IAPE Evidence Blog

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The Repub­lic, therepublic.com
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Cal­casieu Parish, LA

LAKE CHARLES, La. — State Judge Wil­ford Carter has ordered a for­mer Cal­casieu Parish sheriff’s deputy to pay resti­tu­tion after he pleaded guilty to felony theft, malfea­sance and drug possession.

The Amer­i­can Press reports (http://bit.ly/qjfACs ) Troy Tay­lor, 44, was arrested in May 2008 after he was accused of steal­ing money and other items from the sheriff’s office evi­dence room. Tay­lor was an evi­dence custodian.

Inves­ti­ga­tors who searched Taylor’s home found items from the evi­dence room there, includ­ing a lap­top com­puter, fish­ing poles and iPods, author­i­ties said.

Tay­lor was also charged with sev­eral counts of drug pos­ses­sion after detec­tives report­edly found more than 3,000 pills — includ­ing hydrocodone, alpra­zo­lam, Val­ium and Ecstasy — in a safe in his office.

After his first arrest, Tay­lor posted $10,000 bond. He was arrested again in July 2008, when the drug charges were assigned.

An inves­tiga­tive audit revealed that $98,528 was miss­ing, author­i­ties said.

Carter sen­tenced Tay­lor Tues­day to five years in prison for each charge, with the terms to run at the same time. Carter sus­pended the sen­tence and ordered Tay­lor to pay $30,000 in restitution.

Pros­e­cu­tor Brent Hawkins said the defen­dant admit­ted to tak­ing about $30,000, much less than the audit showed was miss­ing. Hawkins asked to reserve the right to increase that amount if evi­dence sur­faces to show Tay­lor stole more money.

Hawkins set a resti­tu­tion hear­ing for Jan. 18. At the hear­ing, he and Taylor’s defense attor­ney, John LaVergne, can present evi­dence as to which amount they each believe Tay­lor owes.

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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

New Orleans Net LLC, nola.com
BYLINE: John Simer­man, The Times-Picayune 

Orleans Parish, LA

Link to Arti­cle
The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. Items belong­ing to Michael A. Litchkoff that were taken in a 1962 rob­bery are among the items in the inven­tory. Litchkoff, a for­mer United States Coast Guards­man, born in 1908, was never located to have the items returned. An inter­net seach shows he died on Sep­tem­ber 8, 1968 and is buried in plot U O 1960 in the Willamette National Ceme­tery In Port­land, Ore. It is sup­posed he was vis­it­ing New Orleans when the crime occurred. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE 

The plas­tic bag sat there in the base­ment of the Orleans Parish crim­i­nal cour­t­house, coated in a moldy film that hides what’s inside and where it might belong. They’ll get around to open­ing it, joked Rob­bie Keen, “when­ever we get brave enough.”

The rank con­tents have stayed packed in plas­tic since the ini­tial cleanup fol­low­ing Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, when flood­wa­ters filled the crim­i­nal cour­t­house base­ment and turned an already-primitive evi­dence stor­age oper­a­tion into a cesspool of water­logged evidence.

Float­ing vials of bod­ily fluid, latent fin­ger­prints, drugs, sex toys, pros­thetic legs and stacks of guns, knives, metal bats and crow­bars went scattered.

In some cases, pros­e­cu­tors in crim­i­nal cases have sim­ply gone with­out, assum­ing the evi­dence was lost or destroyed.

But over nearly two years, Keen and her team of five full-time work­ers have steadily waded through 18,000 pieces of evi­dence. They have sorted, repack­aged, shelved and bar-coded them in a labo­ri­ous bid to bring mod­ern, com­put­er­ized sense to the evi­dence — and pos­si­bly exon­er­ate inno­cent con­victs, or under­score their guilt, in the process.

Under a $1.4 mil­lion grant from the National Insti­tute of Jus­tice, the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project has cat­a­loged key items in rape, mur­der and armed rob­bery cases from before the storm — stuff that by state law must be retained forever.

Some of the evi­dence they’ve sorted dates back to 1958, said Keen, an archae­ol­o­gist work­ing for the New Orleans Police and Jus­tice Foundation.

“This is like the biggest dig,” said Keen. “We had teeth yes­ter­day, den­tures … The blood and stuff, it’s amaz­ing how long it lasts. We found blood into the ‘70s and it was still liquid.”

The work is not done. Hun­dreds of orphaned pieces of evi­dence wait to be opened and pegged to crim­i­nal cases, remain­ing for now in a steamy ware­house whose loca­tion is kept secret.

But the evi­dence rooms at the crim­i­nal cour­t­house at Tulane and Broad Streets — in the base­ment and the attic — now are clean, tidy and rel­a­tively free of the ver­min that would feast off con­fis­cated drugs, Keen said.

Sev­eral boxes of mar­i­juana and other nar­cotics will be sent to a steel plant in an undis­closed loca­tion — a purg­ing process that is also a key part of the project.

At least 25 per­cent of the evi­dence in var­i­ous rooms of the crim­i­nal cour­t­house has been tossed, along with 75 per­cent of the evi­dence at the ware­house, Keen said.

Some items — tires, fish­ing rods, not drugs — can go on the mar­ket. Clerk of Crim­i­nal Court Arthur Mor­rell said he plans to sell some of the old evi­dence, pos­si­bly through an online auction.

“We got so much stuff. We’re going to have to. It would be crim­i­nal to destroy some stuff and not bring money to our office,” Mor­rell said dur­ing a recent tour of the evi­dence rooms with Crim­i­nal Dis­trict Judge Lau­rie White, who over­sees the grant.

The con­di­tions now a far cry from what they were when the cleanup first started in early 2010, Keen said.

“We had an extreme rodent prob­lem. The rats would eat the pot and use the roaches for water,” Keen said, describ­ing the mess. “We had dead bod­ies of rats hang­ing out of things.”

The project has mod­est aims: To bring evi­dence stor­age in Orleans Parish into the mod­ern era, aided by a com­put­er­ized inven­tory sys­tem known as “The Beast,” which replaced a paper-and-Magic Marker sys­tem that endured for decades.

Before the scan­ning sys­tem, if cour­t­house staffers mis­placed a piece of evi­dence on a shelf, there would be no ready way to track it down. Now, The Beast knows where it sits.

“So far, since Kat­rina, we haven’t lost any cases,” insisted Donna Thomp­son, assis­tant super­vi­sor in the base­ment prop­erty room where court staff tracks the evi­dence and signs it out to prosecutors.

“In the future, if a case gets retried, there’s going to be no ques­tion in their minds when they ask for the evi­dence,” said Emily Maw, direc­tor of the Inno­cence Project New Orleans, a par­tic­i­pant in the project.

“They’re going to know the answer they get is absolutely accurate.”

One recent crim­i­nal case high­lighted the prob­lem. In an aggra­vated rape trial, pros­e­cu­tors in 2006 thought that a fetus that was cen­tral to the case was lost in the Kat­rina flood­wa­ters. The jury hung.

Then, last year, the fetus was dis­cov­ered on the day of trial with a jury picked, hav­ing appar­ently been over­looked. The judge ordered a mis­trial. Finally, this month, pros­e­cu­tors used the fetus to help con­vict 58-year-old Samuel Williams.

Now, behind a locked chain in a room where defen­dants once came in for line­ups, boxes line up neatly on shelves, with bar-coded stick­ers. Fin­ger­prints, crime scene pho­tos and rape-kit evi­dence rest inside. On another shelf, neatly stacked plas­tic tubes hold knives of var­i­ous shapes and sizes — weapons once, now evidence.

A plas­tic tub near the door con­tains ham­mers, golf clubs, shafts, tire irons, saws, claws, all tagged for tracking.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Inno­cence Project, the DA’s office and the Police and Jus­tice Foun­da­tion meet every other week to go over cases where redis­cov­ered bio­log­i­cal evi­dence might prove fruit­ful to either con­firm a con­vic­tion or open the door to an exoneration.

So far, evi­dence has gone to the lab for test­ing in nine cases. Four remain pend­ing. Three test results sup­ported the con­vic­tions. Two were inconclusive.

Regard­less, it’s a step for­ward, Maw said,

Since a 2001 state law granted state fund­ing for indi­gent con­victs to seek post-conviction DNA test­ing in some cases, just three Orleans Parish pris­on­ers had sought the test­ing until the project got under­way. Now a dozen have.

One main rea­son: No one quite knew where bio­log­i­cal evi­dence sat.

“We said we’d love to do post-conviction DNA test­ing in Orleans Parish, but we can’t because we’re never going to find the evi­dence,” said Maw. “It didn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean it wasn’t there. The sys­tem had been so chaotic for so many years.”

John Simer­man can be reached at jsimerman@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3330.

Work­ers Darn­nell Gauntt, left, and Angela Anthony unpack cloth­ing items from a mur­der. The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
 

The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. A worker repacks items from a mur­der. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
 

The Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. Worker Dar­nell Gauntt unpacks a shoe from a mur­der case. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Stacks of evi­dence line shelves wait­ing to be sorted as the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
 

Project Direc­tor Rob­bie Keen explains the pro­ce­dures of how the Orleans Parish Post-Conviction DNA/Evidence Project is inven­to­ry­ing and orga­niz­ing crim­i­nal evi­dence at the Orleans Parish Cour­t­house on Tues­day, August 23, 2011. Some of the evi­dence bags are still unopened since Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina. ELIOT KAMENITZ / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE 

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

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The Repub­lic, therepublic.com

Vin­ton, LA

LAKE CHARLES, La. — The sen­tenc­ing of a for­mer Vin­ton assis­tant police chief who pleaded guilty to malfea­sance in Novem­ber has been moved to October.

Accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Press, 36-year-old Chad Porter­field was arrested in Decem­ber 2008 for steal­ing over $150,000 from the Vin­ton Police Department.

Audi­tors said the miss­ing cash came from the department’s evi­dence room and traf­fic stop funds.

Porterfield’s sen­tenc­ing is set for Oct. 21.

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