What the NAS Report Was Supposed To Say: The Lobbyist, The Senator, and ASCLD’s War Against Its Own

Unraveling the moves made by the Consortium of Forensic Science Organizations (CFSO) and those involved in its member organizations surrounding the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Report titled “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward” was not an easy task.

But it was made easier by the fact that someone at the CFSO decided at some point that its mission was to make ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB the rulers of the world, evidently to the exclusion of the wants or needs of its other members. Picking the slowest horse to win is never advisable.

Once again, the members of the CFSO are:

• ASCLD
• ASCLD/LAB
• American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS)
• 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)

However, for anyone who is just joining us, let me make some characterizations of the member organizations of the CFSO based on the behavior of their representatives since the release of the NAS Report and from what I have been told by various members of these organizations over the last few months.

• ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB- These two groups appear to have taken over the CFSO. They operate out of the same office in Garner, North Carolina with their for-profit consulting company, ASCLD Consulting. ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB appear to have filed incorrect tax documents for at least the last few years and ASCLD Consulting has filed Articles of Organization and Annual Reports with the state of North Carolina with a fake business address. At the roundtables with the Senate Judiciary Committee staffers to discuss Forensic Reform Legislation, representatives from these two groups made statements that appeared to defy all logic and made forensic scientists in general look like lunatics.
• American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS)- Immediate past-President Tom Bohan was pretty much considered a good guy and had good ideas about moving forensic science forward. Current President Joe Bono, as the Contract Manager for ASCLD Consulting, has strong financial ties to ASCLD and is seen as trying to tear up the tracks that Tom Bohan laid down to move forensic science forward. Along with other forces for and against research and collaboration within the higher ranks, there seems to be a bit of a schism in AAFS right now. I think they will be fine in the end when members discover the true nature of the relationships of all involved.
• Forensic Quality Services (FQS)- A laboratory accreditation group. I’ll discuss their origins and position in a minute.
• International Association for Identification (IAI)- Typically a pretty good group. Did not appear to support the ramblings of the ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB representatives at the roundtables with the Senate Judiciary Committee staffers. The IAI has openly supported the NAS Recommendations and generally believes in openness and transparency.
• National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME)- This group does not appear to be going out of its way to support the efforts of ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB. They have their own accreditation program for Medical Examiner offices, so they don’t really need to get caught up in ASCLD’s campaign.
• Society of Forensic Toxicology/American Board of Forensic Toxicology (SOFT/ABFT)- It was the SOFT/ABFT representative, along with Tom Bohan of the AAFS, who tried to help point out the flawed logic of the ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB representatives at the roundtables, so these guys are OK in my book.

At this point, it is necessary to introduce you to a couple of other organizations of the ASCLD empire.

In 1995, ASCLD founded an organization called the National Forensic Science Technology Center (NFSTC) with $1,500 and one staff member at St. Petersburg College in St. Petersburg, Florida. Since then, the NFSTC has grown to include a staff of 54 permanent, full-time employees housed in their own facility in Largo, Florida and over $13 million in income according to their last annual report.

The NFSTC offers training and other support services for crime labs and forensic scientists around the country, almost always for free because they are now supported through grants and federal funding. One of the things the NFSTC does is free assessment audits of, for example, a lab’s DNA operations. You may remember from an earlier post, that ASCLD Consulting, which was founded in 2007, offers assessment audits for a fee of, for example, a lab’s DNA operations. Yep. That’s right. Compare and contrast.

In 1999, the NFSTC started a program, at the behest of ASCLD/LAB, to help crime labs meet ISO Guide 25 (now ISO 17025) standards. That project spawned what is now Forensic Quality Services (FQS), another CFSO member organization. FQS is now a stand-alone, nonprofit organization and accredits crime labs, just like ASCLD/LAB. FQS is considered by ASCLD/LAB to be a competitor. Yep. Now it starts to get good and bloody.

FQS, unlike ASCLD/LAB, fully supports the recommendations of the NAS Report. FQS also fully supports the formation of the National Institute of Forensic Science (NIFS) that ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB have fought so hard against.

If you are speculating that it would be in ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB’s best interests to somehow get rid of NFSTC and FQS, you would probably not be alone in that speculation.

Let’s see what happens.

The Lobbyist

Meet Beth Lavach. Beth is the lobbyist for the CFSO. Has been for years. Some people believe that lobbyists are bad, which is sometimes true, but sometimes not. Having representation on Capitol Hill is not in and of itself a bad thing.

For a while, having Beth as a lobbyist was a good thing. Beth worked to help get more funding for the Paul Coverdell National Forensic Sciences Improvement Act, which was introduced before her time with the CFSO.

Forensic science also got the NAS Report, which was commissioned by the Science, State, Justice, Commerce, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2006 and on whose committee sat none other than Peter Marone, Chair and ASCLD/LAB representative of the CFSO. Yes, the CFSO asked for the NAS Report.

The next sequence of events gets a little murky.

The bill authorizing the NAS Committee to meet and issue the NAS Report was passed in the fall of 2005. The expectation, for at least some in the CFSO, was that the report would say that crime lab directors need gobs more money to keep doing whatever it is they do and that laboratory accreditation was absolutely necessary. Naturally, at that time, ASCLD/LAB would be the choice to be the nation’s accrediting agency. FQS didn’t become a stand-alone entity until 2003, so it wasn’t a real threat to ASCLD/LAB yet.

In the meantime, ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB founded ASCLD Consulting in 2007. ASCLD Consulting is a for-profit group that offers to help labs figure out what they need to do to meet ASCLD/LAB accreditation. For a price, of course. All they had to do now was wait for the NAS Report to be issued declaring that congress should give them gobs of cash and make them rulers of the forensic science world.

But the NAS Report didn’t say that.

The NAS Report said that more money needed to go to research, not to crime lab directors and ASCLD/LAB. The NAS Report said that congress needed to create a whole new federal agency to oversee forensic science so that it can grow into something great and respectable, not turn it over to those shady characters who are filing bad tax returns and business documents from an office off the interstate somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

The CFSO had to take action, quick.

The CFSO released this statement on February 17, 2009, one day before the release of the NAS Report:

“The CFSO has long called for a comprehensive review of the state of forensics in this country,” said CFSO chairman Peter Marone. “The Consortium would like to thank Senator Richard Shelby, (R-AL) for his vision and leadership in requesting this and we would also recognize the National Academy for its role in authoring this landmark study.”

Peter Marone’s allegiance to the report that he helped to write degraded rather rapidly after it was released. That statement above was accompanied by an invitation from the CFSO to the first roundtable “to craft its strategy for addressing the needs of the Forensic Sciences in the United States.”

The CFSO’s big point at that first roundtable? Recommendation Number 1 from the NAS Report (a new federal agency called the National Institute of Forensic Science) can’t possibly be implemented in this economic climate. Plus, the Department of Homeland Security was the last new federal agency and who wants a repeat of that, right? So what are we going to do instead?

And so started the CFSO’s campaign to get its effort to crown ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB rulers of the forensic science world back on track.

The CFSO roundtables soon grew to include the Senate Judiciary Committee staffers and resulted in the Draft Legislation that would turn over everything to a “qualified professional organization” and was mainly focused on accreditation, not research.

However, since the authorization of the NAS Report in the fall of 2005, FQS has grown by leaps and bounds. The NAS Report itself was released on February 18, 2009.

FQS now accredits all the labs of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Illinois State Police, a couple of U.S. EPA labs, several other state crime labs, the crime labs for Philadelphia, Denver, Honolulu, and quite a few private labs, university labs, and others. FQS also lists the labs from which it has suspended or withdrawn accreditation, which ASCLD/LAB does not appear to do.

In March 2010, FQS was accepted as a signatory to the Inter American Accreditation Cooperation (IAAC) Multilateral Recognition Arrangement (MLA). What this means is that their accreditations are recognized internationally by other accreditation bodies. They are in the big time now. This has apparently sent ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB into a panic.

Something had to be done.

The Senator

Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) is the senior senator from Alabama and has long been a friend of forensic science. Beth Lavach and the CFSO have done their best in the past several months to jeopardize the relationships of forensic science with congress with their antics in Senator Shelby’s office.

Richard Shelby sits on the very powerful Committee on Appropriations where he is, among other things, the ranking Republican of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the names of these committees, it is the Committee on Appropriations that decides where all the money goes that the federal government spends. The Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies (also called the CJS) decides where the money goes for agencies such as:

• The entire Department of Justice (ATF, FBI, DEA, Bureau of Prisons, NIJ, etc.)
• The Department of Commerce which includes NIST, the agency that employs Mark Stolorow, Ken Melson’s other co-chair of the Subcommittee for Forensic Science operating out of the White House, and
• Science Agencies such as the National Science Foundation

Basically any agency that would give money to a crime lab. Richard Shelby is the head Republican on the committee that makes the decisions for the funding of all these agencies.

When the CFSO has a problem, Beth Lavach goes to see her favorite senator, Richard Shelby, and you see action from Shelby’s office. Sometimes it’s something big, like the NAS Report. Sometimes it’s something smaller.

April 13 Letter From Richard Shelby to FBI Director Robert Mueller

Currently, many police department crime labs send out their rape kits and other DNA samples to private laboratories to help clear their DNA backlogs. Unfortunately, when the private labs complete their analysis, they cannot upload the results to CODIS, the
national DNA database.

Current FBI protocols require that police crime labs do a technical review (retest) of every sample sent to a private lab before the results can be uploaded to CODIS. So the rape kits are processed, but the DNA data doesn’t get uploaded into the database where it would be compared to other DNA samples. This creates a secondary backlog for crime labs.

When ASCLD found out that the FBI was going to announce that it was going to review its policies to possibly allow those private laboratories to enter their test results directly to CODIS without the extra technical review from the police crime labs, ASCLD called an emergency meeting at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science (AAFS) in Seattle on February 24, 2010. ASCLD issued this statement declaring its position against allowing the private labs access to CODIS. They want that power to stay with them.

On March 23, 2010, the FBI issued a press release announcing that they had “established an ongoing dialogue” with various stakeholders to decide whether or not to allow the private labs to upload directly to CODIS without the technical review currently required.

The CFSO and, more specifically, Beth Lavach, went into action. On April 13, 2010, Senator Shelby issued a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller demanding an answer for this “abrupt and extraordinary change in policy.”

Shelby’s letter goes on to cite the opposition of the nation’s crime lab directors (ASCLD), to ridicule Mueller for his inexperience in relation to the lab directors, and basically ask him who in blue hell he thinks he is for even thinking about doing such a thing.

What Senator Shelby’s letter ignored was evidence to the contrary of the position of the lab directors. Evidence such as this memo dated November 5, 2009, less than six months before his letter to Director Mueller, prepared by the Los Angeles Police Department Crime Lab (starting at page 10 of the PDF; the crime lab is part of Detective Bureau) which is run by the President-Elect of ASCLD, Greg Matheson. The memo states (emphasis in original):

The LAPD has outsourced the testing of kits to reduce the backlog; unfortunately, the FBI has a policy that requires all kits that are outsourced must be retested by another public crime lab, such as LAPD, to verify results. This delay is outrageous and has created a whole new backlog. There are now 1,102 kits that have to wait an average of 72 days for this SECOND REVIEW! We need to press the FBI to immediately change their policy…

The LAPD has requested, on two separate occasions (once in 2005 and most recently in May 2009), that the FBI revise their policy to allow accredited contract labs to upload their results directly without this time consuming additional government lab review requirement. There is growing pressure on the FBI from government labs nationwide on this matter.

In 2007, even Peter Marone participated in an article for Law Enforcement Technology magazine to extol the virtues of outsourcing a crime lab’s DNA backlog, along with Ralph Keaton, ASCLD/LAB’s Executive Director, and then-President of ASCLD, Bill Marbaker.

Shelby’s letter goes on to demand a laundry list of things from Director Mueller’s office. Then the letter begins talking about these insidious “DNA lobbyists” (referring to the private DNA testing labs), implying that the letter is referring to the same “profit-driven, private DNA companies” that do outsourced DNA testing for crime labs. In fact, at this point, Shelby’s letter is talking about the NFSTC, a nonprofit corporation that does not do any forensic testing and offers its services to any crime lab, almost always for free.

Shelby’s letter has narrowed its focus to the NFSTC by referring to certain grant audit reports (GR-40-09-006 and 09-38 September 2009), one of which leads straight to the NFSTC (09-38) and the other which does not appear to exist (GR-40-09-006). However, there is a grant audit for the NFSTC that is one digit off from the one listed in Shelby’s letter (GR-40-09-005). I could not find any grant audits beyond this number (005), so the one mentioned in Shelby’s letter may be a typo.

In any case, this seems to be the first outward evidence of ASCLD’s war on the NFSTC, which will soon grow to include FQS.

ASCLD’s War Against Its Own

Since the April 13 letter from Shelby’s office to FBI Director Robert Mueller, ASCLD’s war against the NFSTC and FQS has become much more obvious.

First, there have been a couple of other things that have come from Richard Shelby’s office over the summer. One is rather huge and disturbing for the NFSTC and FQS. This is part of the proposed CJS Appropriations Bill for 2011, in the section for funding for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ):

The Committee directs the Inspector General to investigate the former co-location and current relationship of the three entities [NIJ, NFSTC, and FQS] to assure the American people that no improprieties have or are occurring; with solesourcing from NIJ to NFSTC, NFSTC is not sharing inappropriate information or intelligence with FQS; and that the taxpayers are assured that an ethical Gold Standard of DOJ dollars is being maintained.

This basically calls into question the fact that the NIJ funds the NFSTC through grants which the NFSTC then uses to fund their free programs to crime labs. What the Inspector General (and a lot of other people) may find amusing, is in some of the language in an earlier part of this section of the bill:

FQS is a for-profit entity previously co-located with NFSTC, and co-shared and performed many of the same functions, staff, equipment, and facilities.

In fact, FQS is a nonprofit corporation. The “former co-location” that the bill refers to is the fact that, as I mentioned earlier, FQS was spawned from a project at NFSTC. A project that ASCLD/LAB asked the NFSTC to do.

The second item to come from Richard Shelby’s office was a letter that was issued on August 6, 2010, the last working day for the Senate before the long August recess. This letter was also issued to FBI Director Robert Mueller, but targeted the NFSTC specifically.

This August 6 letter states that there is a DNA backlog of 233,000 samples nationwide with the FBI accounting for 225,000 samples. That would leave 8,000 samples in state and local labs. Given that the Los Angeles Police Department alone had 1,102 in their own secondary backlog less than a year ago and there has been no change in conditions (access to CODIS for private labs or a major influx of trained personnel or other resources to the system), I find those numbers a little hard to believe.

Shelby’s letter then takes Mueller to task for allowing FBI employees to work for the NFSTC in their DNA assessment audit program. Their free DNA assessment audit program. Shelby’s letter states:

Other auditing groups are available and used by many public labs, but they do not have the benefit of having their reports pre-screened and then edited by the FBI Lab’s DNA unit chief before they are “officially” submitted to the FBI Lab for approval. This gives the NFSTC an unfair advantage, and provides the FBI Laboratory with a perception of questionable behavior by its DNA employees.

Yes, there are other auditing groups available. Like ASCLD Consulting. Which charges a fee for their services. Perhaps someone should point out to ASCLD Consulting that the “unfair advantage” that the NFSTC has is that their services are free. And that they didn’t file Articles of Organization and Annual Reports with a fake business address.

Shelby’s letter then angrily denounces comments made by the FBI Lab Director at a conference in London regarding ASCLD’s opposition to the change in technical review standards for CODIS to allow private labs to upload their DNA results. The letter ends by misstating the date of the original April letter.

On Friday, August 13, one week after Senator Shelby’s second letter to FBI Director Mueller, an email with attachment went out to ASCLD’s membership about a proposed change in its bylaws.

The proposed revisions reflect that the ex-officio positions of “the current assistant director, laboratory division, of the FBI” and a “current member of the board of directors of the National Forensic Science Technology Center (NFSTC) would be removed from the ASCLD Board of Directors.

Nothing like making it official.

What Richard Shelby Knew

Do I believe that Richard Shelby knew that he was sending letters to FBI Director Robert Mueller that contained incorrect information? Or that there was information going into the CJS Appropriations Bill for 2011 that was incorrect?

Nope.

I am not here to comment on his politics, but Richard Shelby is not a stupid man and he has tried to be a great friend to forensic science. I think that Senator Shelby believed he was acting on information from a very reliable source, one he believed had no reason to give him bad information.

And that source- our source- the CFSO and Beth Lavach, now acting solely for the benefit of ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB, has jeopardized the future relationships and future funding for forensic science because of their own greed.

Did Beth Lavach think that no one would notice that the letters coming from Senator Shelby’s office contained bad information? Or that the information in the CJS Appropriations Bill was incorrect? Is anyone really that stupid?

Richard Shelby is up for re-election this year. While he is not facing a very tough challenge, it is a very heated campaign season and surely someone would love to see this sort of thing end up in a campaign commercial somewhere. Did Beth Lavach think that would win points for forensic science, which is basically a charity case on the Hill anyway?

ASCLD: Relevant No More

ASCLD is a group that has outlived its usefulness to the forensic science community. The vast majority of its members are no longer forensic scientists, if they ever were in the first place. Their personal and professional interests clearly do not mesh with those of practicing forensic scientists and they should not be speaking as such. They should be recognized for what they are: mid-level civil service managers, not forensic scientists.

Why would ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB be so strongly opposed to openness and transparency? The reality is quite simple: it will show what a horrible job they have been doing in running their labs. As I have said before and as I have heard from many, many forensic scientists since: all forensic scientists know at least one other who should not be in the field. The only reason that those people are still in the field is that they are, for some reason, being sheltered by their lab directors. Good forensic scientists have no fear of transparency. Bad lab directors are horrified of it.

And now they have embarrassed us on a grand scale. It is time for this group of self-serving, mediocrity-embracing charlatans to sit down and shut up.

And it is time for real forensic scientists to finally rise to the occasion and take responsibility for their science.