Report Finds F.B.I. Lab Slipping From Pinnacle of Crime Fighting

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The New York Times, January 29, 1997, pp. A1, B8.

Report Finds F.B.I. Lab Slipping From Pinnacle of Crime Fighting

By David Johnston and Andrew C. Revkin

Washington -- For decades the FBI's reputation as a crime-fighting agency has rested heavily on its high-tech forensic laboratory, which could solve baffling crimes from a speck of blood, a sliver of paint or the thinnest filament of human hair.

But an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general has put the FBI laboratory, and the way the agency has used it, under the glare of public scrutiny. The findings, which were turned over to FBI officials last week, are threatening to shatter the image of an agency on the cutting edge of scientific sleuthing.

On Monday, FBI officials announced a shake-up at the lab, transferring four senior employees, including the heads of the chemistry and explosives units, the first in disciplinary personnel actions in what officials say will be a thorough overhaul of the lab's operations.

The report has not yet been made public, but current and former FBI lab officials who have been interviewed by the inspector general's office have said that dozens of cases have been affected by problems associated with the lab's work.

Among the problems cited by the officials were sloppy handling of evidence and lax procedures within the lab. In addition, they complained of the work of agents who use the lab to make their cases, including unreliable processing of the material sent to the lab for analysis and misuse of the lab's findings by FBI agents and their supervisors.

This range of problems has been evident in several well-known cases:

-- After federal agents searched the residence of Richard Jewell, a private security guard who was an early suspect in a bombing at the Atlanta Olympics last summer, FBI scientists and other specialists warned that "you've got the wrong guy," an FBI laboratory official said. But their cautionary remarks, based on the absence of even trace amounts of explosive materials, went unheeded for months.

-- After a truck bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, lab experts complained that field agents had haphazardly examined the crime scene, the clothing of Timothy McVeigh, one of two defendants later charged with the explosion, and the vehicle driven by him. The evidence was handled sloppily, with some of it mistagged or spilled from evidence bags, when it was sent to the lab for examination.

-- During the investigation of the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center, some investigators in the chemistry section of the FBI lab became concerned that tests being conducted for traces of an explosive blend of urea and nitrogen fertilizer were not precise enough.

The World Trade Center bomb was made of urea-nitrate, a compound that can be confused with non-explosive mixtures of the same ingredients. In an informal internal check of lab procedures, some senior FBI lab workers mixed human urine with fertilizer and added samples of that non-explosive mixture to the flow of material being tested by the chemistry unit. A manager in the chemistry lab identified the urine-fertilizer mixture as an explosive.

Errors at the lab are already providing defense lawyers with ammunition to use in some of these cases and appear to threaten the FBI with challenges to expert forensic testimony in cases based on the more than 600,000 evidence examinations conducted each year by the lab. The problem could expand beyond federal cases to affect evidence in thousands of state and local cases examined by the FBI each year.

On Tuesday, FBI officials began trying to limit the damage to the lab's reputation, issuing a report on efforts to improve the lab. The agency is improving training and building a new lab at its training academy in Quantico, Va., to replace the lab now housed at FBI headquarters in Washington.

And the agency is for the first time seeking accreditation with the Laboratory Accreditation Board of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors.

But FBI officials who have acknowledged the seriousness of the findings said that no past, present or future prosecutions would be compromised and that no one would be prevented from getting a fair trial.

In a statement Monday, FBI officials said the inspector general's inquiry had focused on only 3 of the lab's 23 units. The FBI has also hired Dr. Randall Murch to head its scientific analysis section, and several employees said Murch was responsible for recent improvements.

Still, Joseph E. DiGenova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington, said the issues raised in the report would allow defendants to contest lab findings against them and would permit people convicted of crimes to attempt to reopen their cases, based on the possibility of flawed forensic evidence.

"It's going to be a royal pain in the neck for federal judges and prosecutors and a godsend for defense attorneys looking for a means of getting their clients off," he said.

The two-year-old inspector general's inquiry began in 1995 after complaints by Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist in the explosives unit and a whistle-blower whose frequent criticism of the lab made him unpopular with the agency's upper echelon. But many of his criticisms have been corroborated by other officials in interviews with the inspector general, government officials who have read the interview reports said.

Nevertheless, Whitehurst was one of the four officials removed from his job in the wake of the inspector general's review. The agency has not said why Whitehurst was suspended, but his lawyer, Steven Kohn, said the action was a reprisal for Whitehurst's years of complaints. FBI officials denied that the action was retaliatory.

The other three officials who were transferred were David Williams, a supervisory agent in the explosives unit; Roger Martz, chief of the chemistry unit, and James T. Thurman, chief of the explosives unit.

The three were criticized for their performance in the Oklahoma City case. Officials said that Williams had been responsible for collecting evidence at the scene that Thurman had supplied information for a search and for arrest warrants against McVeigh and that Martz had conducted some tests in the lab on some of the evidence.

Scientists at the lab said they were often stifled in a lab run by non-technical field agents who had little knowledge of science and who regularly altered reports to help prosecutors. But law enforcement officials said there was little evidence that anyone had been wrongly convicted based on improper lab work.

In long investigations, like the Unabom case, bomb technicians and other specialists often got bogged down into a defensive mode, one FBI technical expert said. "You get an inadvertent bonding of like-minded individuals supporting each other's false conclusions," he said.

At the heart of the problem in the lab is the FBI practice of promoting employees with no advanced scientific training to supervisory positions in departments handling very complicated scientific inquiries, said the expert, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

For many years, the top jobs in the explosives unit, for example, have been held by people without relevant advanced training, the expert said. The lab has become top heavy with non-experts, he said.