Hundreds of Broward Cases in Doubt Over DNA Testing Problems, Expert's Suspension for Sexism, Racism

The shots rang out before either cop could reach for his holster. The only thing the two Broward Sheriff's deputies could do was call for help. "We're shot!" came a voice over police radio. Then it was quiet.

When the bullets stopped flying that November night, Dep. Corey Carbocci lay bleeding on the pavement. Dep. Brian Tephford hung halfway out of his patrol car. Their red, white, and blue police lights were still flashing across the sprawling condo complex where a routine traffic stop had suddenly turned violent.

A swarm of police and first responders sped to Versailles Gardens, a cluster of buildings off McNab Road in the suburb of Tamarac. Screams came from the crowd that had formed near the deputies. Carbocci, 37, clutched his chest and leg as paramedics assessed his wounds. But Tephford wasn't moving. The 34-year-old father of three was soon pronounced dead.

Three suspected gunmen — Eloyn Ingraham, Bernard Forbes, and Andre Delancy — were caught the day after the November 11, 2006 attack, holed up in a room at a Dania Beach inn with two Glocks in the toilet tank and a Springfield Arms pistol under a bed. Prosecutors said ballistics, cellphone data, eyewitness accounts, and DNA evidence all linked the men to the crime.

Read more at Broward New-Times

Can DNA Evidence Be Too Convincing? An Acquitted Man Thinks So

It has been about three months since Terrell Gills’s release from jail, and there are still sleepless nights and days spent in his room as he contemplates the year and a half he spent on Rikers Island for a crime of which he was acquitted.

He stays there for most of the day with the door locked, his jail life so ingrained that he still eats at times close to his old jail schedule: 4:30 a.m., noon and 5 p.m.

There is other baggage: antisocial feelings, and the questions that come during job interviews about the nearly two years left blank on his résumé.

The answers do not come easily.

Mr. Gills, now 36, was arrested in August 2015, accused of robbing a Dunkin’ Donuts about three months earlier in Jamaica, Queens. The arrest was made, in part, on the strength of forensic evidence that is typically persuasive: a DNA match.

Read more at the New York Times.

How DNA Evidence Went From Airtight to Error-Prone

Blind faith in any technology can be dangerous -- especially when it comes to areas of forensic science such as DNA fingerprinting. For example, if police have “DNA evidence” against a suspect, most juries will assume that’s proof of guilt. But while the technology for analyzing DNA has become vastly more sensitive since it was first introduced in courts in the 1990s, crime labs are working with ever more minute traces -- sometimes just a few molecules -- and drawing inconsistent or erroneous conclusions from them. In fact, there’s good reason to believe DNA evidence has sent people to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Read more here.

DA to reopen 2000 closed cases in Broward County with DNA errors

Two years ago, Boynton Beach forensic expert Tiffany Roy was hired to double-check DNA evidence swabbed from a knife handle. What she found was troubling: The Broward Sheriff’s Office crime lab had mistakenly claimed it was conclusive.

It wasn’t.

As New Times previously reported, Roy complained to the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, which investigated and agreed with her findings.

Now, the crime lab faces revocation of its accreditation, and the Broward State Attorney’s Office will likely have to reopen thousands of closed cases.

Read more at Broward New Times

PCAST Report Final Issued

Report on Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods

On September 20, 2016, PCAST released a Report to the President on Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison

https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast/docsreports