An inde­pen­dent audit of Virginia’s cen­tral crime lab­o­ra­to­ry ini­ti­at­ed by the present gov­er­nor found that the lab had botched DNA tests in the death penal­ty case of Earl Washington (pic­tured). The find­ing prompt­ed Gov. Mark Warner to order a review of 150 oth­er crim­i­nal cas­es and the devel­op­ment of pro­ce­dures to insu­late the lab from out­side polit­i­cal pres­sures.

The audit was con­duct­ed by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. It found that the Virginia lab’s inter­nal review process was flawed, and it raised con­cerns that lab work­ers had felt pres­sured to pro­duce quick and con­clu­sive results in the Washington case, even when the evi­dence was unclear. Washington had been sen­tenced to death for a 1982 mur­der and rape. His death sen­tence was com­mut­ed in 1994 after DNA tests first threw doubt on his guilt. He was even­tu­al­ly grant­ed an absolute par­don in 2000 and freed from prison. Tests com­mis­sioned by defense lawyers in 2004 have impli­cat­ed anoth­er sus­pect, who is in prison in an unre­lat­ed rape case. The audit con­clud­ed that the state lab improp­er­ly exclud­ed this sus­pect as the source of DNA found on the victim.

Betty Layne DesPortes, a defense attor­ney who heads a legal pan­el for the American Academy of Forensic Science, com­ment­ed about the audit’s find­ings: ​“You have to have doubts about the reli­a­bil­i­ty of any case com­ing out of there. How can we be sure that this case was­n’t typ­cial.” Virginia is sec­ond only to Texas in the num­ber of exe­cu­tions car­ried out since 1976. (N.Y. Times, May 8, 2005). See Gov. Warner’s Press Release, with link to the entire report. See also Innocence.

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