IAPE Evidence Blog

Worces­ter Telegram & Gazette Corp., telegram.com
Link to Article

Web­ster, MA

WEBSTER —  A man who allegedly left behind a cig­a­rette dur­ing a June 2010 bur­glary has been arrested after DNA from the dis­carded butt was matched to him.

Joshua Piehl, 24, of 34 Worces­ter St., Charl­ton, on a war­rant Wednes­day and charged with break­ing and enter­ing in the day­time with intent to com­mit a felony and two counts of wan­ton destruc­tion of prop­erty. He was arraigned in Dud­ley Dis­trict Court and released on per­sonal recognizance.

Police were called to the home of an elderly woman on Gore Road on June 27, 2010, after she reported hear­ing strange voices in her base­ment. Offi­cers found the home had been bro­ken into and dis­cov­ered the cig­a­rette butt, which was sent to the state police crime laboratory.

Police were recently noti­fied that the DNA matched Mr. Piehl and they got a war­rant for his arrest.

Web­ster police Detec­tive Gor­don D. Went­worth Jr. wrote in a news release that Mr. Piehl con­fessed to the break-in in Web­ster and to a sim­i­lar inci­dent in Douglas. 

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

The Berk­shire Eagle (Pitts­field, Mass­a­chu­setts)
SECTION: NEWS
BYLINE: By Andrew Amelinckx, Berk­shire Eagle Staff

Adams, MA

PITTSFIELD — A for­mer Adams police offi­cer pleaded guilty to 10 counts of child pornog­ra­phy pos­ses­sion Fri­day in Berk­shire Supe­rior Court. 

Alan C. Vigiard, 46, is sched­uled to be sen­tenced on June 22. In the mean­time, he is out on per­sonal recognizance.

Vigiard quit the force a week after he was con­fronted with the evi­dence on Oct. 29, 2009: A CD con­tain­ing images of child pornog­ra­phy using a police com­puter in the department’s evi­dence room. The images ended up in the hands of the Berk­shire Dis­trict Attorney’s office because they were on a CD of evi­dence from an unre­lated lar­ceny case.

The CD also con­tained a video show­ing a man mas­tur­bat­ing in the evi­dence room. While the man’s face wasn’t vis­i­ble, a scar on the man’s hand matched Vigiard’s. Vigiard was one of a few offi­cers with a key to the evi­dence room.

Pros­e­cu­tors asked and Judge Daniel Ford agreed to drop a charge of las­civ­i­ously pos­ing or exhibit­ing a child in a state of nudity.

Assis­tant Dis­trict Attor­ney Robert W. Kinzer III is rec­om­mend­ing Vigiard be sen­tenced to a 2 1/2– to four-year prison term, fol­lowed by five years of probation.

Vigiard’s defense attor­ney, Tim­o­thy Shugrue, is ask­ing his client be given three years of GPS-monitored house arrest and five years of probation.

Vigiard was caught after a joint inves­ti­ga­tion by the Adams Police Depart­ment and Mass­a­chu­setts State Police detec­tives assigned to the office of Berk­shire Dis­trict Attor­ney David F. Capeless.

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

The Boston Globe, EDITORIAL OPINION; Opin­ion; Pg. 15
BYLINE: Dou­glas Starr

Boston, MA

In real­ity, many foren­sic sci­ence labs are cor­rupt or incompetent

THE CONTROVERSY about whether the state’s chief med­ical exam­iner fal­si­fied his cre­den­tials puts one more crack in our national myth about crime scene inves­ti­ga­tions. That myth, cre­ated by the CSI shows that have been a sta­ple of TV for the past decade, por­tray crime labs as mod­els of ultra-modern effi­ciency, where ded­i­cated inves­ti­ga­tors use state-of-the-art (or even fic­tional) sci­ence to solve impos­si­ble cases in the course of an hour.

Over the past sev­eral years we’ve learned that the image is quite far from real­ity. The qual­ity of Amer­i­can crime scene foren­sics is wildly incon­sis­tent: many labs have poorly trained inves­ti­ga­tors, anti­quated equip­ment, and cases backed up for weeks. In some labs, inves­ti­ga­tors have pur­posely altered test results in order to get find­ings that favor the pros­e­cu­tion. Here are a few recent examples:

An ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tion in North Car­olina has revealed that agents at the State Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion lab have cor­rupted their sci­ence to suit the pros­e­cu­tion. They mis­in­ter­preted blood stain pat­terns, re-ran exper­i­ments until they got “right” results, neglected to con­duct impor­tant lab­o­ra­tory tests, and con­ducted phony blood analy­ses. The result: More than 100 wrong­ful con­vic­tions. Three peo­ple may have been wrong­fully executed.

In San Fran­cisco, a crim­i­nal­ist in the city’s crime lab has been skim­ming cocaine from the evi­dence room for years. Her evidence-tampering revealed such lax account­ing and secu­rity mea­sures that the state has inval­i­dated many con­vic­tions and has slammed the drug pros­e­cu­tion process to a halt. A local pub­lic defender described it as a “tsunami of incompetence” — so severe that the lab had to be closed and drug cases han­dled by another facil­ity. At least 750 drug-related cases have been dismissed.

Houston’s crime lab has been wracked by one scan­dal after another. In 2003 the police department’s DNA lab was found to be so error-prone that the city shut it down. It reopened, only to be closed again sev­eral years later. This year a team of out­side con­sul­tants found tech­ni­cal errors in 62 per­cent of the department’s fin­ger­print cases.

Detroit closed its crime lab in 2008 after review­ers found a “shock­ing level of incom­pe­tence.” All Detroit’s CSI work now goes to the state crime lab, which fur­ther strains the state’s already-burdened resources.

No one knows when these prob­lems began, or if they have qui­etly been with us since the estab­lish­ment of the first Amer­i­can crime labs in the 1920s. The prob­lems became vis­i­ble in the 1990s, when DNA tech­nol­ogy made it pos­si­ble to re-examine blood, sperm, and other evi­dence that had been pre­served from crime scenes.

Since then, attor­neys from the Inno­cence Project and other orga­ni­za­tions have over­turned hun­dreds of wrong­ful con­vic­tions. Last year, in the first sta­tis­ti­cal study of over­turned con­vic­tions, legal schol­ars found that nearly 70 per­cent were based on mis­takes in the crime lab or invalid tes­ti­mony by foren­sic experts.

Mean­while, the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences has reported wide­spread inad­e­qua­cies in America’s crime labs, includ­ing out­dated equip­ment, a lack of stan­dard­ized pro­ce­dures, and “stag­ger­ing” case back­logs. They also faulted the cul­ture of cer­tain crime labs, in which tech­ni­cians seemed more moti­vated to pro­vide evi­dence that would sup­port the pros­e­cu­tion rather than pro­duce a sci­en­tific finding.

To address these prob­lems, the acad­emy rec­om­mends re-inventing the nation’s foren­sic labs — not as arms of the police force but as inde­pen­dent sci­en­tific enti­ties, with ties to uni­ver­si­ties and the research com­mu­nity. Tra­di­tional foren­sic meth­ods, such as fin­ger­print­ing and hair analy­sis, would need to be reeval­u­ated for sci­en­tific accu­racy, and tech­ni­cians would need to meet national edu­ca­tional standards.

It will be a long, hard slog to get­ting this cru­cial part of our jus­tice sys­tem into shape. Mean­while, next time you watch Hor­a­tio Caine and his CSI team solve an impos­si­ble case with futur­is­tic effi­ciency, remem­ber — like much of what you see about jus­tice on tele­vi­sion, it’s more a moral­ity tale than a por­trait of reality.

Dou­glas Starr is a pro­fes­sor of sci­ence jour­nal­ism at Boston Uni­ver­sity and author of “The Killer of Lit­tle Shep­herds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Foren­sic Science.”

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