D.C.’s New Crime Lab Goes Under the Microscope
By Editorial,
Washington Post Editorial
| 03. 11. 2015
WHAT’S THE point of spending millions of dollars on a crime lab if people don’t trust its findings and won’t use it? That is one question D.C. officials should be asking in light of the unsettling revelation that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has stopped sending DNA evidence to the new Consolidated Forensic Laboratory because it claims there have been serious mistakes. Far more than money is at issue: Forensics plays a key role in determining the guilt or innocence of crime suspects. The concerns of federal prosecutors must be investigated and the integrity of the lab assured.
In January federal prosecutors stopped sending evidence for DNA testing to the crime lab, which is operated by the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences, opting instead to pay for tests at outside labs. The move, as The Post’s Keith L. Alexander reported, came after an outside expert, in a routine review of evidence for an upcoming case, found errors in the interpretation of test results; a subsequent review of 116 cases by two nationally known experts found what federal prosecutors characterized as...
Related Articles
By Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan, CBC | 04.09.2024
A Canadian DNA laboratory knowingly delivered prenatal paternity test results that routinely identified the wrong biological fathers — ruling out the real dads — and left a trail of shattered lives around the globe, a CBC News investigation has found...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Carey Gillan, UnSpun | 03.18.2024
A Mexican standoff with the United States turned into a Mexican smack-down this month with the release of Mexico’s formal rebuttal to US efforts to overturn limits Mexico has ordered on the use of genetically modified (GM) corn and the...
By Hilary Brueck, Business Insider | 03.23.2024
"OpenAI Co-Founder & CEO Sam Altman speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 at Moscone Convention Center on October 03, 2019 in San Francisco, California (Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)" by TechCrunch is licensed under CC by...