Inside the District of Columbia Department of Forensic Sciences crime lab. Credit: DC.gov
Seven years after ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) forced the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences to suspend DNA casework due to “inadequate practices,” and one year after the board revoked the lab’s accreditation, there is finally movement on the future of the once-heralded lab.
Late last week, nine D.C. Councilmembers introduced legislation to completely overhaul the Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS), which has been unaccredited and unable to analyze evidence since April 2, 2021.
“It’s hard to overstate the harm that the collapse of the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences has caused to the District’s criminal justice system,” said Councilmember Charles Allen, chair of the Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety. “The ripple effects are massive and will take years to fix.”
The $220 million facility was built in 2012 to much ado, including praise that it would help quickly process evidence all around D.C. But by early 2015, two audits found that the lab’s DNA procedures were inadequate, jeopardizing nearly 200 cases. At the time, D.C. district prosecutors within the U.S. attorney’s office alerted city officials to what they described as numerous errors with DNA analysis performed at the lab. After an almost complete personnel overhaul, a new director said the lab was meeting industry standards again by 2018.
But that didn’t last long, as an audit ordered by the Justice Department in October 2019 revealed “no confidence in the analytical results of the Firearms Examination Unit.” The firearms controversy was tied to two homicides and subsequent re-examination of evidence by an expert. The audit said DFS management failed to properly address the analyzer’s conflicting results and concerns, and “misrepresented the various activities undertaken and analytical conclusions reached to their clients and stakeholders.”
This new legislation from Allen and colleagues directly addresses the failures identified at DFS over the years, including renewed transparency and new management. Much of the legislation hails from recommendations from SNA International, who the District contracted in May 2021 to perform a review of the lab’s operations. The bill incorporates most of SNA’s recommendations, as well as additional reforms based on a series of oversight hearings conducted by the Committee since the accreditation loss.
Overhauling processes
The first three (of six) components of the bill are the most transformative, especially the first one—turning DFS into an independent agency and redesignating it as the Forensic Sciences and Public Health Laboratory.
The councilmembers say this will “make the lab more receptive to the concerns brought forth by all entities in the District’s criminal justice system [and] less susceptible to political pressures.” Currently, DFS is a subordinate agency within the executive branch.
The legislation also proposes a reimaging of the Scientific Advisory Board. It would not only add two additional seats, but it would also change the qualifications for members. The board would be renamed the Science Advisory and Review Board (SARB), and the qualifications would require more technical and quality assurance experience, in contrast to the more academic requirements currently in place.
The SARB would then become solely responsible for the process for addressing and responding to complaints or allegations. In a solution that seems directly related to the firearms controversy, the new legislation would completely cut the laboratory off from the review process, making personnel and leadership “unable to dictate or influence the outcome of a complaint.”
“[The SARB would] have access to all laboratory papers, books, and records, and could order any corrective actions be implemented by the Director or Chief Forensic Sciences Officer. All correspondence and reports issued by the SARB would now be public documents,” the councilmembers explain in a press release.
Leadership changes
While the new powers the SARB has will give it an important role in ensuring transparency, the legislation takes it a step further by proposing a publicly accessible database on the lab’s website where it must disclose all quality assurance documents.
Personnel-wise, the bill proposes two important changes. On the recommendation of the SNA, the bill changes the qualifications of the director from scientific acumen to management experience. It also changes the director’s term from four to six years to “make the position less susceptible to political influences and transition.”
On another recommendation from SNA, the bill establishes an entirely new position—Chief Forensic Sciences Officer. This person with a scientific and technical background would oversee all forensic disciplines within the lab. The position is council-confirmed.
“What I am proposing makes significant changes to the structure and operations of the Department to restore trust in its work and get it back on track, as well as completely reforming how complaints and allegations of misconduct or testing errors get addressed,” said Allen. “We can never lose sight of the end goal of an independent and transparent forensic lab that evaluates evidence fairly and ensures defendants and victims benefit from unbiased science.”