Damning report focuses on HPD property room

09:53 AM CDT on Friday, July 1, 2005

By Doug Miller / 11 News

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The 11 News Defenders first exposed "Evidence of Errors" at the Houston Police Department Crime Lab.

Now three years later, the public is learning the specific reasons for the sloppy science that prompted the prison release of two men and the retest of hundreds of criminal cases.

The information was revealed in a brand-new report from an independent investigator.

It reveals the problems that led to the crisis in the crime lab. Usually only police are supposed to gain access to the property room. But rats got in there, too, and chewed up evidence.

"It's an old facility. It's a hot and dusty facility. These are deficencies in the property room that had been recognized by the Houston Police Department and it's our understanding that they are acting on those," said Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general with the U.S. Justice Department. "Right now, the property room doesn't satisfy anyone including the command staff at HPD and including the people who work in the property room."

"I think this is a situation in which there were failures at virtually every step of the process, starting at the supervisory level in the lab, going up through the top lab management, up through the command staff and HPD," he says.

They are glaring issues including no internal quality control tests since 1997, two internal audits from 2000 and 2001 that contained inaccurate information and four cases of so-called "dry-labbing" -- fabricating tests that were never performed.

A lack of funding or support from Former Chief CO Bradford and an inadequate property room and evidence storage system were also part of the problem.

HPD Chief Harold Hurtt has learned from these lessons. "This is one example that every police chief in the country can learn from, the fact that it is our job our job to monitor and lead the entire organization," he says.

Another damning report on HPD's crime lab and property room brings another batch of revelations. In this hot building they stored bodily fluids gathered as evidence and put them in a place that wasn't even air-conditioned.

The report bluntly states the DNA lab was in shambles, but its boss was so out-of-touch he didn't even know it. And one of the doctors who worked here spent a lot of time sleeping at his desk.

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The HPD property room was infested with rats and included bodily fluids that were not stored at the proper temperature.

"There was management practices that were unacceptable," said Mayor Bill White. "And people did not treat the crime lab in general, DNA, with the seriousness it needed."

The report's especially critical of former Police Chief Clarence Bradford for leaving a key DNA lab job unfunded for years.

And then, there were those 283 boxes of misplaced evidence 11 News first reported on last year. It turns out one of them was mislabeled and evidence from 33 criminal cases was simply thrown away.

"The one question I want answered is: Have we sent anyone to death row and who has been executed that shouldn't have," said city council member Adrian Garcia.

After 11 News exposed the problems with HPD's crime lab, the wrongly convicted Josiah Sutton walked out of prison.

Now Sutton's case will become one of the specific convictions this independent panel plans to investigate in-depth.

What is troubling to many is that it's becoming clearer there are questions that may never be answered.

There are 16 cases already under review that have no evidence left to re-test and another 40 have been retested but are inconclusive.

There are 35 cases in which evidence was flooded during Tropical Storm Allison because of the roof leaks at the crime lab. An employee told investigators that biological evidence had become so saturated there was bloody water dripping out of boxes.

The problem now is that no one seems to know what cases those were- "The one question I want answered is have we sent anyone to death row and who has been executed that shouldn't have," says Councilmember Adrian Garcia.

This is the third report from Bromwich accepted by current lab management. "We need to move forward. That's history, we can't change it. Obviously the personnel, it does cause motivational problems," says current lab manager Irma Rios.

The police department plans to open a new property room behind the old police headquarters. It will cost more than $12 million.