IAPE Evidence Blog

The Patriot Ledger (Quincy, MA)
BYLINE: Patriot Ledger staff

Daniel­son, CT

Judge gives for­mer Quincy res­i­dent 20-year sen­tence for 1988 Conn. attack

DANIELSON, Conn. — A sex­ual preda­tor who a judge said “honed and per­fected” his tech­nique while liv­ing on the South Shore was sen­tenced to 20 more years in prison fol­low­ing his con­vic­tion for a 1988 rape in Connecticut.

James Thomas Ward, 44, was liv­ing on Cum­mings Road in Quincy when he was first linked through DNA to the rape of a 20-year-old new­ly­wed at her Killingly home.

The woman was home alone on a week­day morn­ing when Ward knocked on the door, say­ing he had car trou­ble. He talked his way into the house and the woman gave him water for his car. He left but returned a few min­utes later with a knife and threat­ened to kill the woman before rap­ing her.

Judge Patri­cia A. Swords on Tues­day called the crime “heinous to the extreme” and sen­tenced Ward to 20 years in prison. She threw out a jury’s guilty ver­dict on the charge of first-degree kid­nap­ping, which dropped the max­i­mum sen­tence by 25 years.

The vic­tim was in court Tues­day and took excep­tion to the judge’s ruling.

“It’s been over 20 years,” she said. “I’m very con­fused. I’m very angry. What I don’t under­stand is why we both­ered to have a trial.”

Con­necti­cut pros­e­cu­tors suc­cess­fully argued that the five-year statute of lim­i­ta­tions on sex­ual assault cases did not apply because Ward had fled the state and was liv­ing in Mass­a­chu­setts, first in Brain­tree and later in Quincy.

Swords said Ward was “hon­ing and per­fect­ing his tech­nique” when he sex­u­ally assaulted a stu­dent in her dorm room at East­ern Nazarene Col­lege in Quincy a year after the Killingly rape. Ward had tracked the young woman, broke into her dorm room in the mid­dle of the night wear­ing gloves, and then raped her, Swords said.

Ward also was con­victed of sex­u­ally assault­ing a woman, who was sun­bathing in her dri­ve­way in 1994. He was jailed in 2004 after sev­eral domes­tic vio­lence and pro­ba­tion vio­la­tion charges.

In court Tues­day, defense attor­ney William Pet­zold said Ward, who is serv­ing a prison sen­tence in another case, has had suc­cess in sex­ual offender treat­ment and asked that Ward not be “ware­housed for the rest of his life.”

Ward apol­o­gized in a tear­ful plea for leniency.

“I do know it was a hor­ri­fy­ing and trau­matic expe­ri­ence that you in no way deserved to endure,” Ward said. “I’ve had this on my con­science for more than 21 years.”

Swords said Ward’s actions, includ­ing the fact that he took the case to trial and made the vic­tim relive the hor­ror of the assault, were incon­sis­tent with some­one who is remorse­ful and look­ing to ease his conscience.

Mate­r­ial from Gate­House News Ser­vice was used in this report.

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

Hart­ford Courant (Con­necti­cut)
BYLINE: DAVE ALTIMARI and MATTHEW KAUFFMAN, daltimari@courant.com

New Haven, CT

AS CRIME LAB STRUGGLES WITH BACKLOG, STATE USES
FEDERAL FUNDS IN EFFORT TO CATCH UP

For nearly two years, the DNA sam­ples con­nect­ing Ronald Brown to the rape of a teenage girl sat in the state police foren­sic lab­o­ra­tory while the con­victed mur­derer roamed the streets of New Haven.

Brown had been released from prison in Novem­ber 2006 — but not before giv­ing author­i­ties a DNA sam­ple that was sup­posed to be ana­lyzed by the state lab and logged into a national DNA databank.

Six months later, Brown’s DNA sam­ple was still on the shelf, with thou­sands of other untested sam­ples, when a 15-year-old girl was dragged behind a house on Chapel Street in New Haven and sex­u­ally assaulted. A rape kit, includ­ing DNA evi­dence from the girl’s attacker, was taken the day after the May 4, 2007, assault and sent by New Haven police detec­tives to the state police lab in August 2007.

But two more years would pass before sci­en­tists in the lab ana­lyzed Brown’s DNA sam­ple — and found that it matched the DNA in the New Haven rape. Brown was arrested last week, 32 months after the crime, and charged with first-degree sex­ual assault and kidnapping.

DNA analy­sis has rev­o­lu­tion­ized crime-solving. But heavy back­logs have become the norm at Connecticut’s once-renowned foren­sic lab­o­ra­tory, lead­ing to long delays that crit­ics say put the pub­lic at risk.

The lab­o­ra­tory now has a back­log of 10,600 DNA sam­ples from con­victed offend­ers that haven’t been processed and entered into the databank.

On Fri­day, two days after The Courant sub­mit­ted ques­tions to the state police about prob­lems at the lab­o­ra­tory, Gov. M. Jodi Rell announced that the lab has made “sig­nif­i­cant progress” in elim­i­nat­ing that DNA back­log by hir­ing per­son­nel using fed­eral stim­u­lus money.The gov­er­nor said the lab was able to enter 1,900 sam­ples into the data­bank in Jan­u­ary, result­ing in six “hits” on unsolved sex­ual assault cases going back as long as 22 years. Rell announced a goal to elim­i­nate the back­log by the end of the year so that “vic­tims can get the jus­tice they deserve.”

But an inter­nal mem­o­ran­dum from the lab direc­tor obtained by The Courant details how evi­dence from recent vio­lent crimes, includ­ing homi­cides, sits untouched in the state lab­o­ra­tory for up to a year.

The Novem­ber 2009 memo, writ­ten to State Police Com­mis­sioner John A. Dana­her III, says:

*Police depart­ments sub­mit­ting DNA evi­dence from a homi­cide scene can expect to wait as long as nine months for pro­cess­ing, unless it is a high-profile case such as the killing of Yale stu­dent Annie Le. Evi­dence from 35 homi­cides has not yet been processed.

*Latent fin­ger­prints found at a crime scene can take a year for the lab­o­ra­tory to ana­lyze against a national database.

*Rape kits with poten­tial DNA evi­dence may be shelved for up to a year. The state has 110 rape kits that have not been analyzed.

*Firearms sub­mit­ted for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion can take from nine months to a year to review.

In the memo, Direc­tor Ken­neth Zer­cie blames the back­log on staff cuts. He wrote that in July 2009, for exam­ple, the lab had five exam­in­ers who han­dled fin­ger­prints and doc­u­ments; now it has one.

And with lim­ited staff, Zer­cie says, the delays cited in the memo are actu­ally opti­mistic projections.

“These time esti­mates are best-case sce­nar­ios,” Zer­cie wrote. “With inter­rup­tions of emer­gency case exam­i­na­tions, high pro­file inves­ti­ga­tions, cold case resub­mis­sions and court tes­ti­mony require­ments, the entire staff of the Divi­sion of Sci­en­tific Ser­vices is stretched in many directions.”

State Rep. Michael Lawlor, a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor, said he was shocked to see how long evi­dence in pend­ing cases sits in the laboratory.

“The end result is if you are a police chief or cop you could wait for as much as a year for DNA results. That’s a pretty seri­ous prob­lem that under­mines what law enforce­ment does,” Lawlor said.

Lawlor said work­ing on elim­i­nat­ing the DNA back­log is dif­fer­ent from solv­ing active cases.

“They are not say­ing we are throw­ing peo­ple at solv­ing crimes but just that we are throw­ing peo­ple at elim­i­nat­ing a back­log,” Lawlor said. “Why hasn’t any­body been told there is a long delay in cases? Why does it take the leak of a memo for peo­ple to find out there’s a seri­ous problem?”

Many law enforce­ment per­son­nel, whether police detec­tives or pros­e­cu­tors, are reluc­tant to speak on the record about the lab’s prob­lems for fear of alien­at­ing lab employees.

“We have a homi­cide case with DNA evi­dence that we’ve been wait­ing almost a year for them to process and they always tell us: ‘Bring us a sus­pect and we’ll do it right away.’ But how do we know our sus­pect isn’t just sit­ting in the data­bank wait­ing to be found if we could just get the DNA done?” said a detec­tive from a mid-size depart­ment who didn’t want to be identified.

The lab’s rep­u­ta­tion took a hit in Novem­ber when The Courant reported that a DNA sam­ple believed for years to belong to the killer of Yale stu­dent Suzanne Jovin was actu­ally the DNA of a now-retired lab technician.

Even before that rev­e­la­tion, Thomas and Donna Jovin took the unusual step of pub­licly crit­i­ciz­ing the lab in a let­ter to Rell, say­ing that “short­com­ings” at the foren­sic lab­o­ra­tory are pro­hibit­ing detec­tives inves­ti­gat­ing their daughter’s slay­ing from apply­ing cut­ting edge tech­niques to the case. “This facil­ity, once regarded as a lead­ing foren­sic unit in the coun­try, is suf­fer­ing from under­staffing and inad­e­quate fund­ing. As a con­se­quence, the unit is strug­gling to sat­isfy the needs of ongo­ing and emerg­ing inves­ti­ga­tions, not to speak of ‘cold cases’ such as the mur­der of our daugh­ter,” the Jovins wrote.

Lawlor said the state bud­get cri­sis and early retire­ments have taken a toll on the lab’s effec­tive­ness. Many for­mer lab work­ers have joined their for­mer boss, Henry Lee, at the Uni­ver­sity of New Haven.

Dana­her said state police offi­cials are aware of the DNA back­log, which was as high as 35,000 sam­ples in recent years. He said the state has set a goal to process 1,000 sam­ples a month from the back­log until it is elim­i­nated. To do that, the state is using fed­eral funds, includ­ing about $2 mil­lion in stim­u­lus money, to pay for 11 lab tech­ni­cians. He said the recent matches illus­trate the value of the lab’s work.

“The new hits just show why it is so impor­tant to clear the con­victed offender DNA back­log,” Dana­her said. “Once we elim­i­nate that, we can go after the pend­ing cases with more people.”

Dana­her acknowl­edged there is some frus­tra­tion among law enforce­ment in the state with the delays in get­ting foren­sic evi­dence processed.

“Every­body wants their case done right away but when you are get­ting 150 new cases a month plus about a 1,000 con­victed offender sam­ples a month it is hard to get to every­thing,” Dana­her said.

He said the lab has to pri­or­i­tize cases. In the Annie Le killing, for exam­ple, author­i­ties col­lected hun­dreds of pieces of evi­dence and the lab worked around the clock to do the DNA tests that allowed police to charge Ray­mond Clark with murder.

“There were a lot of bod­ies from the lab that worked a lot of hours on the Annie Le case and they are still work­ing a lot of hours on that case right now,” Dana­her said. “Every time a pri­or­ity case comes in, other cases get pushed back.”

In Ronald Brown’s case, Dana­her acknowl­edged that the back­log of sam­ples from con­victed felons led to a long delay in ana­lyz­ing his DNA. He said the state had used a fed­eral gov­ern­ment con­trac­tor to keep up with inmate sam­ples, but fell behind after the con­tract was can­celed when the com­pany ran into quality-control problems.

It took the lab about six months to process the rape kit. But Brown’s DNA sam­ple was not processed until Jan. 29, 2009 — more than two years after it was received. Lab offi­cials real­ized they had a match in April 2009.

Advo­cates say it is impor­tant to reduce back­logs in ana­lyz­ing offender DNA sam­ples. But long delays in pro­cess­ing crime-scene evi­dence, par­tic­u­larly from sex­ual assaults, are even more dis­tress­ing, said Scott Berkowitz, founder of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Net­work, a Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based group that has pressed for faster analy­sis of crime-scene evidence.

“It’s hard to explain to a vic­tim: The crime’s hap­pened, we have the evi­dence, but we’re not going to look at the evi­dence,” Berkowitz said.

“It’s a very dif­fi­cult thing for the vic­tim to go through. It can take hours to have all the evi­dence col­lected, to have body parts pho­tographed, to have hair and fibers and blood drawn,” he said. “So those who put them­selves up to it and go through this long process, we owe them better.”

Back­logs have plagued state foren­sic labs for decades. But with a boost from fed­eral Depart­ment of Jus­tice funds, sev­eral have worked to whit­tle away at those buildups.

In Mary­land, Gov. Mar­tin O’Malley inher­ited a back­log of 24,000 DNA sam­ples when he took office in 2007.

Within a year, he said, the back­log was gone, result­ing in a six­fold increase in the rate at which author­i­ties found matches between crime-scene evi­dence and the DNA database.

More than 20 years ago, Vir­ginia had 160,000 blood sam­ples await­ing analy­sis. Since then, that state’s DNA data­base has grown from about 26,000 sam­ples to more than 300,000, and the state now aver­ages about 700 hits a year against the data­base, accord­ing to state records.

Arkansas offi­cials raised court fees in 2005, pump­ing mil­lions of new dol­lars into state labs and nearly elim­i­nat­ing a 16,000-case back­log. And sev­eral other states with pop­u­la­tions larger than Connecticut’s have back­logs no larger than a few thou­sand cases.

Berkowitz said fail­ing to ana­lyze DNA sam­ples, par­tic­u­larly in sexual-assault cases, puts the pub­lic at risk.

“Rapists tend to be ser­ial crim­i­nals. They tend to com­mit a lot of attacks before they’re found. And because most cases never get reported to the police, the odds of catch­ing them are even lower,” he said. “But in a case that actu­ally is reported to police and the evi­dence is col­lected, it’s crazy to leave them on the streets.”

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