'Betrayed': Forensic science failures undermine justice as labs fail to adopt standards

Kathy Eppler had waited seven years to see the man who murdered her two brothers and sister-in-law be punished for his crimes.

Garrett Coughlin was sentenced to life without parole in the triple murder, but failures in a forensic lab contributed to the derailment of her long-sought justice.

A forensic scientist with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation manipulated hundreds of DNA test results – including those in the 2017 killings of Eppler's family. So prosecutors offered Coughlin a deal allowing him parole after 24 years.

"All of us feel betrayed," Eppler told USA TODAY.

Colorado's crime lab is one of many across the country that have come under fire in recent years as the ripple effects of misconduct and lab errors came to light. Colorado authorities have pledged to review DNA testing practices, but Eppler believes fixing the system will require a complete overhaul of the lab, greater transparency and more outside oversight.

"Where the heck's the checks and balances for this? There's nobody regulating," she said.

It has been 15 years since a scathing report blasted scattershot practices at forensic labs across the country, including shoddy analysis of bite marks and blood splatter, and five years since federal researchers began issuing exacting new standards designed to make forensic science more reliable. But only half of the more than 400 largest crime labs across the country have publicly adopted the standards.

Experts say many labs are short-staffed and cash-strapped, in some cases receiving only hundreds of dollars to complete tests that can cost thousands, such as analyses of rape kits or firearms. Some may have adopted standards but haven't said so publicly because they fear being held accountable for them in court. Lab results are a crucial piece of evidence in criminal cases, and falling short would undermine their credibility, potentially jeopardizing justice and public safety.

Beyond that, many labs are connected to law enforcement agencies, which experts say leads to bias and pressure to churn out results that solve cases quickly rather than follow national standards federal researchers have developed.

But shortcuts and errors in forensic science can have life-or-death consequences.

Research has found that when the wrong person is put behind bars, the real perpetrator often goes on to commit more crimes, according to Kate Judson, executive director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences. In one study in North Carolina, six perpetrators went on to commit 99 crimes while the wrong people sat in jail. Since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, more than 1,000 people have been exonerated after being wrongfully convicted of crimes based on false o?r misleading forensic evidence.

"That's significant to me," Judson said, adding that even one perpetrator being free to commit one more crime creates "one more victim that we wouldn't have had if we caught the correct person quickly."

“It's really a tragedy,” she said. “It's not just the incarcerated person and the victims who didn't get justice … it's also their families, their communities, and then ultimately, the reason why our system works is we trust it, and every time we breach that trust it harms our whole system.”

A damning report leads to federal forensic science standards

Modern forensic science is a wide range of disciplines mostly developed by people connected to law enforcement looking to identify suspects, not by scientists conducting peer-reviewed studies, according to Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project.

Forensic disciplines that are now considered “junk science” – from bite-mark analysis to microscopic hair evaluation – were accepted by courts with little scrutiny until advancements in DNA analysis in the early 1990s exposed deep flaws in the field, Fabricant said.

“Many commentators would say that there's a lack of science in forensic sciences,” said Fabricant, author of "Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System."

As the revelations led to exonerations, Congress commissioned the National Academy of Sciences to investigate the most commonly used forensic techniques. What it found was damning: Apart from DNA analysis, nearly all forensic methods were scientifically unsound and incapable of consistently connecting evidence found at crime scenes with their source.

The 2009 report offered recommendations to overhaul the field, including with the creation of a powerful, independent federal agency that could provide oversight. That didn't happen, though Fabricant still believes a federal agency with regulatory power is needed, like the FDA, but for forensics.

Instead, the report led to the creation of the National Commission on Forensic Science – which was dismantled within months of President Donald Trump taking office in 2017 – and OSAC, the Organization of Scientific Area Committees for Forensic Science, a federal program tasked with establishing and implementing national standards for forensic science.

OSAC has developed hundreds of standards for everything from how crime labs should be run to how scientists should describe evidence in court. John Paul "JP" Jones, forensic science standards program manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said more than 800 experts in nearly two dozen disciplines pitched in over the course of a decade to develop the standards.

But the vast majority of forensic science work is done at the local level, which means the federal government’s power to impose the standards is almost nonexistent. Adopting them is entirely voluntary, and only half of the 423 largest crime labs say they have implemented some of OSAC’s standards, Jones said.

“There's no one body nationally that can snap their fingers and say everyone must implement X-Y-Z,” he said.

It’s possible more labs are adhering to these best practices, Jones said, but many are afraid that admitting they don’t comply with all 200 of OSAC's standards could be used against them in court. He said about 50 to 60 new labs agree to implement some of them each year, and he hopes that number will grow as labs see the standards working for their peers.

“I'm hopeful for the future, or else I wouldn't be here doing this,” Jones said. “But it's going to be slow progress in our current nonregulated environment.”

Crime lab failures undermine credibility, criminal justice system

Scandal after scandal has plagued local crime labs in recent years, undermining credibility and potentially justice and public safety.

In Rhode Island, some forensic analysis of firearms was suspended in August after criminalists linked bullet cartridge casings from a 2021 killing to the wrong gun. A suspect was indicted in the drive-by shooting, which claimed the life of 29-year-old Keshaudas Spence, and the case is still pending. But evidence in 20 others had to be retested, and an outside consultant found a "lack of diligence" and problems with record-keeping and oversight in the firearms analysis unit.

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha has said he is confident in the "vast majority, if not all, of the evidence" from the lab, but the developments raise "fair questions" about lab results and operations, spurring his office to ensure steps are taken to address the problems.

Defense attorneys already have begun challenging the reliability of the lab's gun evidence in a host of cases, including in the death of Berta Pereira-Roldan, who was celebrating her 19th birthday when she was gunned down in Providence.

In Colorado, the state's Bureau of Investigation allowed 29-year veteran analyst Yvonne "Missy" Woods to continue working even though colleagues reported problems with her forensic work as early as 2014, an internal investigation found. She frequently deleted DNA testing data to avoid following required protocols, including in the 2017 triple murder of Eppler's family.

Coughlin was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But his conviction was overturned because of juror misconduct, and prosecutors, based in part on the tainted evidence, decided to offer him a plea deal rather than go to trial again.

"All of us feel devastated and just sick," Eppler told USA TODAY. "I mean, I have no confidence at all in the CBI."

The crime lab in Washington, D.C., lost its accreditation for a second time in 2021 after an audit found the lab incorrectly reported that the same firearm was used in two different homicide cases and then tried to cover up the mistake.

The city had to outsource forensic work to private vendors until parts of the troubled crime lab got back up and running. The number of DNA profiles extracted from local evidence and uploaded to a national database used to identify suspects and solve crimes across the country dropped dramatically during the two years the lab was unaccredited.

In the garage beneath the multimillion-dollar lab in the nation's capital, investigators spend long hours trying to extract any evidence they can – fingerprints, DNA, stray hairs, shell casings – from the broken and bullet-riddled vehicles found at crime scenes. Inside it's chilly, to prevent staff from overheating in their protective gear, and dirty, thanks to debris left behind by burnt-out cars.

On the upper floors, which smell faintly of chemicals, toxicologists and forensic chemists analyze blood samples. Down the hall, there’s a shooting range where government agents test weapons to run ballistics and lab rooms so secure that anyone who enters must provide a DNA sample so they can be ruled out when analysts are developing genetic profiles of victims and suspects.

Jennifer Love, the lab's chief science officer, helped the lab regain accreditation late last year for its forensic chemistry and forensic biology unit, which handles DNA. The lab has voluntarily pledged to adopt the new federal standards, but Love said there is still a small DNA analysis backlog and they will need to hire new staff to get their disbanded firearms unit reaccredited.

“We've come a long way, but we have a long way to go,” she said.

Though accreditation provides some level of oversight, Sarah Chu, director of policy and reform at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, said her research has found the minimal requirements for accreditation aren't enough to prevent lab failures that have plagued the forensic industry.

Chu said state boards and commissions may be a better way to regulate forensic science, citing the Texas Forensic Science Commission as an example. These regulatory bodies exist in 17 states and Washington, D.C., but there’s nothing standard about them either, according to Kermit Channell, president of the National Association of Forensic Science Boards.

Channell said some boards are made up of subject matter experts, while others include police and prosecutors handpicked by politicians, which limits their effectiveness and leaving them vulnerable to political pressure.

“There are politics that play a role in forensics,” he said. “People that don't believe that's true haven't worked in a crime lab.”

Victims say more is needed to fix backlogs, forensic science errors

The Houston crime lab earned the title of worst crime lab in America in the early 2000s after four men were wrongfully convicted because of failures and misconduct in the lab, said Peter Stout, president of the Houston Forensic Science Center. Officials spent a decade fighting to win back accreditation while struggling against backlogs and made a decision that eventually would turn the lab into a model for the industry: to sever its ties with the Houston Police Department.

Stout, who joined the lab in 2015, worked to rebuild the organization from the ground up and start complying with the OSAC standards. To routinely test the system’s efficacy, he implemented blind quality control, a tool he learned during his career in military drug testing that he said is “basically nonexistent in crime laboratories.”

“We far exceed proficiency testing of the entire laboratory, and the only reason we can do that is because we've got the latitude to do that, and nobody can tell me no,” he said. “With the pressures that are on most laboratories, it's really difficult for them to justify that kind of thing.”

While Stout leads a well-funded staff of more than 200, he said more than half the labs in the country have 30 or fewer employees and receive about $600 per request, which he called “generally pathetic.” Processing a simple sexual assault kit can cost $1,000. Performing firearms analysis can cost as much as $5,000.

The result is backlogs that can stretch into the thousands and linger for years.

When evidence like rape kits go untested, survivors are left in limbo and torment while perpetrators are free to reoffend. By the time Texas authorities processed evidence from a sexual assault forensic exam that was done after Lavinia Masters reported being raped in 1985 at age 13, the statute of limitations had expired and the suspect had attacked someone else.

"It felt like my whole world was falling apart again that I had worked so hard to try to put back together," said Masters, who worked to get legislation passed in Texas setting tighter deadlines for rape kit testing. Texas lawmakers also allotted $50 million to update technology and expand the pool of qualified analysts.

In Colorado, while the state retests up to 3,000 DNA samples and prosecutors review cases affected by lab errors, Eppler says she has had enough – more need to be done more quickly.

"My big family table got really small after this and got replaced with years of heartache," she said. "And I see no action being taken."

Contributing: Thao Nguyen, USA TODAY; Mark Reynolds, Providence Journal; Chuck Lindell, The Austin American Statesman

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Forensic science failures persist as labs fail to adopt standards