The pos­si­ble exon­er­a­tion of a man con­vict­ed of rape in 1987 has led inves­ti­ga­tors of the Houston police depart­ment crime lab­o­ra­to­ry to con­clude that the lab’s reli­a­bil­i­ty cri­sis may be worse than was first antic­i­pat­ed. This rev­e­la­tion could lead to re-test­ing of evi­dence in thou­sands of addi­tion­al cas­es from the past 25 years. Six inde­pen­dent foren­sic sci­en­tists said that a crime lab­o­ra­to­ry offi­cial either lacked the basic knowl­edge of blood typ­ing or know­ing­ly gave false tes­ti­mo­ny lead­ing to the con­vic­tion of George Rodriguez for rape near­ly two decades ago. Rodriguez’s case led the pan­el to con­clude that the offi­cial, who lat­er became head of crime lab’s DNA unit, might have offered ​“sim­i­lar­ly false and sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly unsound” reports and tes­ti­mo­ny in oth­er cas­es. Their con­clu­sion esca­lates the num­ber of crime lab cas­es to be reex­am­ined from 360 to an esti­mat­ed 5,000 — 10,000 cas­es, a num­ber that would sure­ly include some cap­i­tal mur­der tri­als from Harris County. According to foren­sic expert Barry Scheck of The Innocence Project in New York City, ​“We know already that they could­n’t do DNA test­ing prop­er­ly. Now we have a scan­dal that calls into ques­tion many thou­sands more cas­es. And this juris­dic­tion has pro­duced more exe­cu­tions than any oth­er coun­ty in America.” Of the 323 peo­ple exe­cut­ed in Texas since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed, 73 have been from Harris County. The Houston DNA lab was shut down short­ly after a state audit found that DNA tech­ni­cians there had mis­in­ter­pret­ed data, were poor­ly trained and kept shod­dy records. In many cas­es, the tech­ni­cians used up all avail­able evi­dence, mak­ing it impos­si­ble for defense experts to refute or ver­i­fy their results. (New York Times, August 5, 2004) See Innocence.

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