In continuing a series that DPIC had highlighted earlier, the Denver Post has featured more than a dozen news articles and a series of online videos, providing an in-depth look at the handling of crucial biological evidence gathered during criminal investigations. “Trashing the Truth: The Hidden Story of Lost Evidence” examined the nationwide problems with evidence storage, the destruction of evidence, and the relationship between missing evidence and wrongful convictions. It also addressed how this issue impacts victims and victims’ family members who are waiting for answers in unsolved crimes.

In one article, the Post told the story of Floyd Brown, who has been in a North Carolina mental institution for 14 years without a trial. Brown, who is mentally retarded, is accused of murdering 80-year-old Katherine Lynch, but he maintains that he did not commit the crime and did not give the confession prosecutors have pointed to as evidence of his guilt. In the years since Brown was institutionalized, the wooden stick sheriff’s deputies say was used to kill Lynch has been lost or destroyed. Earlier tests on the weapon concluded that they did not match Brown, and his defense attorneys say that more sophisticated DNA testing of the stick could have proven their client’s innocence and possibly revealed the identity of the actual assailant.

In another article, the paper details the exoneration of Johnny Briscoe, who served 24 years in prison for rape. For nearly a deacde, defense attorneys and others hoping to prove Briscoe’s innocence tried to locate three cigarette butts collected from the crime scene that were frozen in a St. Louis County Crime Lab freezer for the purpose of future DNA testing. During that time, the district attorney and lab technicians either refused to look for the evidence or said they could not find it after a search of the facility. The three cigarette butts were located only after a power failure shut down the lab and staff were forced to conduct an inventory of all of the evidence in the freezer. New DNA analysis of the evidence revealed that Briscoe was innocent and that another man had committed the crime. That man, Larry Smith, had been serving time in the same prison as Briscoe for the rape of a woman in the same apartment complex as the victim assaulted in Briscoe’s case.

The series noted:
The Denver Post has found 141 prisoners nationwide who profess their innocence but in whose cases physical evidence has been lost, mishandled or destroyed.
…
Their cases raise questions about a justice system that fails to regulate DNA evidence and leaves to the whims of clerks and law-enforcement officials the fates of inmates trying to prove their innocence. Their stories also call into question whether the U.S. criminal justice system has strayed from one of its basic principles: that it’s far worse to convict an innocent person that to let a guilty person go free.

It’s one thing to be wrongly convicted and doing another man’s time. But it’s quite another to have your freedom hinge on tiny traces from a stranger’s body, only to learn those samples have been lost or destroyed.

(Denver Post, July 22-25, 2007). View the “Trashing the Truth” Videos Online. See Studies and Innocence.

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