Lab-Tainted DNA May Incriminate Innocents

Posted by Terry Francke, General Counsel | Dec 29, 2008 | Public Records Reveal . . . | 0 |

PUBLIC RECORDS REVEAL . . . That DNA testing in criminal labs is not foolproof and may incriminiate the innocent, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Through the California Public Records Act, the (Los Angeles) Times obtained documents from five state-run and three county forensic labs reporting scores of laboratory errors or "unexpected" results over a five-year period ending in 2007. Labs must track these outcomes and keep them on file under state and federal rules.
(An expert) who reviewed the records for The Times, said that "on a regular basis, laboratory personnel make mistakes that could lead to false identifications" of suspects.
The records show, for instance, that between 2003 and 2007, the Santa Clara County district attorney's crime laboratory caught 14 instances in which evidence samples were contaminated with staff members' DNA, three in which samples were contaminated by an unknown person and six in which DNA from one case contaminated samples from another.

About The Editor

Terry Francke, General Counsel

Terry Francke has a 39-year history of helping journalists, citizens and public officials understand and use their First Amendment and open government rights. With CalAware, Francke has authored comprehensive and authoritative guidebooks to California law on access to government meetings and public records and the news gathering and publication rights of journalists. Focusing on these issues in public forum law, he supervises CalAware's legislative and litigation initiatives; conducts workshops on legal compliance; helps design public records audits; supports local sunshine ordinance drafting efforts; writes CalAware Today, a blog on current developments and proposals in the law and best practices; and answers countless queries by phone and e-mail from citizens, journalists, public officials and employees, and lawyers. Francke previously served 14 years as executive director and general counsel to the California First Amendment Coalition, after a 10-year post as legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Association. He has served as an advisory panel member to the National Center on Courts and the Media; taught journalism law at the Department of Communication at Stanford University; and served as an expert contributor to the 1994 major revisions to the Ralph M. Brown Act and the 2004 ballot proposition making open government a basic right of citizens under the California Constitution. Francke is a 1967 graduate of the University of Notre Dame and a 1979 graduate of McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific. Prior to his legal career, Francke worked as a weekly newspaper editor and in military and local government public affairs positions.

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