correction
An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a sentence as a direct quotation in the report. The sentence was a summary of its findings. The article has been corrected.
A long-anticipated report on the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences (DFS) found systematic failures throughout the agency, and in response, the city government has vowed to convene a committee of stakeholders to launch post-conviction reviews dating to the crime lab’s inception in 2012.
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Leadership "did not establish the required levels of oversight and accountability for forensic operations to maintain standards and expected performance,” according to the report completed by Virginia-based consulting firm SNA International on Dec. 9 and released by the city Monday evening.
The enormous undertaking will include cases involving the firearms examination unit and the latent fingerprint unit. Chris Geldart, deputy mayor for public safety and justice, said he hopes to meet with representatives from the Public Defender Service, the U.S. attorney’s office and the attorney general’s office, among others, within 10 days.
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“Do I feel a sense of responsibility? Yes, absolutely. The District owns this responsibility,” Geldart said.
The city hired SNA to complete an exhaustive assessment of the crime lab’s operations after it lost its accreditation in May and halted its work analyzing evidence. The firm conducted 49 interviews and anonymously surveyed more than 50 people.
The 157-page report detailed specific deficiencies in the crime lab’s units, as well as sweeping cultural and personnel failures throughout the department. It concluded that there were not appropriate procedures in place to find errors and learn from mistakes when they were discovered. And it chronicled outdated or invalid procedures in the digital evidence unit.
D.C. agencies to launch post-conviction reviews in light of crisis at Department of Forensic Sciences
The report also concluded that the agency lacked adequate training and that many former police officers were “grandfathered” into the agency without “formally vetting their prior training, competency, or proficiency.” SNA also found that forensic casework examiners had “varying degrees of knowledge, skills, and abilities to evaluate data, draw conclusions, and testify in court.”
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SNA included a list of recommendations for the D.C. government and DFS leadership.
At the same time it published the report, the city released an order signed by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) convening an ad hoc committee to identify “an independent project executive to manage the implementation of the SNA report recommendations.”
Geldart said the report gave him hope that the lab’s hard-science units, such as chemistry and DNA, will be ready for reaccreditation as early as March. Other parts of the lab, such as the firearms and fingerprint units, however, may take much longer to return — if they ever will.
“We are going to have to do some work in there to determine if we even want to bring those back as things that we do inside our lab, or if we outsource those to reputable firms that are doing it now,” Geldart said.
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Since the lab lost its accreditation, the city has outsourced its crime scene and evidence analysis to federal and private labs. Anthony Crispino, the department’s interim director, has made significant cuts to his firearms examination unit, saying that it would take “at least a year” to address deeply rooted deficiencies and rebuild that team.
The crime lab was once a symbol of pride for the District, launching in 2012 as a cutting-edge facility “with the goal of making forensic science transparent, science-driven and free from prosecutorial or law enforcement influence or politics,” Bowser wrote in a letter at the time.
Nearly a decade later, the lab is embroiled in allegations of wrongdoing, and the city is functionally without a forensics arm. Over the years, the crime lab has come under fire for errors interpreting DNA and firearm analyses and questions about oversight. The agency has twice lost its accreditation and twice had its director step down after problems were revealed.
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Meanwhile, prosecutors and defense attorneys have openly worried that previous mistakes at DFS could have led to wrongful convictions.
At a public oversight roundtable in October, representatives from the D.C. Office of the Attorney General, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and the Public Defender’s Office in D.C. each committed to launching sweeping post-conviction reviews but said they needed to see the SNA report to structure their efforts.
Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) has been especially vocal about the urgency of the report’s release, which the city said it received last week but needed time to review. Racine wrote a letter to Geldart on Wednesday demanding the report, which Crispino had vowed to make public, and threatening legal action.
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“Please immediately provide the report to OAG, or we will invoke legal processes to obtain it,” Racine wrote in the letter, later stressing that he had “constitutional and ethical obligations” to review it.
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Geldart fired back in a letter to Racine on Friday, writing, “I must say that it seems aimed more at making a public point than advancing our common goal of restoring the viability of DFS operations and focusing on the critical work we do to further public safety in the District.”
The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment Monday night. The Public Defender Service declined to comment until it had time to review the report. Representatives from the attorney general’s office could not immediately be reached.