Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Grits for Breakfast

Criminal Law

: Grits for Breakfast

Make crime labs independent from law enforcement

Reacting to news of serious problems at the Houston PD fingerprint lab prompted attorney Patrick McCann to author a thoughtful column in the Houston Chronicle ("Let's get experts to test evidence," June 26) that advocates making crime labs independent from law enforcement. The article concludes:We have been subjected to a decade of unfolding scandals at HPD's lab, on everything from DNA, to toxicology, to firearms, to outright falsification of lab results, to failure to even review evidence in capital and other serious cases. Now we discover that their fingerprint "identification" section is not only unworthy of the name, but should be renamed the "mis-identification" section, because their techs are unable to get this right even on a murder case where someone's life could literally be at stake...continue to full post

Full post as published by Grits for Breakfast on June 28, 2010 (boomark / email).