STATE OF INJUSTICE

Crime Lab Investigation Reveals Indifference To Right And Wrong
Throughout The Criminal Justice System

A VISITOR to the Houston Police Department's crime lab will tour
rooms full of illegal drugs stacked floor to ceiling. At one point
the assembled bales of marijuana, packages of cocaine and heroin, and
plastic bottles of soda and codeine (a heady outlaw cocktail for
which Houston is known) weighed 28 tons. Testing and identifying
these substances accounts for three-fourths of the crime lab's work.
If defense counsel neglected to have the evidence independently
verified, a mistaken identification could send an innocent person to
prison. The chance of error would be high even if all the lab's drug
testers were skilled and conscientious. Unfortunately, that has not
been the case. A special master brought in to investigate the crime
lab's scandalous shortcomings found that in several instances drug
test results were invalid and perhaps fraudulent. Two analysts were
accused of faking the results. Because the people running the Police
Department cared so little for justice, the employees were allowed to stay.

The suspected instances of "dry-labbing" (falsely making the test
results match the charges against a defendant) join a list of botched
DNA and ballistics analyses, failed serology proficiency tests and
generally unreliable and poor quality work performed by the lab. The
lab was chronically underfunded. Analysts received little or no
scientific training. Water leaking through the roof and invading rats
were allowed to contaminate evidence.

Flawed lab work sent at least two innocent people to prison. The
Police Department's failure to disclose and correct the lab's shoddy
standards deprived countless more defendants of a fair trial as
juries were led to believe that the crime lab handled evidence and
reached conclusions according to the discipline's highest standards.

This shocking state of affairs could not have endured for at least 15
years without the willful ignorance, negligence and wrongdoing of
officials throughout Harris County's justice system. Mayors and
police chiefs budgeted too little for the crime lab; Police
Department supervisors ignored analytical errors and tolerated
cheating. Crime lab employees reached false conclusions,
misinterpreted forensic evidence and misled juries about their
knowledge and skills.

In the Harris County district attorney's office, some prosecutors
knew about cheating on crime lab tests but did not inform their
colleagues or the defense bar, as required by law. When criminal
violations by lab personnel were alleged, prosecutors declined to
seek indictments, deciding instead to leave bad enough alone.

The courts also bear blame. Some trial judges prevented defense
lawyers from impeaching the quality of lab tests and truth of
analysts' testimony. Appellate courts in come cases refused to
correct blatant injustice by ordering new trials or freeing
defendants based on new evidence of innocence.

Absent, amid the discovery of repeated and extensive miscarriages of
justice, is a sense of public outrage and shame that our justice
system could be so permissive of wrong and so indifferent to right.
Unless Houstonians demand justice from those charged with carrying it
out, more innocent defendants will be punished while the guilty walk free.

This is the first of several editorials concerning flaws in the
criminal justice system in Texas and Harris County.