The Public Defender’s Office said attorneys will start an investigation into contaminated evidence at the Baltimore Police Department’s crime lab, after the city police commissioner fired its director.
Patrick Kent, the chief attorney for the Forensics Division of the Public Defender’s Office, said his agency planned to “conduct our own, independent review” after meeting with police and prosecutors.
“There is a significant problem and it should be investigated,” he said. “It’s very disturbing that city police crime laboratory has been operating lacking the most basic and rudimentary quality control measures. They have not had the appropriate protocols to test for contamination. We’re going to have to see how many problems do we have in the Baltimore City crime laboratory?”
Edgar Koch, the city’s crime lab director since 1997, was terminated Tuesday, because of “a number of operational issues,” said Sterling Clifford, a spokesman for Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld.
Clifford would not elaborate on the nature of all the issues, but said one involved staff DNA samples being labeled as unknown crime scene evidence.
While handling crime scene evidence, crime lab staff sometimes leave traces of their own DNA in the evidence, Clifford said.
Koch had been categorizing those DNA samples as “unknown genetic profiles” from crime scenes, according to Clifford.
Police recently discovered that a small percentage of those unknown profiles belonged to staff members after the department created a database of staff DNA samples, the spokesman said.
“Previous unknown DNA samples came back as matches to staff,” Clifford said. “The issue is not that staff contamination occurred.
That’s not uncommon and, to a certain extent, unavoidable.”
The police department notified the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office and the Public Defender’s Office after learning of the reclassification of samples.
“It’s not the kind of thing that produces false positives,” Clifford said. “In a way, this is helpful because we can rule out unknown samples.”
The police department’s crime lab is accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. Having a staff DNA database is an “accepted best practice, but not a requirement for accreditation,” Clifford said.
Still, Kent said, the city’s crime lab has botched evidence before, pointing out problems with gunshot residue in 2001.
“The theme we’ve seen from Baltimore City is they’re far more focused on the media fallout than they are on getting the science right,” he said.
Koch could not be reached for comment Wednesday. A lecturer at the University of Baltimore, Koch got his start in forensics as an officer in Anne Arundel County.
The lab’s deputy director, Sharon Talmadge, has replaced Koch.
