SBI

"Looking back, there's a lot we may have done differently and maybe should have," said Branny Vickory, the current district attorney for Lenoir County.

Maybe should have done differently? You mean like not withhold evidence and send an innocent man to life in prison? Screw you, Mr. Vickory.

cross-posted (in slightly edited form) at dKos

The State Bureau of Investigation is under fire again. Turns out two senior agency officials improperly used the state and federal criminal database, known as the Department of Criminal Information (DCI) network.

Jerry Ratley, the former assistant director who oversaw the network, used it to snoop on his ex-wife, her co-workers, her husband, the wife of an SBI agent and others, records reviewed by The News & Observer show. Wendy Brinkley, who is directly responsible for policing and maintaining the network, used it to track her stepson's case in the courts, the records show.

How serious is this? Federal and state law both state in no uncertain terms that the network is not for personal use. Police officers and sheriff's deputies caught misusing this information can be brought up on criminal charges.

Sins of omission have consequences:

Evidence was mounting that incomplete and misleading lab reports were helping send the wrong people to prison - and letting the real criminals go free to commit other crimes.

And there's good reason the audit by Swecker and former FBI manager Michael Wolf sent ripples throughout North Carolina's criminal justice system: It showed that the crime lab's failures to conduct tests or inform court officials of blood test results that might help the defendant may have involved as many as 229 cases.

Those lab techs should be held partially responsible for any crimes committed by those who dodged justice thanks to faulty lab reports. And they should have to pay some sort of restitution to the wrongly convicted.

Death penalty foes come together in Raleigh:

In addition to their pleas for a more sweeping examination of the SBI crime lab, the speakers called for an investigation into the cases of each of the 159 inmates on North Carolina's death row, further study of all evidence in pending capital cases and for a vetting of the cases of all inmates executed since the crime lab's beginning.

"The pursuit of justice is, and should be, our common thread," said Jeremy Collins, director of the N.C. Coalition for a Moratorium..."It is our hope that justice, not tainted and manipulated science, will be the guiding light of our criminal justice system."

A report released today by two former FBI agents, commissioned to review North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation laboratory in the wake of the Greg Taylor exoneration, finds that the convictions of three people executed in North Carolina were based in part on forensic reports and testimony that were, to be kind, misleading. The report is available online here.

The News & Observer's series continues:

Problems at the lab run deeper than blood. State law puts scientists at the lab on the prosecution's team, instead of assigning them as independent seekers of fact. Analysts sometimes don't run DNA or blood tests that might threaten prosecutors' theories. And they shield themselves from scrutiny, fighting against turning over records and forbidding defense experts from observing their work.

To SBI analysts, defense attorneys are often the bad guys. Training manuals and directives paint defense attorneys as tricksters who are driven to let criminals go free. "Tell the D.A. in advance of any weaknesses in the case so that the trial of the case can be planned to minimize the weaknesses' impact," says a 2007 manual used to teach analysts how to testify in court.

After reading the first two stories of the N&O's investigation of the SBI (which I summarized at dKos), I find myself thinking something I haven't thought since Jesse Helms' days--I'm ashamed to be a North Carolinian. Although there are two more parts of this story, I've seen enough to think that at some point, a federal or state judge needs to step up and place the SBI under court supervision.

Not the kind of reputation you want to build:

Marilyn Miller, a professor of forensic science at Virginia Commonwealth University, said that forensic scientists outside of North Carolina have long been concerned about examinations and testimony offered by Deaver and his protégés. But they feel powerless to do anything.

Stuart James, one of the world's foremost experts at analyzing bloodstain patterns at crime scenes, was hired by Turner's lawyers to examine the evidence before the trial. Since Turner's acquittal, James has shown the video of the SBI experiments in workshops and conferences in the United States and Europe. Every colleague deemed the work unscientific, James said.

"They thought it was a bunch of malarkey," James said. "They were aghast at it."

SBI reveals withholding full laboratory analysis in criminal cases was common practice:

North Carolina's top law enforcement agency did not always automatically provide complete crime lab test results for use in trials, the agency's director told The Associated Press on Friday, bolstering an accusation that helped exonerate a murder convict this week after 16 years in prison.

"I wasn't here in '91, but that was the practice," she said. "It was not to withhold. It was simply to give the lab reports and to await requests from either the prosecution or the defense for the bench notes," said Pendergraft, who has been SBI director since 2001.

Good Lord.