IAPE Evidence Blog

10WALB, walb.com
BYLINE: Jade Bulecza, jade.bulecza@walb.com
Link to Article

Lown­des County, GA

Val­dosta, Georgia -

Lown­des County deputies had to scram­ble to pro­tect drugs and other evi­dence that’s nor­mally safely locked away in an evi­dence room.

That’s because a man acci­den­tally crashed his truck into the room.

That dri­ver, Ivey Star­ling, is still in the hospital.

This truck rammed into the wall at the sheriff’s office around noon.

72 year old Ivey Star­ling took his son Ivey Star­ling Jr. to the sheriff’s office to get his truck that was stolen over the week­end. Inves­ti­ga­tors say it shook the building.

“I was in my office talk­ing to some­one and all the sud­den a big boom and our alarm went off and I ran out and the truck was in the build­ing,” said Capt. Wanda Edwards.

“For unknown rea­sons he hit the accel­er­a­tor and come the con­crete curb­ing here and struck the wall,” said Trooper Jeremy Kinsey.

As you can see there’s dam­age here on the out­side and inside the walls have shifted and even the air con­di­tion­ing unit that cools Sher­iff Prine’s office has also been damaged.

Joseph Gif­ford is accused of steal­ing Ivey Star­ling Junior’s truck around mid­night from his home. Gif­ford was arrested on Williams School Road Mon­day morning.

County offi­cials were work­ing on a short term solu­tion to secure the area as they assess the damage.

“It’s actu­ally our evi­dence room where we keep our evi­dence store drugs and drug para­pher­na­lia such as that,” said Sher­iff Chris Prine.

“We’re going to come up with some kind of block­ing to cover the hole up,” said Chad McLeod, the Lown­des County project manager.

Troop­ers are still inves­ti­gat­ing what caused Star­ling to crash. 

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

World­Now and WALB, WALB NEWS10, walb.com
BYLINE: Stephanie Springer
Link to Article

Turner County, GA

The Sher­iff of Turner County is the tar­get of a crim­i­nal investigation.

WALB News 10 has learned that Sher­iff Roy Wiley is being inves­ti­gat­ing for pos­si­bly remov­ing a large amount of mar­i­juana from his crime evi­dence room and giv­ing it to a can­cer patient.

The GBI con­firms the inves­ti­ga­tion was launched July 8th.

As word of this inves­ti­ga­tion spreads, Sher­iff Wiley, who took office in 2008, is nowhere to be found.

Sher­iff Roy Wiley has a lot of friends and sup­port­ers in Turner County. “So far he has been a good Sher­iff, he has always been good to us,” said Rick Mulvey.

“He’s a very pop­u­lar fel­low, good guy, good fel­low,” said John Holland.

“As far as I’ve been con­cerned he’s been a great sher­iff, he’s fair and decent to every­one,” said Billy Jordan.

But the town is now buzzing about a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into Wiley’s actions. WALB News 10 is told that Sher­iff Wiley instructed one of his offi­cers to remove a large amount of mar­i­juana from the crim­i­nal evi­dence room so he could give it to a friend with cancer.

The GBI won’t con­firm that, but they do acknowl­edge they are inves­ti­gat­ing Wiley.

“It is shock­ing, I’ve been know­ing this man all my life,” said Jordan.

County offi­cials we spoke with today say they are not aware of the inves­ti­ga­tion. “I have not been con­tacted by any law enforce­ment of inves­tiga­tive agency about it,” said Holland.

We also attempted to con­tact Sher­iff Wiley him­self, but we were told he’s out of town at a Sheriff’s con­fer­ence. WALB News 10 has learned that the Sheriff’s Con­fer­ence ended Wednes­day and we’ve not been able to reach Sher­iff Wiley.

“I hope that what­ever this is works out for him because he is a pop­u­lar and good sher­iff for Turner county,” said Holland.

“You can’t base your opin­ion by what you hear in the streets, if he is under inves­ti­ga­tion I’m quite sure the GBI will do their job,” said Jordan.

“He’s our friend and he’s our sher­iff and until he is proven guilty I’m not going to believe any­thing I hear,” said Mulvey.

Wiley was elected Sher­iff in 2008, pre­vi­ously he was the Police chief in Sycamore.

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

Gwin­nett Daily Post, gwinnettdailypost.com
BYLINE: Josh Green, Staff Writer, josh.green@gwinnettdailypost.com

Lawrenceville, GA

Police dept. main­tains chain-of-custody ques­tion a non-issue

LAWRENCEVILLE — When Lawrenceville police trans­ferred evi­dence that’s cru­cial in hun­dreds of pend­ing cases from their for­mer head­quar­ters to an upgraded facil­ity last year, they brought in Gwin­nett County Jail inmates to do the heavy lifting.

Those alleged crim­i­nals also raised the poten­tial for con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing the evidence’s chain-of-custody, the path from crime scene to cour­t­house that is crit­i­cal in crim­i­nal tri­als, offi­cials said Monday. 

While Lawrenceville police offi­cials recently con­ceded that, on the sur­face, putting every­thing from hand­guns and sur­veil­lance videos to bulk mar­i­juana in the hands of inmates — albeit in sealed boxes — may sound illog­i­cal, police fol­lowed strict secu­rity plans and never took eyes off offend­ers dur­ing the brief trans­port on June 19, 2010.

“Com­mon sense would tell you we had it pretty well cov­ered,” said Lawrenceville police Maj. Paul King. “If we ever had any doubts that (evi­dence) was going to be com­pro­mised in any way, we wouldn’t have done it.”

The three inmates’ role in trans­fer­ring evi­dence sur­faced in late April, dur­ing the mar­i­juana traf­fick­ing trial of Oronde Clay, 39, of Nor­cross. Dur­ing tes­ti­mony, Clay’s defense attor­ney, David Clark, quizzed Lawrenceville police offi­cer Eric Wiernik, the department’s evi­dence room man­ager, about the method of trans­fer­ring roughly eight pounds of pot his client was caught with.

Clay was even­tu­ally sen­tenced in the bench trial to serve five years, which Wiernik said dis­cred­its the notion that the evi­dence had been com­pro­mised. Still, Clark said the method used by police seemed “kind of odd.”

“It casts sus­pi­cions on the chain-of-custody,” Clark said. “There’s no evi­dence that the evi­dence in my case was tam­pered with, but the poten­tial is there.”

Dis­trict Attor­ney Danny Porter said he wasn’t aware that inmates were used in the trans­fer, and that he’d never heard of police inten­tion­ally putting evi­dence in the hands of inmates before, but he’s con­fi­dent the integrity and qual­ity of the proof remains.

“I would not clas­sify it as best prac­tices, but given the fact that (evi­dence boxes were) sealed up, it shouldn’t affect the cases,” Porter said.

Wiernik spec­i­fied that most evi­dence was sealed in bags, pre-boxed before the move and shrink-wrapped in lit­tle tow­ers of four. Larger items were indi­vid­u­ally sealed in more spa­cious boxes. The move lasted from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m., as dozens of boxes trav­eled in a con­voy of three police vehi­cles less than a mile around Gwinnett’s county seat. Four offi­cers watched the phys­i­cal labor and made sure inmates didn’t ride with the evi­dence, he said.

Inmate work­ers then unloaded the boxes in the $7.7 mil­lion headquarter’s new evi­dence room, a card-key-controlled area with cin­derblock walls and high ceil­ings, roughly eight times big­ger than its predecessor.

The move was kept hush-hush around the depart­ment to dis­cour­age spec­ta­tors, Wiernik said.

“In effect, we did move it our­selves,” he said. “We just used jail inmate per­sons for the phys­i­cal labor part of it. The jail is real spe­cific about who they let out.”

Sheriff’s Depart­ment spokes­woman Stacey Bour­bon­nais said minimum-risk inmates are loaned to sev­eral Gwin­nett cities which man­age and return them to jail once work details are com­plete. On aver­age, 27 inmates are loaned daily, she said.

On the day Lawrenceville police trans­ferred evi­dence, records show that eight inmates were loaned to the city. Nei­ther Lawrenceville police nor the Sheriff’s Depart­ment kept track of which three worked for police and sub­se­quently han­dled evi­dence boxes that day.

Records show that all eight inmates had been arrested mul­ti­ple times. Their charges at the time ranged from pro­ba­tion vio­la­tions and theft to shoplift­ing. While Wiernik said he couldn’t recall the inmates by name, he remem­bered them as hav­ing worked daily jan­i­to­r­ial jobs around the police department.

Porter said offi­cers who over­saw the trans­fer can expect to be sub­poe­naed to tes­tify, if the evi­dence is chal­lenged. He doesn’t antic­i­pate the inmate movers will be called to wit­ness stands.

Accred­i­ta­tion agen­cies main­tain high stan­dards at both state and national lev­els for evi­dence han­dling but nei­ther specif­i­cally pro­hibit inmate involve­ment. Lawrenceville police are not accred­ited in Geor­gia or by the national reg­u­la­tory body, the Com­mis­sion on Accred­i­ta­tion for Law Enforce­ment Agen­cies, or CALEA.

Frank V. Rotondo, Geor­gia Asso­ci­a­tion of Chiefs of Police exec­u­tive direc­tor, said courts aren’t likely to buy that evi­dence stan­dards were altered based on inmates han­dling sealed boxes for a brief time, though that case could be made.

“Lawrenceville has a lot to lose if they weren’t doing it cor­rectly,” Rotondo said. “Evi­dence is one of the high­est lia­bil­ity areas in today’s law enforcement.”

Craig Hart­ley, CALEA deputy direc­tor, said evi­dence han­dling accounts for a large num­ber of the agency’s standards.

“I can’t tell you that the (CALEA) strat­egy used to con­trol the prop­erty would pro­hibit the use of (inmates), because we don’t address it specif­i­cally,” Hart­ley said. “How­ever, I think there always has to be tight pro­to­col in place to ensure the integrity of those items.”

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