record which Prop­erty and Evi­dence staff mem­bers come in and out, and when, those staff mem­bers were also given keys that can be used instead. The keys don’t leave any record of who came in, the audit says.

That’s all kind of amaz­ing, says defense attor­ney Derek Byrd, pres­i­dent of the Sara­sota County Bar Association.

“There isn’t a prop­erty depart­ment in the world that allows just any cop to come and go,” Byrd says, because of the poten­tial for evi­dence tampering.

Pills can be replaced, incon­ve­nient bio­log­i­cal evi­dence could be switched or destroyed.

“It’s going to cre­ate issues because that’s not the way it’s always been done,” Byrd says.

But just as amaz­ing, Byrd said, is that this audit was fin­ished in May of last year and, even if qui­etly posted at City Hall at the time, defense attor­neys have not known about it.

On Mon­day, which was a hol­i­day, I couldn’t reach any­one who could tell me whether the State Attorney’s Office was ever told about the inter­nal audit. Police Chief Michael Hol­loway got a copy, since it was his depart­ment that requested the audit, accord­ing to a list of recip­i­ents in my copy. But I was unable to reach him on Mon­day to ask who else was informed.

Rules of evi­dence require that pros­e­cu­tors tell defense teams about poten­tial evi­dence prob­lems “if they knew about it,” Byrd said.

If they weren’t told about the audit, he said, the ques­tion is: Why not?

Tom Lyons can be con­tacted at tom.lyons@heraldtribune.com or (941) 361‑4964.

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