Your various CSI-type shows display modern police forensic labs as clean, gleaming, orderly high-tech cathedrals to science. The reality is seldom as glamorous, with cramped offices and significant backlogs being the norm. Around the country, various forensic labs have gotten so far behind that serious criminal cases have been dismissed due to lack of evidence.
Houston previously had a problem with it’s forensics department, so the Houston Forensic Science Center was created in 2012. And now they’re having big problems too.
Houston Police Officers’ Union President Douglas Griffith called for the resignation of the head of the city’s forensic science center this week over a significant backlog in testing evidence that has led to dismissal of criminal cases for a lack of probable cause.
“It’s either gross mismanagement or incompetence,” Griffith said during a press conference Wednesday.
Sharing photos of suspected marijuana seized by police at Houston’s Hobby Airport, Griffith said that 38 potential drug smuggling cases, involving 40 to 70 pounds of marijuana each, were dismissed on lack of probable cause because the city’s lab had not returned confirmatory tests.
Created by the city in 2012 after a scandal-ridden inhouse facility lost accreditation, the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC) is independent from the police department but funded by the city and governed by a board appointed by Mayor Sylvester Turner. Peter Stout, who holds a PhD in toxicology, has served as head since 2015.
Griffith explained to The Texan that according to HFSC’s own website, it takes 306 days to process a sexual assault kit and 215 days to process firearms or ballistics testing.
“But in an email sent by Dr. Stout to me, as well as city council, the district attorney, and defense attorney Murray Newman, he said if we want a rush case done today, it would not be done until 2025,” said Griffith. “So, there’s a discrepancy between what’s on the website and what’s in the email.”
The name Murray Newman may be familiar to some readers as Dwight links to his blog Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center.
In an email sent on July 17 to city, police, and criminal justice officials, Stout wrote, “It will be a really rude awakening to ask for a priority on July 31st for a trial on August 15th and find that your spot in line will be March 2025 behind the 66 other homicide cases already on the list.”
“That’s a year and nine months to test a weapon used in a homicide,” warned Griffith.
Stout’s email also warns recipients that “a priority request is just that, a request not a guarantee,” and that his office may reject or accept requests.
The city has set the HFSC 2024 budget at $28.5 million but added additional funds of nearly $5 million over the past year. Despite the extra funding, HFSC limits the number of DNA testing samples to 10 per case at a time, so investigators or prosecutors must wait for the first 10 samples to be returned before submitting a separate set.
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg told The Texan that delays in toxicology testing are leading to dismissal of gun crimes.
Ogg’s name should be familiar to readers as being a Soros-backed DA.
“Drugs are the first things we find and serve as the reason for the search that then locates a gun,” said Ogg. “But we are losing gun cases when judges dismiss a case for lack of probable cause because we don’t have those toxicology reports back.”
Noting that firearms testing results had recently increased from a 14 month wait to 20 months, Ogg also expressed concern about delayed evidence in relation to a new Texas law authored by Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston) prioritizing violent cases.
“The emphasis now will be on prosecuting child sexual assaults, which require lab testing, and gun violence and homicide cases. I am just very concerned that as the cases are being called to trial the labs will not have completed their work and the evidence will not have been disclosed,” said Ogg. “Then those cases will stand at risk, possibly allowing a dangerous suspect to be released to the streets.”
Harris County has been plagued by a criminal case backlog since Hurricane Harvey flooded courtrooms in 2017. The situation only worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic that brought the court system to a grinding halt.
With additional funding and extra court judges managing an emergency docket, earlier this year Ogg announced the case backlog had been reduced by 21 percent but that there were still about 114,000 backlogged cases.
That the crime lab is still having unacceptable backlog problems a decade after the last crime lab had similar problems is hardly a credit to the Democrats who have controlled Houston’s government since 1982.
Given what I know of how the how the defund the police racket tried to work in Austin, I have to wonder if funding for essential services (like a competent [police crime lab) have been siphoned off to “social justice” causes in Houston as well…
Tags: Crime, Democrats, Douglas Griffith, forensics lab, Holly Hansen, Houston, Houston Forensic Science Center, Houston Police Department, Kim Ogg, Murray Newman, Peter Stout, Social Justice Warriors, Texas
sigh
Do I really have to point this out to anyone? Really?
Have people truly missed that this is a common part of the Democratic playbook, everywhere?
They did the same crap in Afghanistan and South Vietnam. Cut essential support, cry “Oh, woe is me… The North Vietnamese are winning the war!!!”
They do the same damn thing in regards to law enforcement. At the same time that Democratic Party operatives are weaseling their way through the criminal justice system demanding “fair trials”, they’re corrupting the support for those trials by cutting budgets and demanding that unqualified people be given jobs in the name of “equity”.
The old Communists used to accuse people of being “wreckers”, but that was purest projection. The real “wreckers” are on the left, because that’s what they do.
As a former cop, I will note that some of the problem – specifically, the need to test marijuana – stems directly from the legislature’s legalization of hemp in 2019.
Before then, a simple field test kit, which could be done on site by police officers, was good enough to say, “Yes, this green dried plant stuff that looks like weed and reeks like weed is marijuana.” The field test kits change color if THC is present.
Since hemp was legalized, the field test kit isn’t good enough, because even the low level of THC in legal hemp will show a positive in a field test kit.
So, since 2019, all that weed now has to go to a crime lab to get the THC level tested. And that testing requires the proper equipment, which no crime lab in the state needed up until then. And which the legislature did not add any funding for when the passed the hemp law.
So it’s not totally the fault of the incompetence of the Dems running Houston. You can put some of the blame on the weed lobby.
The Detroit Police Department Crime Lab had 11,000 unprocessed rape kits (dating back to 1984) and was just guessing in their firearms analyses when they were shut down in 2008. 31,000 criminal convictions were reviewed and most were overturned. The only bright spot was 200 previously unknown serial rapists were identified during the 10 years it took the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Division to DNA test all the rape kits.
Transferring the DPD Crime Lab work to the MSP FSD increased their workload 20%, transferring local expenses to taxpayers across the state. MSP FSD performs – on a timely basis – all the testing that the DPD CL was supposed to be performing (but didn’t) for 75% of the cost.
Urban governments are incapable of managing anything more complex than lawn mowing.
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I think it was the state of Maryland that had multiple-year backlog of analyzing unprocessed rape kits. This was several years ago, and some women’s groups were trying to raise private funds to have them analyzed (maybe by paying the forensic folks overtime?)
Not to mention the FBI forensic labs have been rocked by several scandals involving fraud and perjury.
Apparently crime labs aren’t really very well run or use a lot of scientifically invalid tests. So much for the fiction of CSI tv shows.