IAPE Evidence Blog

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New Orleans, LA

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Lawyers for a for­mer New Orleans police­woman con­demned for mur­der and the cousin con­demned for help­ing her want their trial judge called as a wit­ness in new appeals.

Attor­neys for Rogers LaCaze want Judge Frank Marullo to tes­tify about alle­ga­tions he once signed a hand­gun from the court’s evi­dence room out to Antoinette Frank, later con­victed of killing her part­ner and two oth­ers at a restaurant.

Judge Lau­rie White heard argu­ments Fri­day, but did not imme­di­ately rule. She set two more hear­ings Oct. 15. One is on LaCaze’s motion to remove Marullo from the case. The other is for a sep­a­rate motion by Frank, also ask­ing for a new judge.

Pros­e­cu­tors accused the defenses of judge-shopping in an attempt to can­cel the con­vic­tions and death sen­tences handed down in 1995.

Infor­ma­tion from: The Times-Picayune, http://www.nola.com

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

Wis­con­sin State Jour­nal (Madi­son, Wis­con­sin), FIRST EDITION
SECTION: FRONT; Pg. A1
BYLINE: By KAREN RIVEDAL krivedal@madison.com 608 – 252-6106

Fort Worth, TX & Madi­son, WI

PROCEDURE FOR CHECKING OUT EVIDENCE HAS BEEN TIGHTENED, AND OTHER MEASURES ARE LIKELY.

A few years ago the police depart­ment in Fort Worth, Texas, had a prob­lem with the chronic dis­ap­pear­ance of con­fis­cated pornog­ra­phy from the evi­dence room.

Offi­cers were watch­ing the video­tapes for lunch-hour enter­tain­ment — until higher-ups started requir­ing a supervisor’s sig­na­ture for release of that type of evidence.

“That put a quick stop to that,” said John Vasquez, who leads the Texas asso­ci­a­tion for evi­dence technicians.

A much more seri­ous secu­rity prob­lem — theft of heroin — sur­faced at the Madi­son Police Depart­ment late last year. Inves­ti­ga­tors say an offi­cer removed the addic­tive drug from the prop­erty room for no legit­i­mate rea­son at least 10 times. 

The depart­ment didn’t notice the pat­tern until after Detec­tive Jef­fery Hughes crashed his car near Edger­ton Nov. 20 and inves­ti­ga­tors say they found a torn-open evi­dence bag of heroin and other drug-related mate­ri­als in and around his car.

As in Fort Worth, com­mand offi­cers in Madi­son almost imme­di­ately started requir­ing a supervisor’s sig­na­ture for the removal of sen­si­tive evi­dence and say they are look­ing for more improvements.

But two months later, they’ve dis­closed very lit­tle else.

Chief Noble Wray has refused to explain key details about what poli­cies or pro­ce­dures existed before the crash, how they may change and whether any other offi­cers have been impli­cated in wrong-doing. He has promised to say more after the Hughes crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion and a review of prop­erty room prac­tices are complete.

“This is not some­thing I want to keep inter­nal,” Wray said in an inter­view last week. “It’s impor­tant to share the infor­ma­tion. But at this point in time, I don’t have any updates.”

Police spokesman Joel DeSpain said Wray is hav­ing records checked “going back many years” to find out if there have been addi­tional breaches — mainly, whether offi­cers may have exploited secu­rity loop­holes in the rules to get drugs or other items for per­sonal use or to tam­per with evi­dence in pend­ing cases.

GOOD FIRST STEP

State and national experts say a supervisor’s sig­na­ture for the release of sen­si­tive evi­dence is a good first step.

But they stress that much more needs to be done to pre­vent offi­cers from suc­cumb­ing to the temp­ta­tion of drugs, cash and other valu­ables sealed in stor­age lock­ers amid the stolen bikes, lost purses and other found prop­erty in police evi­dence rooms.

Main­tain­ing a secure envi­ron­ment has become espe­cially impor­tant in recent years because of advances in DNA analy­sis and other tech­niques that may require police to keep evi­dence secure for decades in case of appeals.

“It’s an area of polic­ing that requires atten­tion and financ­ing and a greater degree of scrutiny than ever before,” said William Kiley, a retired New York deputy police chief who trains depart­ments nation­wide in prop­erty room practices.

The Madi­son department’s reluc­tance to specif­i­cally explain how its sys­tem works, will work or used to work makes it dif­fi­cult to say now what may be needed.

TIGHT TIME LINES

Nation­ally rec­og­nized best prac­tices include tight time lines for offi­cers to return removed evi­dence and sys­tems that track and double-check the loca­tion of evi­dence. Sev­eral respected police-standards groups say such steps help to ele­vate prac­tices in police prop­erty rooms, which tra­di­tion­ally have been clut­tered, basement-level spaces that long have been viewed as the “red-headed step-child” of police oper­a­tions, Vasquez said.

“We’ve been down in the dun­geon all these years,” he said. “Now it’s time to do bet­ter, because an evi­dence room can make or break a police depart­ment. It’s just that in a lot of agen­cies, until some­thing hap­pens, they don’t make changes.”

COULD BE CHARGED

Since the crash, Hughes, 39, of Mil­ton has been fight­ing for his life — first at UW Hos­pi­tal, where he spent weeks in a med­ically induced coma, and now in an uniden­ti­fied care facil­ity. City lawyers say his med­ical bills are being paid by a depart­ment dis­abil­ity pol­icy that kicked in after the accident.

Dane County Sher­iff Dave Mahoney last week said his detec­tives were “close to con­clud­ing” the crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion of Hughes’ crash. He could be charged with heroin pos­ses­sion and dis­ci­plined internally.

Court records show there had been clues some­thing may have been wrong. Hughes often was not the detec­tive assigned to the cases for which he sought — and received — drug evi­dence. He also repeat­edly filled out prop­erty request slips say­ing he wanted the heroin for “test­ing,” even though the drugs in ques­tion had often already been tested or were slated to be destroyed because the cases were resolved.

Inves­ti­ga­tors believe Hughes, who was known to suf­fer from painful chronic headaches, was tak­ing the drugs for his own use. The inves­ti­ga­tion has ruled out drug-dealing by Hughes and the pos­si­bil­ity he had an accomplice.

“This sce­nario is regret­tably not unique,” Kiley said. “In most cases around the coun­try, the indi­vid­ual has been addicted to a sub­stance and that was the rea­son for the theft.”

Hughes’ alleged fre­quent focus on drugs that were slated for destruc­tion also fits with national patterns.

‘MOST VULNERABLE’

Kiley said drugs slated for destruc­tion are the “most vul­ner­a­ble entity” in a prop­erty room because the mate­r­ial is no longer needed by the courts but typ­i­cally is kept around until large enough quan­ti­ties accu­mu­late to be shipped to a regional dis­posal facility.

Kiley said it’s best that those kinds of drugs be stored sep­a­rately from other drugs and that clerks in busy prop­erty rooms are peri­od­i­cally prompted through an auto­mated sys­tem to check up on any evi­dence that has been tem­porar­ily removed for any pur­pose. He also said offi­cers who remove evi­dence should be required to quickly return it or pro­vide a third-party receipt show­ing where it is, such as at a crime lab or in a court.

“We rec­om­mend that depart­ments have a require­ment that when evi­dence is signed out, it’s brought back or a receipt is pro­vided by the end of the (day),” said Kiley, pres­i­dent of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence, based in Bur­bank, Calif.

NOT ALWAYS ACCEPTED

Experts acknowl­edged — as Madi­son police have said infor­mally — that a deter­mined rule-breaker can find ways to cir­cum­vent almost any secu­rity sys­tem. It’s also true that some steps, such as requir­ing a supervisor’s sig­na­ture, aren’t uni­ver­sally accepted and can have cer­tain draw­backs, such as pos­si­bly mak­ing the process slower or less efficient.

Most experts also stress that prop­erty room clerks — who for bud­get rea­sons are increas­ingly civil­ian employ­ees — must be trained to see red flags and report con­cerns to supervisors.

In Hughes’ case, on the day of the crash, the prop­erty room clerk who gave him 4.8 grams of heroin in an evi­dence bag later told inves­ti­ga­tors she thought the request was “odd” because she knew he wasn’t assigned to the case and that the drugs had already been tested.

She also said Hughes seemed to be in a “daze” and “high.”

Madi­son police have refused to say whether prop­erty clerks can deny requests and whether the clerk in this case told any­one about her con­cerns before inves­ti­ga­tors talked to her a few days after the crash.

They have said the prop­erty was “prop­erly checked out” under pro­ce­dures in effect then.

In two brief pub­lic state­ments since the crash, police offi­cials said the exist­ing prop­erty room sys­tem is designed to “thor­oughly doc­u­ment the chain of cus­tody” and that it does a good job of mon­i­tor­ing evi­dence through an “account­able track­ing sys­tem” in which a paper trail exists when­ever evi­dence is moved.

They also said clerks “are able to ascer­tain where evi­dence is at any point in time,” but they won’t say whether clerks rou­tinely check on the sta­tus of removed evidence.

Out­side observers have not agreed with the police department’s assess­ment of the sys­tem. For­mer Madi­son police offi­cer Michael Scott, who now directs the UW Cen­ter for Problem-Oriented Polic­ing, said the inci­dents involv­ing Hughes “quite obvi­ously did expose a flaw in a lax policy.”

Vasquez said it was “rare” and “not the norm” for offi­cers to be allowed to check out evi­dence on cases they aren’t assigned to, espe­cially if the evi­dence is marked for destruc­tion or already has been tested.

WHAT OTHER AREA AGENCIES ARE DOING

Here’s what two area agen­cies had to say about how their evi­dence rooms oper­ate: Vil­lage of Ore­gon Police Chief Doug Pet­tit said he was skep­ti­cal about the need for most offi­cers to tem­porar­ily remove evi­dence from prop­erty rooms.

In his prop­erty room, only the prop­erty room man­ager — a command-level offi­cer — han­dles evi­dence once it enters the room, he said. Evi­dence is dropped into a pass-through locker that the man­ager inside can access with an elec­tronic key sys­tem, he said.

“If it needs to be released for court pur­poses, that per­son would do it,” Pet­tit said. “If it needs to be destroyed, that would be the per­son to do it.”

Dane County Sher­iff Dave Mahoney said a sworn offi­cer is in charge of con­sid­er­ing deputies’ requests for evi­dence from his prop­erty room. He said evi­dence processed into the room is imme­di­ately bar-coded so that if it is removed, the sys­tem shows who has it for what­ever rea­son spec­i­fied on the request form.

Mahoney said a supervisor’s sig­na­ture isn’t required for his deputies to remove evi­dence and deputies aren’t required to bring back receipts show­ing where they have taken the evi­dence within any cer­tain time period, as experts recommend.

“It’s worked out very well,” Mahoney said. “In 28 years, I can’t think of a case where we have had a problem.”

KEEPING EVIDENCE SECURE

To keep a secure police evi­dence room, experts say:

* Allow only the detec­tives assigned to a case to check out evi­dence for that case.

* Require a supervisor’s sig­na­ture for removal of evidence.

* Put tight time lim­its on return of sen­si­tive evi­dence and mon­i­tor it closely. Require return by the end of the shift or require the offi­cer to bring back a receipt from a crime lab or from court or any other place it was taken.

* Install cam­eras and alarms in the evi­dence room.

* Use evidence-tracking soft­ware so clerks can see the sta­tus of removed evi­dence imme­di­ately upon open­ing a file.

* Limit temp­ta­tion. For large amounts of cash, keep a few bills as sam­ples and put the rest in a safety deposit box in the bank. Weigh and test drugs com­ing in, going out and com­ing back again.

* Acknowl­edge secu­rity breaches pub­licly, have an out­side audit done and share results publicly.

* Closely screen prop­erty room work­ers, includ­ing finan­cial back­ground checks.

Sources: Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence, Com­mis­sion on Accred­i­ta­tion for Law Enforce­ment Agen­cies, Texas Asso­ci­a­tion of Prop­erty and Evi­dence Inven­tory Technicians.

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW

The Madi­son Police Depart­ment is two weeks or more away from fin­ish­ing a review of its evi­dence room security.

Then, Chief Noble Wray says, he will explain secu­rity pro­ce­dures and how they’ll be tightened.

For now, there are unan­swered questions:

* How much author­ity do civil­ian prop­erty room clerks have to deny requests from officers?

* Were clerks trained to rec­og­nize red flags, such as repeated requests by one per­son, and required to report sus­pi­cions or con­cerns to supervisors?

* What rules were in place for the stor­age of drug evi­dence slated for destruction?

* Did clerks rou­tinely mon­i­tor the sta­tus of removed evidence?

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

Wis­con­sin State Jour­nal (Madi­son, Wis­con­sin), ALL EDITIONS
SECTION: FRONT; Pg. A1
BYLINE: By KAREN RIVEDAL krivedal@madison.com 608 – 252-6106

Madi­son, WI

The Police Depart­ment has put in place new pro­ce­dures for the police prop­erty room after a Madi­son detec­tive who was seri­ously injured in a car crash allegedly removed heroin from the room on sev­eral occa­sions under ques­tion­able cir­cum­stances, offi­cials said.

“The imme­di­ate changes … are designed to make the sys­tem more proac­tive, while main­tain­ing the integrity already built into the exist­ing chain of cus­tody pro­ce­dures,” Madi­son Police Chief Noble Wray and other lead­ers said in a state­ment Wednesday.

Area police, pros­e­cu­tors, defense attor­neys and oth­ers in Dane County say they are watch­ing the case closely — both for what hap­pens to Jef­fery Hughes, the detec­tive under sus­pi­cion, and for how fall­out from the inci­dent affects court cases and prac­tices in the prop­erty room.

“I think (the inci­dents) quite obvi­ously did expose a flaw in a lax pol­icy,” said Michael Scott, a for­mer Madi­son police offi­cer and now a clin­i­cal asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of law who directs the UW Cen­ter for Problem-Oriented Policing. 

“We count on the approx­i­mately 30 law enforce­ment agen­cies refer­ring cases to this office to keep care­ful track of who has access, and when, to every piece of evi­dence in each case,” Dane County Dis­trict Attor­ney Brian Blan­chard said. “Madi­son police super­vi­sors are actively review­ing details of how one detec­tive allegedly took advan­tage of Madison’s sys­tem, and how to pre­vent sim­i­lar inci­dents in the future.”

The biggest change is a require­ment that any offi­cer seek­ing release of sen­si­tive evi­dence such as drugs, firearms or weapons from the prop­erty room now must have a supervisor’s sig­na­ture on the request form.

But John Tradewell, an attor­ney man­ager in the Madi­son trial office of the Pub­lic Defender’s Office, said the unlaw­ful use of drug evi­dence sug­gested by the inves­ti­ga­tion still could com­pro­mise any cases Hughes han­dled or pos­si­bly oth­ers with any sus­pected evi­dence irregularities.

“It is trou­bling if the chain of evi­dence is inter­rupted,” Tradewell said. “You don’t know whether the evi­dence sub­mit­ted is really the evi­dence that applies to your client. Cer­tainly we’re going to be encour­ag­ing our lawyers to be think­ing about this.”

Con­cern about confidence

Ore­gon Police Chief Doug Petit, for­mer pres­i­dent of the Wis­con­sin Police Chiefs Asso­ci­a­tion, said he wor­ries peo­ple will assume Madison’s prob­lem is shared by other local police agencies.

“Law enforce­ment tends to get painted with a broad brush, so it is a con­cern of the entire law enforce­ment com­mu­nity when some­thing like this hap­pens,” Petit said. “We hold posi­tions of pub­lic trust, and this erodes at that pub­lic trust, and we need com­mu­nity sup­port now more than at any time in the past.”

Experts in Wis­con­sin and nation­ally noted that proof of a com­pro­mised police evi­dence room can have far-reaching con­se­quences for the depart­ment involved and its leaders.

“It has an affect on the public’s per­cep­tion of the integrity of the entire depart­ment,” said William Kiley, a retired New York deputy police chief. Kiley trains police depart­ments around the coun­try and in Canada in best prac­tices for prop­erty room man­age­ment as pres­i­dent of the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence, based in Bur­bank, Calif.

“You might get over the imme­di­ate prob­lem fairly quickly,” Kiley said, “but that sting is going to be with your depart­ment for a very long time.”

Changes made quickly

The changes to Madison’s prop­erty room poli­cies were made with no pub­lic announce­ment on Nov. 28, a lit­tle more than a week after Hughes crashed his car while off-duty.

Inves­ti­ga­tors found a ripped-open evi­dence bag of heroin, with some of the drug miss­ing, and other drug-related mate­ri­als at the crash scene near Edgerton.

Police records show Hughes, 39, of Mil­ton received that bag of heroin from the prop­erty room hours before the Nov. 20 crash, say­ing he needed the drugs for “test­ing.” But Hughes’ request that day and on at least 10 prior occa­sions raised red flags, police said.

He usu­ally was not the pri­mary detec­tive assigned to the cases for which he received the evi­dence, and the drugs he requested often already had been tested and in some cases had been slated to be destroyed, police said.

On the day of his crash, Hughes also appeared “dazed” and “high” when he requested the drugs, accord­ing to the prop­erty room clerk on duty that day, court records unsealed last week said.

Han­dling ‘not the norm’

Scott, of the UW Cen­ter, said it “did sur­prise” him that detec­tives for­merly could check out prop­erty on cases in which they weren’t the lead inves­ti­ga­tor with­out approval by higher-ups, “espe­cially with respect to narcotics.”

“Cer­tainly proper pro­ce­dures would call for more safe­guards,” said Scott, who also worked as a police offi­cer in New York City and super­vised a police prop­erty room in Fort Pierce, Fla., and as chief of the police depart­ment in Lauder­hill, Fla. “One of the ques­tions I would ask is whether there might be too much def­er­ence being given by civil­ian prop­erty clerks to detec­tives and officers.”

John Vasquez, pres­i­dent of the Texas Asso­ci­a­tion of Prop­erty and Evi­dence Tech­ni­cians, said it was “rare” and “not the norm” for offi­cers to be allowed to check out evi­dence for test­ing on cases they aren’t assigned to, espe­cially if the evi­dence is marked for destruc­tion or already has been tested.

“And it’s a big prob­lem if the clerk noticed all these things and still released the evi­dence with­out telling some­body else,” said Vasquez, who has more than 20 years of expe­ri­ence in prop­erty room man­age­ment and now works for the Wichita Falls, Texas, Police Department.

Pro­ce­dures unclear

Wednesday’s state­ment did not address whether Madi­son prop­erty room clerks, who are civil­ians, can deny requests from offi­cers, nor does it indi­cate whether clerks are required to report sus­pi­cious behav­ior to supervisors.

It’s not clear whether the clerk who released the heroin to Hughes on Nov. 20 reported her con­cerns before she was inter­viewed by a Dane County sheriff’s deputy three days later.

Also unclear is what the pro­ce­dure is for re-checking evi­dence returned by offi­cers and whether any peri­odic checks are done to mon­i­tor the sta­tus of removed evi­dence. It does not appear that Hughes’ prior removals of drugs were noticed until after records were checked fol­low­ing his crash.

In their state­ment, Madi­son police offi­cials say their sys­tem is designed “to thor­oughly doc­u­ment the chain of cus­tody” of evi­dence, and that the prop­erty room “pro­vides a good, account­able, track­ing system.”

“A paper trail exists for all occa­sions when prop­erty is moved and clerks are able to ascer­tain where evi­dence is at any point in time,” the state­ment said.

The state­ment also says there can be good rea­sons for an offi­cer to request tem­po­rary release of evi­dence from the prop­erty room, such as for “pho­tograph­ing, pro­cess­ing and testing.”

Items also may be needed in court to serve as a visual exhibit and may be needed for wit­nesses or oth­ers to see at other times.

More changes possible

The state­ment also said police are con­tin­u­ing their assess­ment of all prop­erty room and evi­dence pro­ce­dures and that more changes may be made.

“The goal is to pro­tect the integrity of evi­dence and to pro­vide a sys­tem for which the pub­lic will have the high­est con­fi­dence and trust,” the state­ment said.

Petit, the Ore­gon police chief, said the Madi­son Police Depart­ment is a “good agency” doing “good things” for city res­i­dents, noth­ing that eth­i­cal or crim­i­nal lapses can occa­sion­ally affect all kinds of businesses.

“Peo­ple have human frail­ties and these kinds of things are going to hap­pen some­times,” Petit said. “This was an indi­vid­ual who obvi­ously had an issue, but the sys­tem was pro­vid­ing him an avenue. You just try to put as many safe­guards in as pos­si­ble to pre­vent it.”

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