/nyregion

The scope of the problem has yet to be determined; at several points over nearly two years, supervisors in the medical examiner’s office thought they had gotten to the bottom of the technician’s errors, only to find that the trail went further.

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The errors, Dr. Prinz said in an interview, involved reporting false negatives, not false positives. “We do know that nobody was wrongfully convicted,” she added.

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The office has not yet concluded its review of 412 cases out of 843 it intends to examine, Mr. Lien said. The cases span from 2001 to 2011.

26 cas problématiques trouvés et il reste la moitié à analyser. Le bureau traite de l’ordre de 1500 agressions sexuelles par an.

Différents cas :
– l’opérateur n’a pas repéré des traces de sperme,
– a salopé l’analyse et déclaré qu’il n’y avait rien,
– des indices matériels étaient rangés dans le mauvais dossier (à 16 reprises, mélangeant les preuves dans 19 affaires de viol, ça devient plus difficile de conclure, a priori, à l’absence de faux positifs…

(…) a quality assurance manager with the medical examiner’s office (…) [said] It was not “standard policy at all for a technician to have two cases open at once.

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In an e-mail, Erin Murphy, a law professor at New York University, said that such a basic lapse in protocol also raised the question of what other basic rules of good forensic practice the technician might have ignored.

“Is an analyst with such a callous disregard for the integrity of the evidence and the seriousness of his/her job one also likely to disregard other rules, like changing gloves or cleaning the workstation or other methods necessary to safeguard the evidence?”