IAPE Evidence Blog

9 Wants to Know, www.9news.com
BYLINE: Deborah.Sherman, Deborah.Sherman@9NEWS.com.
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Broom­field, CO

BROOMFIELD — E-mails from Broomfield’s police chief and city coun­cil mem­bers show they’re blam­ing the media for report­ing about their prob­lems and try­ing to find and pun­ish the per­son who leaked memos about lost evi­dence and years of mis­man­age­ment inside the prop­erty and evi­dence room. The e-mails also show the chief took steps to address the prob­lems only after 9Wants to Know ques­tioned him about the miss­ing items.

“I cer­tainly hope you are able to dis­cover who had access to inter­nal memos and who leaked them to press and that appro­pri­ate action can be taken,” City Coun­cil­woman Linda Reynolds wrote on Feb. 8 to Police Chief Tom Deland. “I want you to know that per­son­ally I have all the con­fi­dence in you and your depart­ment and that this dis­tor­tion is trash news.”

“I have no idea why one of our own would bring dis­credit upon all the hard work­ing and brave mem­bers of our depart­ment,” Deland wrote in an e-mail Feb. to all police officers.

City Man­ager George Di Ciero told 9NEWS on Feb. 16 that it’s not city pol­icy to look for the peo­ple who released the audit to 9NEWS.

How­ever, in an e-mail to the city coun­cil, Deland wrote, “At this time, it is unknown exactly how 9NEWS obtained a copy of the con­fi­den­tial inter­nal audit. If that infor­ma­tion is even­tu­ally obtained, appro­pri­ate action will be taken.”

Ear­lier this month, a 9Wants to Know inves­ti­ga­tion released the results of inter­nal memos and an audit that found there were 15,000 pieces of old evi­dence that could be destroyed, there were sev­eral hun­dred data entry errors for track­ing evi­dence and prop­erty, and that there were 257 pieces of evi­dence miss­ing or unable to locate.

The audi­tor found the account­abil­ity for the evi­dence was unac­cept­able and found a “pat­tern of prob­lems” in the room. Experts told 9NEWS evi­dence must be han­dled with care to main­tain a “chain of cus­tody” for court cases.

Per­son­nel records show the two evi­dence tech­ni­cians in charge of the room had repeat­edly been ranked “pro­fi­cient” or aver­age or “below-standard” in areas crit­i­cal to man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tion. Yet, the chief kept them in their cur­rent posi­tions with­out any dis­ci­pli­nary action.

E-mails show the chief made sev­eral changes only after he real­ized the story was going to be broad­cast on 9NEWS.

After inter­views with 9NEWS, “Chief Deland reas­signed a sergeant on a full-time basis to work in the prop­erty and evi­dence room and observe and mon­i­tor the pro­ce­dures,” Di Ciero wrote to the city coun­cil. “Chief Deland also requested the city’s newly appointed direc­tor of per­for­mance and inter­nal audit to con­duct a process audit of the prop­erty room.”

The chief ini­ti­ated per­for­mance eval­u­a­tions and improve­ment mea­sures and con­tacted the 17th Judi­cial Dis­trict Attor­ney about the miss­ing evi­dence after learn­ing about the 9NEWS inves­ti­ga­tion, accord­ing to the e-mails.

Two audits of the evi­dence and prop­erty room were launched after the news cov­er­age. One audit is an over­all audit con­ducted by the city’s inde­pen­dent audi­tors who will report to the mayor and city coun­cil. The sec­ond audit will be con­ducted by the city and county’s inter­nal audi­tor and will be reported to the manager.

The man­ager was very crit­i­cal of the media for broad­cast­ing the city’s prob­lems, accord­ing to e-mails.

“Here is a clas­sic exam­ple of “if it bleeds, it leads,” Di Ciero wrote on Feb. 6. “This must really be a down time for real news, so they want to cre­ate some. This is patently disgusting.”

Of the miss­ing items, the police chief says 93 are still miss­ing and 162 of them have been accounted for, accord­ing to Deland.

He says 45 items were found in the room which had been mis­placed in one of the stor­age areas. 117 items were accounted for by review­ing hand­writ­ten logs that doc­u­mented the proper dis­po­si­tion of the prop­erty. Of the 93 items still miss­ing, the chief says he sus­pects data entry mis­takes are to blame and says per­son­nel are still try­ing to track down the items.

Of the mis­man­aged evi­dence, 45 items belonged to felony cases and 29 were mis­de­meanor or traf­fic cases, accord­ing to the 17th Judi­cial Dis­trict office. No crim­i­nal case out­comes were impacted as a result of the destroyed or miss­ing evidence.

If you have any news tips or story ideas, please e-mail Inves­tiga­tive Reporter Deb­o­rah Sher­man at Deborah.Sherman@9NEWS.com.

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

Aspen Daily News, aspendailynews.com
Link to Arti­cle
Car­olyn Sackari­a­son, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer sack@aspendailynews.com

Aspen, CO

Com­plete inven­tory being taken of three decades’ worth of evidence

After an inde­pen­dent audit of Aspen Police Depart­ment oper­a­tions ear­lier this month found an unusu­ally high num­ber of errors in cat­a­loging and pre­serv­ing evi­dence, offi­cials have been work­ing around the clock to track down miss­ing items.

APD inves­ti­ga­tor Wal­ter Chi spent all of last week comb­ing through roughly 1,500 pieces of evi­dence, track­ing how they were ini­tially cat­a­logued, and re-tagging and putting bar codes on each item. Chi said he said he’s about halfway done sift­ing through what APD chief Richard Pryor said is more than three decades’ worth of evidence.

In May, Denver-based Pro­fes­sional Police Con­sult­ing, run by for­mer West­min­ster police chief Dan Mont­gomery, ran­domly inspected 172 Aspen crim­i­nal cases. Of those, 130 had pieces of evi­dence incor­rectly labeled or missing.

The cat­a­loged items that audi­tors could not find in the evi­dence room included a sword used in a 2004 assault, two miniskirts, lido­caine and syringes, a “victim’s white panties” from a 2009 case, a glass dove seized in 2003, and a sports drink stolen from City Market.

Chi said he hasn’t found much of what was miss­ing in the audit, but Pryor said it was dis­cov­ered that the panties had been returned to the victim.

The sword and other items will likely turn up since most of what Chi has dis­cov­ered so far in the evi­dence room had been mis­placed over the years.

“When I was going through the boxes, I was able to locate items that were in the wrong place,” Chi said of the 170 boxes in the evi­dence room.

In other cases, pieces of evi­dence have been returned to their own­ers or released to other agen­cies but not prop­erly recorded.

“A lot of it has been released to its owner,” Chi said of com­puter and paper records not being updated to reflect that.

Chi said he found $6,000 from one case that had been improp­erly stored. Fig­ur­ing out where it should go “will take a bit of dig­ging,” he said.

Pryor said the munic­i­pal code allows money that is col­lected by con­victed crim­i­nals to be diverted to edu­ca­tional pro­grams, as long as the court costs and fines related to their cases have been paid.

Chi said it made more sense to do a com­plete inven­tory of the evi­dence room rather than find the miss­ing items first, hop­ing that they turn up in the process.

“I’m try­ing to dis­tance myself from what’s miss­ing and just do a full audit,” he said.

Montgomery’s audit reviewed about 25 per­cent of what’s in the APD’s evi­dence room.

“We started imme­di­ately since the report came back to process every­thing,” Chi said.

Files in the Aspen Police Department’s evi­dence room, which is under­go­ing a thor­ough review after an audit found a high num­ber of prob­lems there.

The APD is fol­low­ing rec­om­men­da­tions from the evi­dence por­tion of the audit, includ­ing cat­a­loging all exist­ing evi­dence, destroy­ing old evi­dence, inves­ti­gat­ing miss­ing items and money, and cross-checking what it actu­ally has with what com­puter records says it has. Pryor also is imple­ment­ing a bar code sys­tem that will keep track of where and when evi­dence is moved.

Chi’s work has been an inves­ti­ga­tion of its own, hav­ing to back track through the APD’s three dif­fer­ent cat­a­loging sys­tems that have spanned decades, and deter­mine whether pieces of evi­dence were released and to whom.

When he’s done, every sin­gle item in the evi­dence room will be doc­u­mented and updated.

“By the end of the month, every­thing will have a bar code and a tag,” Chi said.

The audi­tors sug­gested that one full-time per­son be in charge of the evi­dence room and its contents.

“At the moment, we need three peo­ple to man­age it,” Pryor said.

A larger pol­icy issue that the APD will face once a com­plete inven­tory has been taken is whether to purge items that are no longer use­ful and the cases are closed. An excep­tion would be DNA evi­dence, which could help iden­tify a sus­pect and pros­e­cute him or her in the future.

There is evi­dence from two dif­fer­ent mur­der cases dat­ing back to the 1980s and for­eign money that offi­cials aren’t sure what to do with.

“It’s a mov­ing tar­get on how to han­dle your evi­dence room,” Chi said. “You sep­a­rate out the high­est risk items — drugs, money and guns … We need to be more secu­rity con­scious about it.”

Drugs and guns from the APD’s evi­dence room were destroyed last year; cur­rently there are five guns in the vault and eight BB guns.

The audit also reported that $4,683 in cash from a 2001 theft is unac­counted for. In all, the audi­tors reported count­ing errors or miss­ing funds in 43 out of 54 cur­rency cases sur­veyed — an 80 per­cent error rate.

In drug cases, the depart­ment erred 82 per­cent of the time — in 87 of 106 cases checked. Most of those mis­takes were in incor­rectly label­ing or weigh­ing seized drugs, the report states. Drugs were unac­counted for in just a few cases, total­ing about a quar­ter ounce of mar­i­juana and 1.7 grams of cocaine.

Out of six weapons cases sur­veyed, one weapon was report­edly stored unsafely with ammunition.

At the audi­tors’ rec­om­men­da­tion, the depart­ment is chang­ing pro­to­col for the weigh­ing, label­ing and cat­a­loging of narcotics.

Pryor asked for the out­side audit — the first known in Aspen police his­tory — ear­lier this year, fol­low­ing appar­ent APD evi­dence col­lec­tion and preser­va­tion issues that proved prob­lem­atic as the dis­trict attorney’s office pros­e­cuted a high-profile sex assault case.

When he com­mis­sioned it, the chief said the depart­ment needed to be open with the pub­lic in address­ing its shortcomings.

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

Aspen Daily News
BYLINE: Troy Hooper, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer, hoop@aspendailynews.com
Link to Article

Aspen, CO

The defense and pros­e­cu­tion in the alleged Cen­ten­nial rape case went at it again Wednes­day as the two sides con­tinue to bat­tle over what is admis­si­ble at trial. 

The pub­lic defender duo of Steve McCro­han and Tina Fang have had some suc­cess with the litany of motions they have filed so far, namely per­suad­ing the judge to sup­press all the state­ments their client, Emanuel Gonzalez-Loujun, 22, of Car­bon­dale, made to police after he was arrested for allegedly rap­ing a young woman out­side of her Cen­ten­nial home in Jan­u­ary 2009. Judge James Boyd sup­pressed all the state­ments as a sanc­tion against the dis­trict attorney’s office, which along with police, have made mis­takes in the case.

The lat­est mis­take Gonzalez-Loujun’s pub­lic defend­ers are try­ing to ben­e­fit from is the Aspen Police Department’s mis­han­dling of the defendant’s blood sam­ples. The department’s evi­den­tiary cus­to­dian Michelle McClin­ton tes­ti­fied that she failed to refrig­er­ate or freeze Gonzalez-Loujun’s blood when the Col­orado Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion sent it back to Aspen. The blood was not prop­erly stored for sev­eral months and was “untestable” by the time it was turned over to the pub­lic defender’s office, the attor­neys said.

Aspen police offi­cer Chris Wom­ack, who was the lead detec­tive on the case, tes­ti­fied “that was just an error on my part” when he sent the blood to CBI for a tox­i­col­ogy test, as it appar­ently should have gone to a dif­fer­ent agency for testing.

Upon learn­ing Wom­ack is par­tially color blind, McCro­han ques­tioned whether the detective’s con­di­tion might have affected how the blood sam­ple was processed.

The defense is ask­ing that the blood evi­dence not be admis­si­ble at trial. 

Mean­while, city attor­ney Jim True filed a motion to quash the defense’s sub­poena seek­ing Aspen police offi­cer Leon Murray’s per­son­nel files. Hold­ing the officer’s files, which were sev­eral inches tall (Mur­ray has worked for the depart­ment for decades) True con­tended the files should remain pri­vate, at one point call­ing up Assis­tant Police Chief Linda Con­sue­gra, who tes­ti­fied no one has ever com­plained of Mur­ray using exces­sive force. Gonzalez-Loujun is accused of assault­ing Mur­ray and resist­ing arrest when he was appre­hended in the Cen­ten­nial area shortly after the alleged rape.

Judge Boyd agreed Murray’s files should remain pri­vate, although he did order the police depart­ment to keep the files ready in case they need to be exam­ined later.

It was also revealed in the open court that the dis­trict attorney’s office had its inves­ti­ga­tor audit the Aspen Police Department’s evi­den­tiary processes, which the pub­lic defender’s office alleges is fraught with prob­lems, but there were “no deficiencies.”

Fang is request­ing the audit be turned over to her office. She also is renew­ing her motion for sanc­tions on the dis­trict attorney’s office. She and McCro­han have been per­sis­tent crit­ics of Chief Deputy Dis­trict Attor­ney Arnold Mord­kin and his conduct.

At the end of yesterday’s hear­ing, Fang accused Mord­kin of improp­erly advis­ing Pitkin County Jail Admin­is­tra­tor Don Bird about the case’s ini­tial keep­ing of records.

The pub­lic defender ran out of time to elab­o­rate but her com­plaint about Mord­kin — along with the admis­si­bil­ity of the blood and other out­stand­ing issues — will be fur­ther dis­cussed Feb. 25. Fang also claims an Aspen police offi­cer involved in the case has a crim­i­nal record and she is seek­ing infor­ma­tion on the unnamed officer’s history.

Gonzalez-Loujun’s trial was orig­i­nally sched­uled to be over by now. But there have been unremit­ting delays that have now pushed the trial’s start back to March 29.

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