Edgar Koch, who had been the city lab's director for the past decade, was fired Tuesday because of the DNA contamination and other "operational issues," said police spokesman Sterling Clifford...
The problem in Baltimore came to light when a new DNA supervisor in the lab, Rana Santos, began entering employee DNA samples into a database and comparing them against "unknown" genetic profiles found in evidence from crime scenes.
Santos' work has revealed about a dozen instances out of 2,500 in which a previously unknown genetic profile turned out to be that of a lab employee, Clifford said. The analysis is continuing, he said, with more employees' DNA being entered into the database and more unknown samples being re-examined.
Although Clifford has tried to downplay the seriousness of the situation, Baltimore's crime lab is the biggest and busiest in the state, and questions about possibly contaminated evidence have led to overturned convictions in other cities across the country. This is also not the first time the Baltimore lab has been called into question.
Three years ago, (chief of the forensics division at the state public defender's office Patrick) Kent's forensics division launched a campaign against the crime lab's methods of analyzing gunshot residue, tiny particles left behind when a gun is fired. Police practices and disorganization at the lab led to contamination and unreliable gunshot residue test results, Kent said. He said his office is still sifting through years of cases to check for potentially false gunshot residue tests.
Although insufficient funding does not seem to be a contributing factor in the contamination, the potential damage to hundreds of ongoing cases could be disastrous for Baltimore police and public defenders. The fact that similar problems have occurred in other cities across the country suggests the need for stringent national guidelines to be put in place, in order to ensure no conviction is jeopardized by sloppy workplace standards again.
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