The ASCLD Empire, Part 2: Who Knew?

In my last post, I outlined some damn questionable goings-on at 139 Technology Drive, the headquarters of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors (ASCLD) and of a seemingly endless array of ASCLD-related organizations, including ASCLD, their laboratory accrediting organization, ASCLD/LAB, and their for-profit consulting group, ASCLD Consulting. Today we’re going to talk about who exactly has been fighting so hard to grab so much for so many organizations that occupy so little office space in that spot off the interstate in Garner, North Carolina.

Just as a reminder, also claiming residency and a couple of phone lines at 139 Technology Drive was the Consortium of Forensic Science Organizations (CFSO), a lobbying organization whose members include:

• American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS)
• ASCLD
• ASCLD/LAB
• Forensic Quality Services (FQS)
• International Association for Identification (IAI)
• National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME)
• Society of Forensic Toxicology/American Board of Forensic Toxicology (SOFT/ABFT)

Now, let’s see. Starting with those who have actually breathed the air at 139 Technology Drive…

Ralph Keaton- The Founding Father

Ralph Keaton has been neck-deep in everything ASCLD-related since the group’s inception. He is listed as one of the first committee members of the Laboratory Evaluation and Standards committee when ASCLD was first established.

Considering the fact that Keaton oversaw the now-storied history of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, seemingly without introspection or regret, that would explain a lot about the deeply entrenched resistance of ASCLD and its related organizations to transparency and the inclusion of anyone outside law enforcement and prosecutors’ offices in any discussions or decision making.

Currently the Executive Director of ASCLD/LAB, Ralph Keaton has held various positions within ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB for decades. As stated in the August 1995 ASCLD/LAB newsletter,

[Ralph Keaton] has been an active member of ASCLD/LAB and ASCLD since the creation of these organizations. He has served as Chairman of the Board and as an inspector for ASCLD/LAB and on the Board of ASCLD.

If there is anything that happens in any of the organizations that are associated with ASCLD that Ralph Keaton is not aware of, I would be very surprised.

Joe Bono- Who Let This Guy In?

I could not for the life of me figure out what the hell happened to the AAFS during the transition in leadership from the seemingly beatific Tom Bohan to the seemingly bozo-rific Joe Bono. Tom Bohan, immediate past-president of the AAFS, had nothing but reasonable things to say about the NAS Report: we need to work toward the recommendations, this is a long time coming, we all need to face facts and get on board.

Current president Joe Bono, on the other hand, has been the ignorant-ASCLD-alarmist type. At the National Institutes of Justice Impression and Pattern Evidence Symposium (IPES), Bono was trying to play to the crowd, advocating no outsiders coming in to forensic science and blaming everything on defense attorneys.

Bono declared that “There are people who think the practitioners need to be taken out of the research project” and that error rates were just “a way that lawyers muddy the waters.” Nice, for a guy who is the leader of an organization that counts quite a few defense attorneys among its ranks and on its board.

As I have already stated in a previous post, taking forensic scientists out of research is not part of the NAS Report. The NAS Report clearly states that there needs to be collaboration between practitioners and researchers. The only people saying that the report calls for practitioners to be taken out of research are those who are trying to steer the research dollars away from research and toward themselves.

The only people suggesting that forensic science practitioners will be shut out are those with some association to ASCLD.

Why would Joe Bono do this? Why would he be on the ASCLD team and not the AAFS team?

It’s right there in his CV. Joe Bono is the Contract Manager for ASCLD Consulting. He has a huge financial interest in making sure that ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB get that Draft Legislation that puts them on the top of the heap. It would seem to be a massive conflict of interest for him to be representing the thousands of members of the AAFS at this time in history, but I guess that’s for them to decide.

Ken Melson- Where’s My Legislation?

Also at the IPES meeting was Ken Melson, Deputy Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Ken is also the co-chair of the Subcommittee for Forensic Science operating out of the White House that proposes to address all of the concerns of the NAS Report in regards to the needs for research in forensic science so that it won’t be necessary to spend any money on research. Isn’t that sweet of him?

Ken Melson is also the Law Enforcement/Prosecutor member of the Board of Directors of ASCLD/LAB and he sits on the Ethics Committee of the AAFS (I know, right?). It would seem to be an obscene conflict of interest to be the Deputy Director of the ATF while at the same time acting as a member of the Board of Directors of ASCLD/LAB which is trying to influence legislation in congress to funnel so much cash and power in the direction of ASCLD/LAB and to also be the co-chair of a Subcommittee operating out of the White House that seems hell-bent on assisting ASCLD/LAB in its efforts to stifle the recommendations of the congressionally-mandated NAS Report and instead funnel the funding toward appointing ASCLD/LAB to be the accreditation agency of the nation.

At the IPES meeting, Ken Melson announced that his big idea is that his White House Subcommittee is going to put together twenty (20!) articles for each discipline with which those disciplines can defend their science. That way, according to Ken’s big ol’ brain, those forensic science disciplines will be bullet-proof, with less than two dozen articles with which to defend themselves.

Remember in a previous post when I was explaining how research is something that just keeps going and builds on itself continuously? I quoted language from the NAS Report that showed that the NAS Committee wants the feds to give forensic science more money to build research programs that are a collaboration between forensic science practitioners and universities so that forensic science can benefit from such research, not so that forensic science practitioners will be shut out.

The only people suggesting that forensic science practitioners will be shut out are those with some association to ASCLD.

In that previous post, I told you to go to this website and do a couple of searches for a couple of terms to see what a real body of research looks like. I told you to search for two neurotoxins, methylmercury and polychlorinated biphenyls, and see how many articles you came up with. The number of articles were 4,502 for methylmercury and 12,440 for polychlorinated biphenyls. Those are just two specific neurotoxins. Search “DDT.” How about “stannous chloride.” Hell, search “gunshot.” Then ask Ken Melson why he thinks 20 articles constitutes a body of research and why it is taking him 2 years in a shady White House Subcommittee to cull those 20 articles from all the rest.

One more point that makes Ken Melson’s 20 article solution even more profane is this quote from the NAS Report itself regarding the state of Firearms and Tool Mark research (emphasis added):

The scientific knowledge base for toolmark and firearms analysis is fairly limited. For example, a report from Hamby, Brundage, and Thorpe includes capsule summaries of 68 toolmark and firearms studies.

Sixty-eight studies. Sixty-eight studies isn’t considered a substantial enough body of research but Ken Melson is sure that 20 will be. Sure thing. Ken Melson will convince congress that he’s solved the research problem, he’ll help get ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB all the funding that should have gone to research, and then all the forensic scientists will be sent marching into the guns of the defense attorneys with 20 articles to defend themselves with. Thanks a bunch, Ken.

At the IPES meeting, Ken Melson stood up to make his presentation and asked everyone, with as much swagger as he could muster, “Where’s the legislation?” in a tone that suggested that the NAS Report had not crossed the minds of anyone on Capitol Hill. He seemed to want to convey that he was doing the forensic science community a favor by stockpiling a massive TWENTY articles for each of our disciplines, sparing us from any further research.

As I have already pointed out, Ken Melson was an active participant in the roundtable discussions initially called by the CFSO which resulted in the Draft Legislation that ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB were so giddy about and which they thought would be introduced before the August recess. So, I can’t help but think that what Ken meant to say was, “Where the hell is my legislation?”

Dean Gialamas and Greg Matheson- The Tweedles, Dee and Dum

Dean Gialamas, Past-president of ASCLD and Director of the Orange County, California, Sheriff-Coroner Department Crime Lab, and Greg Matheson, President-elect of ASCLD and Lab Director of the Los Angeles Police Department Crime Lab, upon seeing their blessed Draft Legislation, almost immediately began to gleefully show exactly what kind of leadership they would inflict upon the rest of the country if given the power that they tried to convince the Senate Judiciary Committee staffers was necessary for them to “fix” forensic science.

For those of you who have been under a rock, there were some roundtable discussions, initially called by the CFSO, in which these badly motivated human beings tried to convince some staffers from the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was no need for research at all. All they needed to do was turn everything over to ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB and that would fix everything. So the Senate Judiciary Committee staffers released this Draft Legislation on May 5, 2010 that proposed to do just that.

Upon seeing what they thought was their victory, Dean Gialamas, Greg Matheson, and other members of ASCLD lead a successful effort to shut down the California Crime Lab Task Force.

The California Crime Lab Task Force was a group that was mandated by the state legislature to look into how to improve upon the work of crime labs and included defense attorneys and academic experts in its review of crime lab activities.

One point made by the members of ASCLD in shutting down the California Crime Lab Task Force, was that they wanted “to postpone any further discussion in the task force until [they] had the opportunity to see what Washington was proposing.”

This was on June 3, 2010, one month after the May 5 release of the Draft Legislation that ASCLD was so proud to have had such a strong influence on. They believed that they had convinced Washington to propose to delegate everything to them.

They even voted down a motion by Jennifer Friedman, Los Angeles County Deputy Public Defender, to let members who wanted to submit written proposals for oversight models do so and to let the Task Force go ahead and meet as scheduled on August 5, 2010.

And the Tweedles have been enormously proud of what they see as their victory in Washington that allows them to shut out any oversight and transparency. How do I know that ASCLD was proud of their “influence” in Washington? I have also printed this before, but just to reiterate, ASCLD actually put it on their website:

Forensic reform legislation will likely be passed this summer as a result of the recently released NAS report “Strengthing Forensic Science in the United States:A Path Forward”…

Chairman Pete Marone and the CFSO have made tremendous strides to influence the forensic reform legislation that is nearing introduction in Congress…

President-Elect Greg Matheson (California) will be representing ASCLD in future CFSO activities.

That pretty much sums up ASCLD right there: they conduct themselves with all the subtlety and genius that you would expect from mid-level civil service managers.

Mike Grubb- Master Planner

Mike Grubb, Crime Lab Director at the San Diego Police Department, is the current Chair of the Board of Directors of ASCLD/LAB. Earlier this year, Mike Grubb made a presentation laying out ASCLD/LAB’s master plan for what the United States can expect if ASCLD/LAB gets its way and the Draft Legislation that was released on May 5, 2010 is made into law. Luckily, I was able to obtain not only a copy of Mike Grubb’s PowerPoint presentation but also a copy of his notes.

Mike Grubb goes to great pains in his notes to explain that ASCLD/LAB is very thorough, even though ASCLD/LAB only examines 5 case packages for an examiner every 5 years. Mike Grubb also claims that ASLCD/LAB is not a

“good ol boy” system – “you sign off on us, and we’ll sign off on you.”

It just isn’t so.

Even though, as Mike Grubb explains earlier in his notes,

The strength of ASCLD/LAB is its delegate assembly, which is now at approximately 375 members. Each accredited laboratory has one vote in the delegate assembly. Any substantial changes in the program (for example, significant changes to requirements) – are taken to a vote of the delegate assembly.

So the labs who are being accredited get to vote on how they are judged. Also, board members, including Mike Grubb, are voted in by the Delegate Assembly (the labs that they are accrediting).

But the real meat is in what Mike Grubb has to say about ASCLD/LAB’s views on the NAS Report’s recommendations. Grubb’s notes say that

As I was reading the NAS Report, for several of the recommendations I found myself saying, “ASCLD/LAB is the response to that, or has a response to that.”

Then, for the next slide, in response to Recommendation 1b for the National Institute of Forensic Science to establish mandatory accreditation:

ASCLD/LAB supports mandatory accreditation… ASCLD/LAB, however, cannot make it mandatory. That has to be accomplished by some other mechanism.

And what ever would that mechanism be, I wonder? Perhaps to have it turned into law by congress and then turned over to a “qualified professional organization” such as ASCLD/LAB so that they can then run it however they please, such as the Draft Legislation that ASCLD/LAB helped to write suggests? That should work just fine.

Then there comes the question of certification of forensic scientists. In Mike Grubb’s mind, crime lab directors and ASCLD/LAB have an answer for that, too. He acknowledges that many professional organizations such as the International Association for Identification, the American Board of Criminalistics, and the American Board of Forensic Toxicology have certification programs, but they are only voluntary he points out.

For the record, ASCLD/LAB accreditation is voluntary, too. And lots of other organizations have certification programs for their forensic disciplines.

But Mike Grubb has what I’m sure he believes is an excellent point to make. And here it is (emphasis added):

We look at the education, training, competency testing, proficiency testing and a sampling of at least 5 cases completed by each analyst – so we’re seeing the casework documentation (notes) and the reports generated by these examiners.

To me, this is a much more rigorous examination of a crime lab employee than just taking a test and passing.

There is a clause in ISO 17025 which states that management must give formal written authorization for each analyst to perform certain types of analyses, to use certain instrumentation, and to issue reports.

Why couldn’t this be the equivalent of certification?

Why indeed. Why wouldn’t we want people associated with ASCLD/LAB and ASCLD certifying that people are good enough at their jobs to send others to prison and death row? People like Dean Gialamas, Greg Matheson, Mike Grubb, Doreen Hudson, Ralph Keaton, John Neuner, Michael Creasy, Ken Melson, Joe Bono, David B. Petersen, Jerry Richardson (former head of the NC SBI), whoever is running the New York State Crime Lab in Albany, Mike Sheppo, and the countless others who have contributed to the delinquency of their own labs or of ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB. A lot of these people aren’t even scientists themselves.

And, yes. That did sound like the Chair of ASCLD/LAB advocating doing away with the certification programs of professional organizations as they exist today.

Not to mention the fact that ASCLD, ASCLD/LAB, and ASCLD Consulting appear to, at the very, very least, have been knowingly filing false tax documents for some years now and have filed Articles of Organization (called Articles of Incorporation everywhere else) and Annual Reports with the state of North Carolina with a fake business address for ASCLD Consulting. And it’s all the same damn people running all three organizations out of the same damn office.

But you want the United States Congress to legislate that you guys should be able to certify that crime labs and forensic scientists are good and honest for the rest of the country. Right.

Moving on to ASCLD/LAB’s solution to detecting fraud and bias (HA!)… For anyone who is wondering why crime lab directors can’t find bad forensic scientists it is evidently because, according to the Chair of the Board of Directors of ASCLD/LAB, they don’t feel it is their responsibility to look.

Do ASCLD/LAB‐accredited labs have, and do the ISO criteria do anything to help us identify mistakes, fraud and bias?…

What about fraud and bias? These are much more difficult to uncover, because if a person has the intent of going bad, then that person is not likely to leave clear evidence of it. No clear trail. Fraud, whether it be drylabbing or pilfering drugs for personal use ‐these are most likely to be uncovered by suspicion by coworkers:

“There’s no way he could have completed that work in that short an amount of time”

“Why does this drug bag have 2 sets of staple holes instead of one?”

So… WOW. Nice attitude toward ferreting out bad scientists in your lab. Let their coworkers find them? So, if they aren’t turned in by a snitch it’s OK for you to turn a blind eye? No policies and procedures necessary here. We’ll just wait for someone with bigger balls than their boss to man-up and blow the whistle on all our bad hiring choices.

A couple of slides later, when discussing the NAS Report’s recommendation for a national code of ethics, Mike Grubb’s notes state:

[In our guiding principles] #5 states that when we see unethical activity, we report it.

I refer you to the activities of your own organization and your shockingly lax attitude toward finding and rooting out fraud and abuse in your own labs, Mr. Grubb.

Great leadership, ASCLD/LAB. Not even a suggestion for how to find fraud and bias. And “when we see it, we’ll report it.” Sure thing. As long as it doesn’t apply to you. Or your buddies. And so long as it doesn’t inconvenience you or make you uncomfortable or have to make a hard decision or something.

The CFSO, Peter Marone, and Line 13 of the CFSO’s 990 Form

See you next time, folks!