REPORT DETAILS ALLEGATIONS AGAINST POLICE DRUG LAB

In 1994, Mike Wallace and CBS' "60 Minutes" knocked on the door of the
State Police crime lab, hot on the trail of disgraced former lab section
chief Fred Zain.

Had Wallace and his team walked down the hall at the South Charleston lab,
they would have stumbled onto a different scandal - one that would remain
hidden for six years.

While the State Police reeled from revelations that Zain's handling of
blood evidence helped put innocent men in prison, members of the lab's Drug
Identification Section habitually skipped mandatory tests in cases from
throughout the state, according to a confidential report obtained by the
Gazette from an FBI probe of the section.

The FBI does not believe the drug section caused any wrongful convictions.
Instead, its report alleges that lab workers ignored the very type of
standards enacted to restore what Zain's misdeeds had shattered - faith in
West Virginia's only lab for testing evidence in criminal cases.

The 2000 FBI probe helped convict Todd Owen McDaniel, a civilian chemist in
the drug section, on federal fraud charges stemming from his shoddy testing
methods. But cutting corners at the section extended beyond McDaniel, the
report reveals.

Among the allegations:

Four section workers other than McDaniel gave answers "indicative of
deception" during lie detector tests. Though such tests are considered
unreliable, the results prompted several of these staffers to amend or
elaborate on their prior statements to FBI agents.

In 1993, as the Zain scandal exploded, section chemists decided to skip a
test for suspected marijuana, "although it was a procedural requirement,"
the report said. "It would be reflected in notes that the test was
conducted when, in fact, it was not."

Staff would ignore this testing requirement "except when interns were
present at the laboratory, when they would conduct this test."

"Tests conducted by an intern were not reflected as such in the case notes."

A required test for suspected cocaine was "conducted sporadically."

Baggies, pipes and similar paraphernalia typically seized by police often
contain residue evidence. When section staff deemed such residue too scant
to test, "They would make sure that there was not enough left by scraping
the pipe and throwing away the residue," the report said. "It would happen
with any type of evidence."

When suspected marijuana evidence included baggies containing hard-to-test
seeds, "The seeds would be crushed intentionally" and "vegetation" from
other samples would be tested in their place.

One of the other chemists tested evidence from different cases at the same
time and in the same container.

The State Police's chief legal counsel stressed Friday that while other lab
staff have been disciplined following the FBI probe, only McDaniel was
found to have committed actual crimes.

Kelly Ambrose declined to detail the disciplinary actions. But she pointed
out that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration retested all of the
evidence handled by the section, and reached identical results.

"Our exoneration was that nobody lied. No one was hiding drugs, no one was
using drugs, no one said the evidence was something that it was not,"
Ambrose said. "There were no test results that were misconstrued or
fabricated."

The State Police have revamped the section's testing, security and evidence
storage policies, thanks in part to the FBI's findings, Ambrose said. The
lab has even eliminated some of the testing that McDaniel and others said
they skipped.

"Our internal policies and procedures are less burdensome but still
acceptable for accreditation purposes," she said. "The tests that we had
required were actually more stringent that those of the group that
accredits the lab."

But the State Police recognize that it was not McDaniel's job, or anyone
else's in the section, to decree such changes on their own.

"If our policy and procedures requires it, we're supposed to do it, that's
the bottom line," she said.

Workers sought release valve for case backlog, FBI told

Along with the occasional intern, McDaniel and one other civilian chemist
worked with three troopers in the Drug Identification Section. The section
conducted a variety of tests on all sorts of evidence from nearly every
state and federal drug case in West Virginia.

The section handles thousands of cases each year. McDaniel later told the
FBI that the caseload grew too fast, and he and others developed large
backlogs.

The section, one of seven at the State Police Forensic Laboratory, was
shaken along with the others in 1993 by the Zain scandal. The state Supreme
Court concluded that Zain's work at the lab was so riddled with errors and
outright fraud, none of it could be trusted.

Reversed convictions, multimillion-dollar lawsuits and national headlines
followed. To salvage its image and to prevent a repeat of such misconduct,
the State Police approached the American Society of Crime Laboratory
Directors for help.

ASCLD, a nationwide network of forensic scientists, helped develop testing
standards and procedures for every section of the South Charleston lab.
With a new policy in place, ASCLD accredited the lab in September 1994.

But McDaniel and others wanted a release valve for the case backlog, the
FBI was told. They found one by cutting corners.

McDaniel has since admitted that he stopped testing suspected marijuana
with a process called Thin Layer Chromatography. McDaniel found the
time-consuming, chemical reaction test "unnecessary and cumbersome."

McDaniel was not alone. By 1999, others in the section were pretending to
conduct the TLC test as well. McDaniel and these co-workers skipped other
tests for similar reasons, despite the policy manual.

The FBI interviewed current and former lab section workers for its 2000
probe. Four workers consented to polygraph tests. Follow-up interviews
after those tests helped detail skirted section policy:

Then-section chief and Trooper J.L. Hudson "disclosed that in years past
she would sometimes not conduct the exact number of preliminary tests as
required by WVSP protocols, but record results in her working notes as if
she had," her interview report said.

Civilian chemist Mills Dillard admitted to putting the wrong dates on some
reports "to make himself appear more productive."

Chemist T.G. Montgomery told the FBI that lab notes "did not reflect when a
test was conducted by an intern. ... If called upon to testify, Montgomery
would testify as if he had conducted the test."

All of the section workers stressed that they never falsely reported
nondrugs as drugs. Hudson told the FBI "she was confident that retesting
would not yield any results different than those which she reported."
Dillard said "he always conducted the most specific tests which are more
accurate."

Only McDaniel was charged in the lab probe, as he had used the U.S. mail to
send his reports. To date, no defendants have had their convictions or
sentences overturned because of the skipped tests and sloppy work habits at
the Drug Identification Section.

Convicted chemist caught by post-Zain peer review

State Police brass believe the policies enacted in the wake of the Zain
debacle helped catch McDaniel and limited any damage he wrought.

The policy calls for "peer review" of each chemist's work. Trooper T.G.
White was performing such a review of McDaniel's work in September 2000
when he alerted their superiors.

White reviewed infrared spectrometer tests McDaniel had conducted on
suspected cocaine. He noticed that the dates on the graphs generated during
the tests did not match up with dates on the accompanying reports.

"White identified five reports which he noted had various inaccuracies,
including discrepancies between dates," his FBI interview report said.
"Some notes contained within the folders had no dates on them."

White realized that at least one graph was dated from a time when McDaniel
was on vacation. "White overlaid three spectrographs from the infrared
spectrometer in three separate reports and determined that they were identical.

Such results are "physically impossible," White said. McDaniel has since
admitted that he skipped that test, too. He stressed that other required
tests ensured accurate readings of the evidence.

McDaniel was suspended and the lab section shut down in September 2000
while the DEA double-checked its test results. Drug cases in both state and
federal court throughout West Virginia temporarily ground to a halt.

McDaniel has been on probation since last May, after spending three months
in a halfway house.

The federal judge who sentenced McDaniel scolded him, but also said he
earned a relatively light punishment because of the "substantial
assistance" he provided prosecutors. That assistance included the lengthy
interviews the FBI included in its confidential report.

Dillard also resigned during the FBI probe. "He cooperated fully with the
government, voluntarily gave all the information he could give and has
since moved on," his lawyer, Brian Glasser of Charleston, said Friday.

The section's remaining staff members were transferred to other areas,
Ambrose said. They and the former section workers interviewed by the FBI
either did not respond to messages seeking comment or could not be reached.