MORE NEGLIGENT FORENSIC SCIENCE

DNA evidence could help tie four men to the 2005 killing of a 21-year-old rap music producer who was dragged from his bed and shot in the head at his Arden area home. Or not.

The evidence sample from the case is one of hundreds analyzed by a former criminalist whose entire work is now under scrutiny after supervisors discovered he didn't follow procedure in a rape case. The supervisors' conclusions are in a memorandum from the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office. "I'm sure there's going to be cases where this is going to be litigated," said Jeff Rose, an assistant district attorney.

The District Attorney's Office manages the county's crime lab where the criminalist, Mark Eastman, worked for five years until he resigned shortly after supervisors discovered problems with his lab work in May. Eastman couldn't be reached for comment.

The scope of the problem -- whether a criminal has gone undetected, whether someone was mistakenly convicted, whether there will be any spare evidence in cases that should be reanalyzed -- is yet to be fully understood, but Rose believes that the damage is minimal and largely limited to the rape case. In that case, a substandard DNA profile was created from a sample off of the rape victim's skin and was entered into a data bank in search of a matching profile, the memorandum says. A match was found, but no arrest was made and the profile has been removed from the data bank.

"I am confident that at the end of the day that justice will not suffer," Rose said. The 354 cases Eastman directly worked on have been reviewed, Rose said. On the rape case, a supervisor discovered that the DNA profile was entered into the data bank, but the sample's integrity didn't meet the lab's minimum standards, the DA's memorandum says. The supervisor also discovered that on 44 "cold" cases -- unsolved cases reopened because of DNA evidence -- Eastman failed to recheck his results, as required, before they were entered into a data bank to search for a matching profile, Rose said. The second reads have now been completed by the county crime lab and nothing wrong was discovered, he said. "There's no reason to believe there was an improper, erroneous profile entered into the database," Rose said.

As a safeguard, he said, the lab will reanalyze any of Eastman's profiles that produce a match, which Rose estimates are fewer than a dozen -- so far -- and will take a week or two for every redo, he said. "This isn't an ideal situation. Hopefully, this will trickle in as we get hits," said Rose.

Eastman worked on the DNA evidence found during the investigation into the May 2005 shooting death of Donald Willis, the music producer, said Lori Teichert, an attorney on a team representing four defendants in the case. Teichert declined to specify the nature of the DNA evidence because a jury has yet to be selected, but she said the DNA has been reanalyzed and results are due later this month. It was the right thing to do because there's no real proof how many times procedures were compromised, she said. "If you're not going to follow protocols, why have them?" she said. "How can I depend on anything else?"

Rose said the District Attorney's Office has compiled a database of Eastman's cases that has been turned over to defense attorneys. On evidence samples that are redone, an issue could arise if the original sample was so spare that nothing is left for a second analysis, Rose said. "There's going to be that time," he said. But a host of backup material, including electronic data on each sample, could suffice, he said. Because the office believes the problem is an isolated one, there are no plans for an outside, independent review, Rose said.

Defense attorneys say the power that DNA evidence holds with a jury requires vigilance in how it's processed. "The average man or woman believes the man or woman in the white coat," said David Lynch, a Sacramento County public defender who specializes in DNA cases.

The problematic profile in the rape case did match someone and that alone was a significant danger, Lynch said. "It's like the lottery," he said. "It's not going to happen to me, but it's going to happen to someone." In some cases, defendants will agree to a plea bargain when they run up against DNA evidence, he said.

Problems with crime labs surface almost weekly nationwide, said Stephen Saloom, policy director of the Innocence Project. The New York legal clinic is renowned for winning exonerations using DNA. "Given the amount of forensic analysis done, it's not necessarily surprising," Saloom said. Especially when lab employees are overworked and pressured by deadlines, he said. "It may take a lot of work to determine this, but that only underscores the importance of staffing and training at crime labs." In Los Angeles County, six public defenders specialize in DNA cases out of a staff of 700 lawyers.

When problems surfaced with DNA testing at a private lab in Maryland that the county used, public defenders went to court over two cases seeking information on what went wrong, said Jennifer Friedman, one of the six public defenders. "It takes a lot of effort to determine if this is an anomaly, whether it just happened one time or whether this person is doing poor work," Friedman said. "But it can absolutely be done and it should be done."

One of the most notorious cases of crime-lab dysfunction drew in state investigators, grand jury probes and resulted in at least one gubernatorial pardon in Texas. Widespread problems at the Houston Police Department's lab surfaced in 2002, which jeopardized relying on DNA evidence, said Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney for Harris County, which includes Houston. After 400 DNA cases were reviewed, including death-row cases, the city of Houston had to foot the bill for an independent laboratory to redo testing, Rosenthal said. Even though a state investigation revealed inadequate training, staffing and funding, the new results largely matched the originals, Rosenthal said. In one case, though, a man convicted of rape who had been imprisoned for several years was exonerated, he said.

Once allegations at a lab start, they don't stop, Rosenthal said. "There will be be allegations that the whole lab is tainted. They will go to ballistics; they will go to fingerprints," he said. At one point, the Texas Legislature even considered removing crime labs from law enforcement management, Rosenthal said. The city hired consultants to correct problems at the lab, which reopened under new policies. "It's going to take awhile," Rosenthal said, "to gain the confidence of the community."

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