STRANGE JUSTICE
(from stju.blogspot.com)
Thursday, December 22, 2005
GREAT MOMENTS IN FORENSIC SCIENCE
Moments before taking the stand to testify in a 1989 capital murder trial,
Houston crime-lab analyst James Bolding still was testing blood evidence —
not in the controlled conditions of a laboratory but in the courtroom itself.
Experts who reviewed trial transcripts from the case of Preston Hughes III,
who was sentenced to death and is awaiting execution, found Bolding's
actions troubling and emblematic of a pattern of problems in the Houston
Police Department crime lab's serology division. "It is ridiculous," said Keith
Inman, a California-based scientist with expertise in serology — the science
of typing body fluids — which was a precursor of DNA testing. "A lab is a lab,
and a courtroom is a courtroom, and they are not interchangeable. The
willingness to do this raises questions about standards at HPD."
A panel of scientists who reviewed HPD analysts' testimony about serology
tests in that case and 12 others, culled from a sampling of more than 100
examined by the Houston Chronicle, found problems in more than half of
the cases that mirror some found in the crime lab's troubled DNA division.
Analysts overstated the strength of evidence in some cases, offered
misleading statistics to juries and displayed a poor command of the
principles of serology, said the experts, who reviewed the testimony at the
request of the Chronicle. "They certainly were undertrained,
undereducated and did not have a very sophisticated understanding of how
to make sure results got expressed correctly," said Norah Rudin, an
independent forensic consultant. "The potential for a miscarriage of justice
is huge."
Concern within HPD: At least one of HPD's own serologists voiced concerns to
her superiors about ineffective management, lack of training and the poor
quality of HPD's serology work years before problems were exposed publicly,
according to a review of hundreds of personnel records. Several scientists from
the serology division went on to fill the ranks of the crime lab's now-infamous
DNA division after HPD began using that science in 1989. The DNA division was
shuttered three years ago, amid questions about the quality of its work. Its
closure prompted scrutiny that has revealed a sweeping forensics scandal.
Since then, flawed work has been uncovered in four other disciplines —
ballistics, toxicology, controlled substances (drugs) and serology — casting
doubt on thousands of cases and leading to the release of two men from
prison thus far. Although serology was not used in every homicide and rape
investigation prior to the advent of DNA testing, during the four-year period
from 1985 through 1988, according to its own crime statistics, HPD
investigated 1,630 homicides and more than 5,200 sexual assaults.
The independent investigator hired this year to conduct a comprehensive probe
of the crime lab is devoting a significant portion of an ongoing case review to
analyses from the serology division, whose faulty work contributed to the
conviction of George Rodriguez. Rodriguez was released from prison last year
after serving 17 years for a rape that DNA tests indicated he did not
commit. The investigator, former U.S. Justice Department Inspector General
Michael Bromwich, is expected to release his team's preliminary findings before
the end of the year.
In the Hughes case, Bolding performed tests to determine whether there
was blood on a knife and shoe from the murders of La Shandra Rena
Charles, 15, and 3-year-old Marcell Lee Taylor. He tested the items in front
of the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney in a Harris County courtroom
just before he was to testify. Bolding apparently was unable to perform the
tests earlier, according to testimony. The lack of quality control concerned
state District Judge George Godwin. "I find this cavalier attitude and
lackadaisical attitude of doing tests right while we've got jury waiting to
come in and hear testimony unacceptable," said Godwin, who nonetheless
allowed the tests into evidence over defense objections.
Experts who reviewed Bolding's testimony questioned why he agreed to
perform analyses outside a lab. "He was an experienced analyst who should
have known better," Rudin said. Bolding, who retired from HPD in 2003 to
avoid being fired, did not return phone calls for comment.
Statistics skewed: Experts also questioned testimony about tests during the
1988 trial of Charles Lee Hawkins, accused in the rape of a deaf woman at a
Houston motel. They concluded that Bolding's testimony overstated the
probability that evidence from the crime came from Hawkins. Bolding, who at
the time of the trial supervised the serology section, told jurors about tests on
blood and semen samples from the crime scene and a rape kit. Using basic
blood typing, he compared types for the victim and Hawkins with the evidence
and testified that Hawkins and fewer than 40,000 other people in Houston
could have contributed to the samples. So, it eliminated a large portion of the
population in Houston?" Assistant District Attorney Leslie Brock asked. "That is
correct," Bolding said.
But other scientists found that Bolding failed to include numerous other
possible contributors. "Bolding botched his stats in a ludicrous way," said
William Thompson, a professor at the University of California-Irvine, who was
central to uncovering problems in the Houston crime lab's DNA division three
years ago. "He is excluding large numbers of people who could have
contributed to that sample." By Thompson's calculations, more than 50 percent
of Houston's male population could have contributed to the sample. The case
against Hawkins also included an identification by the victim. He was convicted
and sentenced to life in prison.
Bolding's error, Rudin said, may have been caused by a problem prominent in
HPD's DNA cases: that analysts often gave juries numbers for the prevalence of
evidence itself and not for the statistical strength of a match between a
suspect and the evidence — an error that leads to exaggerations of the
evidence's strength. "This looks like the beginning of the same mistake, which
skews the conclusions," Rudin said. "The testimony makes the conclusion too
strong."
The overlapping problems in the DNA and serology divisions, experts said,
no doubt are related in part to their common personnel, several of whom
have been at HPD for more than 15 years. Among them: Bolding, who led the
DNA division when it was shut down; Joseph Chu, who received a written
reprimand for shoddy DNA work on several cases but remains at the lab; and
Christy Kim, who retired last year after surviving an attempt to fire her and
who collects more than $2,700 a month in a pension.
Bolding was the crime lab's only serologist when he assumed the job in
1982, after less than one year of training. "He had not yet received any
formal training in fundamental serological techniques, including (blood)
typing," Bromwich, the independent investigator, wrote in a June report.
"Mr. Bolding told us that he 'took books home and did the best he could.' "
Also among the scientists in the serology division was Holly Hammond, who left
HPD after three years. She alerted administrators to problems in the division as
early as 1986 in a letter she filed in response to her largely positive evaluation.
"It has been my observation and experience that training programs in this
laboratory are ineffective, inconsistent and inefficient at the practical level
and, in many cases, are simply nonexistent," she wrote. "Even requested
training, on relatively simple procedures, is often put off indefinitely by
supervisory personnel."
Hammond raised similar concerns in an August 1988 letter after that year's
evaluation, noting that she was writing not in response to her review but
because it was the only forum for expression. She repeated her concerns in her
Nov. 21, 1988, resignation letter. "Problems with equipment, personnel,
compensation and training are holding the laboratory in a position of
inadequacy compared to much of the rest of the forensic community," she
wrote.
Misstating basic rules: Just before Hammond lodged her protest, HPD analyst
David Kaufman testified in the trial of Alphonse Norris Jr., who was convicted
in a 1985 assault. In describing ABO typing tests to the jury, Kaufman misstated
the most basic rules of determining how different blood types show up in such
tests. In ABO typing, some people with the different blood types — A, B, AB and
O — reveal themselves through the presence of different antigens in their body
fluids. If someone displays their blood type in their body fluids, they are called
secretors. A secretor with type-A blood will display A and H antigens while one
with type O will display only an H antigen. In his testimony, Kaufman confused
how different blood types show up in tests. "Either he is a very poor
communicator or he doesn't understand the technical issues involved," said
Inman, the California serology expert. "It's hard to know exactly what the
problem is, but clearly, his testimony is inaccurate." Kaufman could not be
located for comment.
The problems in the Norris case, Thompson said, can be found in others from
the serology section and suggest that problems in the Houston police crime lab
were pervasive across divisions. "It is now clear to me that problems in the DNA
division were just a continuation of earlier problems with serology," he said.
"These problems stem from a long history of low standards and the tolerance of
bad work. "The question is when we will stop finding more instances of errors,"
he said. "After seeing these cases, I am certain it won't be anytime soon

http://www.mysterycrimescene.com/support-files/bolding-hughes-article.pdf