Baltimore police have hired a new boss for their embattled crime lab, which is facing allegations of tainted evidence.
Francis A. Chiafari, the director of molecular technology at BRT Laboratories, began work as the new head of the crime laboratory this week, even as the Innocence Project, a national group of lawyers who try to exonerate convicts based largely on new DNA evidence, is seeking an investigation into the lab’s practices.
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Chiafari, an expert witness in criminal cases — including Maryland’s first-ever fetal homicide prosecution in Baltimore County — has helped write many publications such as DNA Event Tracking Assists Troubleshooting, Interpreting Prenatal Paternity Cases, and Determination of Sibship in Any Two Persons.
He holds a master’s degree from the University of Maryland and was formerly the DNA technical adviser at the Baltimore Police Department.
Chiafari’s hiring comes at a time when the Innocence Project alleges that “serious negligence or misconduct substantially affecting the integrity of forensic results has occurred at the Baltimore Police Department Crime Laboratory. … Recently, the BPD-CL revealed that a lab employee working in the DNA lab contaminated evidence in approximately 12 open cases.”
On Aug. 19, Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld fired Edgar Koch — the city’s crime lab director since 1997 — because of a “number of operational issues” including mistakenly allowing DNA evidence from lab staff to be classified as unknown crime scene evidence.
Rana Santos, the lab’s DNA technical leader, testified on Aug. 27 that she began running police department employees’ names through a new database on Aug. 8, and found 12 cases of staff contamination out of more than 2,500 unknown crime scene DNA samples.
“We did not have a staff database to compare evidence,” she testified during the murder trial of Brandon Grimes, who was charged with killing Baltimore police Det. Troy Chesley. “That should not have been.”
Upon further review, Santos said she found even more cases in which staff members’ DNA evidence got mixed in with crime scene evidence, including on the gun used to kill Chesley in January of 2007.
But Santos said the contamination did not compromise the evidence taken from the gun, which police say belonged to Grimes, 23, whom a jury convicted of murdering Chesley.
“If two people are mixed in a mixture, it doesn’t equal someone else,” she testified.
Santos said staff DNA can get into evidence though hair, eyelashes, coughing, sneezing — even breathing.
“This isn’t scary to me,” she testified. “It’s not something I didn’t expect. It’s not something that doesn’t happen in other labs. … It’s not surprising to me at all.”
She added that the crime lab has since ordered serology workers to wear two gloves when processing potential evidence and use disposable lab gear.
But the Innocence Project alleged the contamination “can incorrectly steer investigators away from identifying criminals.”
