DETROIT -- Criminal justice officials are struggling to calculate the impact of an audit released Thursday that exposed rampant problems in the Detroit Police firearms laboratory and resulted in the shutdown of the department's entire crime lab.

The Michigan State Police audit of the city's gun lab, which began in June after firearms evidence was found to be tainted, revealed a systemic problem that calls into question all forensic evidence handled in the city's police laboratory over the past several years, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said.

"This opens a huge can of worms," Worthy said. "If the quality system is failing in one forensic discipline, it is highly likely to be an indicator of a severe problem that affects other forensic disciplines as well."

Of the 200 cases reviewed during the audit, 10 percent were found to have errors, Worthy said.

University of Michigan law professor David A. Moran, who saw the audit, said a "decent lab" would have an error rate almost 10 times less than what auditors found in Detroit.

"When you're dealing with human beings, you can expect some errors," Moran said. "But a decent lab would have an error rate of under one percent. A 10 percent rate is absolutely shocking."

The problems mean there potentially could be people imprisoned for crimes they did not commit -- and there also could be dangerous criminals on the loose, Worthy said. "We have no idea how many criminals have gone uncharged as a result" of the problems in the crime lab, she said.

The audit opens the door for thousands of lawsuits and appeals, said Detroit attorney Marvin Barnett.

Detroit Police Chief James Barren said Thursday he removed Deputy Chief Joyce Motley as head of the crime lab. Motley retired Thursday.

Barren said the 33 police officers who work in the lab will be re-assigned, and he will consider what to do with the lab's 35 civilian employees. The lab has a $7.8 million annual budget.

Barren said he and Detroit Mayor Kenneth Cockrel Jr. decided to shut down the department's entire crime lab, which also handles DNA and blood analysis, fingerprinting and drug evidence, after seeing the audit's results. The Michigan State Police will take over all forensic examinations -- which will affect cases throughout the state because there already is a significant backlog.

Lab analyzed DNA

"This is an atomic bomb," Barnett said. "This is the prosecution themselves acknowledging a wide range of inconsistencies. I can't even begin to imagine how huge this is. When you think of how many people will try to appeal their convictions and the possible lawsuits -- it boggles the mind."

Prosecutors may be forced to re-examine thousands of cases where forensic evidence was introduced into trial over the past several years, said Moran, who called the audit "devastating in every conceivable way."

"It clearly is going to have a huge impact on a lot of cases," Moran said. "You have thousands of people who have been convicted, at least in part, on testimony or results that came from the firearms lab. All of those thousands of people should have their cases re-examined."

Barnett brought the gun lab's problems to light in April, after an independent investigator he hired determined that police firearm examiners were wrong in concluding 42 fired shell casings collected at a crime scene came from a single weapon.

The defense expert concluded they came from at least two guns -- 24 from one gun, 17 from another weapon and one casing that could not be identified.

An independent examiner retained by Worthy confirmed the defense expert's finding. Former Detroit Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings then shut down the firearms laboratory and asked for the State Police audit.

State labs have backlog

The seven State Police labs in Michigan have a 120-day backlog of more than 1,200 firearms cases, and police throughout the state routinely wait up to nine months for DNA analysis.

"This will have an adverse impact on our backlogs in the forensic lab system across the state," said Capt. Michael Thomas, head of the State Police Forensics Division. "It's going to affect every department."

Worthy said she will immediately begin re-examining cases that resulted in convictions or acquittals where firearms evidence, or testimony of firearms examiners, was introduced in court, but she said she did not know how far back she would go.

"We only found out about this audit (Wednesday)," Worthy said. "We know we have to review all our firearms cases; there's no question about that. I also made the decision that we would have to review all of our other evidentiary cases where the Detroit Police Department has done work out of that lab."

Worthy said she didn't know how much such an undertaking would cost, although she acknowledged, "it's going to cost quite a bit of money."

Thomas said Gov. Jennifer Granholm is seeking additional funding to help pay for the increased workload for the State Police.

The audit, which was released Thursday, is preliminary. A full audit is expected to be released in mid-October, Cockrel said.

"But it clearly suggests this may only be the tip of the iceberg," Cockrel said.

Cockrel said a group made up of representatives from his office and the prosecutor's office, Barren and Michigan State Police will immediately begin looking into the scope of the problem.

Moran said the most damning finding in the audit was the examinations of 33 cases that had already been tried -- three of which showed "class one inconsistencies."

" 'Class one inconsistencies' is just a nice euphemism for a false positive, which means someone actually came into court and said, 'This bullet matches this gun,' when it wasn't true," Moran said.

"Those cases are highly likely to be wrongful convictions.

"If three out of 33 have that result, it's a real problem," Moran said. "God knows how many more of these cases are out there."

detnews.com

Bookmark with: