The ASCLD Drama Map-UPDATED

UPDATED- Updated to include the fact that Kevin Lothridge is also a past-president of ASCLD and provide links to the website of the Forensic Innovation Center.

OK… Let’s see if we can get some of this same-ness mapped out.

Let’s start with who’s who.

Yes, You Are All The Same.

All these people who are fighting each other? They all came from ASCLD. That’s the short story.

Here’s the longer version.

First, you have the ASCLDs. That’s the:

American Society of Crime Lab Directors (ASCLD) and their Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB). ASCLD is the little club that represents civil service middle-managers who “run” crime labs.

ASCLD/LAB is the little club that ASCLD formed to supposedly “accredit” their own labs as a sort of “stamp of approval” to say, “See! We’re doing good work! You can’t come in and see what we’re doing. Oh, no, no, no, no, no… but, just take our word for it. It’s great in here.”

In 1995, ASCLD founded the National Forensic Science Technology Center (NFSTC), they claim with a congressional earmark. I say “they claim” because I got the information from the NFSTC’s website, and I’m getting onto the side of the family that is given to great exaggeration, delusions of grandeur, and an uncomfortable relationship with the truth, even by ASCLD standards. The NFSTC was supposed to “focus on elevating the quality and consistency of forensic services in our nation’s crime laboratories.”

According to the NFSTC’s website, they have been diligently schlepping through the waste-high swamps of thankless public service hell to provide free services and training to crime labs across the nation all these years hence.

Actually, what’s really been happening is a few people have been making a lot- and I do mean a LOT- of money with really not much to show for it besides some travel trailers that are starting to stack up somewhere in Georgia. And some really good food at conferences in resort areas. All paid for with tax-payer dollars that were probably supposed to process rape kits. But I’ll come back to that…

In some murky year that isn’t quite clear on the NFSTC’s website… but they seem to imply is in the early-ish 2000’s… the NFSTC created Forensic Quality Services (FQS), or what I have referred to as “ASCLD/LAB-South”. This does not please them.

FQS does accreditations, too. Just like ASCLD/LAB-North.

But, actually, FQS was, according to an e-mail someone from there sent me… “doing ISO 17025 accreditations as soon after the ISO standard was passed in 1998.” So… I guess they’ve been around a while. Good for them.

So, the family tree looks like this:

Also, almost everyone associated with leadership, board positions, etc., etc., etc. with all of these organizations is either an ASCLD past-president, ASCLD or ASCLD/LAB board member or former board member, or married to someone who has held one of those positions. So, yes. You are all the same.

A Word on Accreditation

Let me just explain what accreditation is right here. Accreditation exists in almost every field, in almost every industry. Medicine, oil, chemicals, cars… whatever it is, you can accredit it. The idea of accreditation is that you develop a good process, you validate that process, you show that it works and that it is reliable, and then you write it down in a manual.

That way, anybody you hire or anybody who walks into your factory or your lab can pick up that manual and know what it is you’re supposed to be doing. Also, if you are accredited to a certain standard, it means that whoever uses your products or services can be guaranteed that you are performing up to the same standard every time because everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing.

For example, if you’re buying tires, you want to buy tires from a factory that makes tires the same damn way every time, not from some idiot who doesn’t want to be “constrained” by “rules” or “processes.” And you want Mr. Tire Man to allow you to check out his factory and supplies to make sure he’s always manufacturing quality new tires and not just putting out retreads from the junk yard. You also don’t want to buy tires from someone who tries to convince you that his idea of “round” is so special and so secret that he just can’t explain it to you because you wouldn’t possibly understand.

Putting people in jail is no different. If anything, it’s more important to make sure crime labs are accredited. And if someone can’t or won’t explain to you how they do what they do, but they want to put people in prison and on death row with it, that’s pretty messed up and you should not trust them.

However, accreditation is only as good as the process and only as good as the standard. Even with ISO accreditation, ASCLD/LAB and FQS (and A2LA) set their own “supplemental standards.” To put it in slightly simplified terms… ISO 17025 is the general standard for scientific testing and calibration labs; the supplemental standards are the specifics for forensic testing and calibration labs. So, even with ISO… there’s room for an accreditation body (ASCLD/LAB, FQS, and A2LA) to make the standard mean as much or as little as they want.

ASCLD/LAB allows its “Delegate Assembly” to set its accreditation standards. That’s not good. That means that the labs that are being accredited set the standards by which they are being judged. And they haven’t set the bar very high.

ASCLD/LAB is correct, for example, when they defend the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (NC SBI) as having been “in compliance with accreditation standards” when they withheld exculpatory evidence resulting in the conviction of innocent people. The NC SBI was in compliance with the ASCLD/LAB accreditation standards that allowed them to write evidence withholding policies into their procedures manual. Right up until 2010.

Also, ASCLD/LAB recently pulled together a few people for quick-and-dirty round tables to rubber stamp some “uncertainty measurements” in a week or less. So that should make everybody feel great about the scienterrificalibility of their stuff.

FQS has vague references to “deriving” their supplemental standards from the guidance documents of the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC), which is a good thing to reference. But no further indication on what that means or who was involved in deriving or contributing beyond that. Don’t know if it was the few forensic labs that 13-year-old FQS counts as clients or if the NFSTC used some of the tax-payer money it funnels to its various self-serving functions or what. I asked FQS for an answer on this and got a very vague non-answer that just told me what the documents were, not who contributed to them.

Also, you have to buy ASCLD/LAB’s documents if you want to see them. FQS implies the same. A2LA’s are on their website for everyone to see. Another reason I like A2LA. Also, A2LA invited me to sit in for a day on one of their Forensic Examination Advisory Committee meetings. It was very impressive. To clarify, I was not working for A2LA, I was only there as an observer.

Now, back to how all these people who came from the same place think they’re different…

The CFSO and The NFSTC

At some point, it looked as though someone in the CFSO decided that they needed to destroy the NFSTC, soap opera-style.

The CFSO is the Consortium of Forensic Science Organizations, which is a lobbying group. Until recently, the CFSO consisted of seven organizations, including FQS. Someone from FQS contacted me very recently claiming that FQS pulled out of the CFSO “several months ago” because it “had taken a direction that is only beneficial to ASCLD-LAB and not the rest of the forensic community.”

I don’t know how they count up to “several” at FQS, but it can’t have been that long ago. They were still in as of the end of March of this year and the CFSO’s website was just updated. And the last e-mail I got from someone at FQS (before a few days ago) was August 30, which was full of complaining about ASCLD/LAB and mum on the issue of pulling out of the CFSO.

This is where I usually list out the organizations that make up the CFSO. But what I’d like to do first is explain the corporate structure of the NFSTC.

The NFSTC was founded by ASCLD, but incorporated in Florida as a nonprofit membership corporation. What that means is, throughout the years, the membership corporation has become made up of various member organizations who each send representatives to sit on the board of directors, kind of like the CFSO.

So…

The CFSO members (until yesterday or whenever) are/were:

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

The NFSTC members are (keeping in mind that FQS was housed at NFSTC until very recently):

• ASCLD
• American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS)
• National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME)
• International Association for Identification (IAI)
• Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF)
• American Board of Criminalists (ABC)
• Association of Forensic Quality Assurance Managers (AFQAM)
• Florida International University
• University of South Florida
• University of Central Florida
• Southeastern Public Safety Institute of St. Petersburg College

ASCLD/LAB used to be listed as a member of the corporation, as did the DEA, but they aren’t any more.

If you’d like a side-by-side comparison on that…

So, yes… you are all the same.

You are even responsible for the same messes that you have created for yourselves, whether you think so or not. Let’s take a look at that, shall we?

The Stupid, Stupid Origins

When I was looking through all of this, it became pretty apparent that these organizations- the CFSO, NFSTC, and all their related organizations- are so organizationally and legally intertwined that there was simply no way that they didn’t know what was going on with the other.

But I’m always getting “leads” and “information” from some source or another that supposedly indicates that they are the bitterest of enemies. The problem with that is… they are all legally bound to the mistakes of each other, for the most part. And the mistakes have been building up rather rapidly lately in ways that have some pretty dire legal consequences for the group.

Which is why, for a little while, I thought that there was the distinct possibility that this whole “war” between these organizations was just a show they were putting on for certain people who have a distinct disdain for some of these organizations in order to try to divert attention away from what was really going on with them.

Because that would be a clever thing to do. Now, however, I’m back to thinking that they are just that stupid.

Going back to December 2007, Crime Lab Report (yes, those geniuses. The ones who brought you that amazing defense of Jill Spriggs et al. regarding withholding evidence and putting innocent people in prison), published a rant on NFSTC starting their own accreditation arm, FQS. In their typical “how dare you do this to a lab director” way, Crime Lab Report lays out their characteristically shrill case for why accreditation of forensic labs is different and can’t possibly be comprehended by anyone but them.

They denigrate ISO 17025 accreditation for being “relatively new” and “not specific to forensic science” because “it is for evaluating the operations of all kinds of testing and calibration laboratories throughout the world.” Yes. What a horror, to be thought of on the same level as other kinds of science. ASCLD/LAB was offering ISO accreditation at the time, by the way.

Like most with a dictatorial bent, Crime Lab Report also argues against free market competition for accreditation bodies because, unlike other free markets, it will drive down standards, raise costs, and lower quality. Because fair and open competition is not really what it seems, our friends at Crime Lab Report tell us. It seems counterintuitive, but we’re just too stupid to understand, so just shut up and trust them. Also, accreditation decisions should not be left up to some “procurement official”, because government officials are… bad? Like lab directors? Local government middle-management think at its best.

Ah, Crime Lab Report. The gift that keeps on giving.

As always, the message is hammered home that forensic science belongs to lab managers and absolutely no one else… not forensic scientists or even the general public that forensic science is supposed to serve; only to those with the… umm… hell, let’s call it a skill… to pass a civil service exam and get to middle management in local government.

But, mostly, the December 2007 Crime Lab Report sets out to show what slimy bastards those people down at NFSTC and FQS are, because they created a competitor to ASCLD/LAB. It lays out the non-compete clause that Bill Tilstone and Jo Ann Given signed and then broke and talks of how, “astonishingly”, NFSTC “committed itself to both supporting and competing against ASCLD/LAB.”

Crime Lab Report is what happens when ASCLD finds itself without an official outlet for retaliation.

The December 2007 Crime Lab Report also puts down the scopes offered by FQS, arguing that offering accreditation on a unit-by-unit basis instead of for a full laboratory is irresponsible. Of course, ASCLD/LAB was doing the same thing, allowing labs to pick and choose which units they accredited. This was put on grand display by the incident with the New York State Trace Unit and Gary Veeder just a few months later. ASCLD/LAB will also accredit almost any scope you can imagine.

Over the past couple of years, with the NAS Report, the threat of forensic reform legislation, and a few other developments, the ASCLD folks and the NFSTC folks have stepped up their game to get themselves positioned to receive some real money and power. To do this, they appear to have a few key players in place to help them.

The Mascots

There are some people who have taken “sides” in this whole thing. For example, Ken Melson, former Director of the ATF and seemingly-eternal ASCLD/LAB board member, is a loyal ASCLD person. Michael Sheppo, current Director of the Office of Investigative and Forensic Sciences at the National Institutes of Justice (NIJ)- where all the grant money comes from- is very definitely an NFSTC person.

For those of you who have been under a rock, Ken Melson is the former Director of the ATF and All-Purpose Bureaucrat who was oh-so-aware that his agency was allowing guns to “walk” to Mexico during the fatally reckless Operation Fast & Furious. Yes, there are surely others who share responsibility, but Melson did his part and did it apparently without a conscience. But, as he’s shown before, other people’s lives and mortality aren’t really his concern. Must be a lawyer thing.

During Operation Fast & Furious, good ATF agents were ordered to stand down and just watch as known straw buyers (people who can purchase guns legally in the US) bought AK-47-type rifles and 50-caliber BMG rifles and then transferred them to suppliers of Mexican drug cartels. There was no attempt to render these firearms inoperable or fit them with tracking devices. They just let them go.

The ATF agents eventually blew the whistle on the whole thing because, as they predicted, innocent people were being killed with these guns, including U.S. law enforcement. Again, judging by his self-promotional tour, not really something that Ken Melson appeared to be concerned about. According to e-mails sent just after the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry who was killed with guns smuggled during Operation Fast & Furious, Melson was, in the traditional ASCLD fashion, not concerned with doing the right thing. He was just concerned with retaliating against the ATF agents who reported the flaws in Operation Fast & Furious. Awesome priorities, Ken.

While at ATF, Ken Melson seemed to be mostly concerned with his White House Subcommittee on Forensic Science, which he stocked with a lot of people who have histories similar to his: ASCLD past-presidents and board members, ASCLD/LAB board members, past and present, and those who have demonstrated that they are like-minded with traditional ASCLD policies. These include policies of cover and concealment of major problems in the laboratory (W. Mark Dale, 1, 2), retaliation against those who would want better for their labs (everyone associated with the DOD labs, 1, 2), and “forensic scientists” who have screwed up so bad (and denied it) that they were probably just glad to be included, much less “asked” for their “opinions” (Terry Green, Michael Wieners, 1).

The whole point of this seems to be to put ASCLD and friends in control of the forensic science system of the United States. Because that has worked oh-so-well for the last few decades that Congress is now calling for mandatory forensic science reform. Message obviously not received.

Michael Sheppo, on the other hand, is so, so, so much different than Ken Melson and those other damn ASCLD people. Or so I’m told. Ummmm… right.

Michael Sheppo is a past-president of ASCLD, former head honcho at Illinois State Police crime lab, member of the Board of Directors of the NFSTC from 1996 to 2006 (president from 1997 to 2005), founder and former president of FQS, and (as I said above) current Director of the Office of Investigative and Forensic Sciences (AKA, Head Money-Shoveler) at the NIJ.

Sheppo has also shown more than a little talent for retaliation, deception of superiors and other authorities, covering up problems where he works, and attempting to funnel money and power to his friends. Such a breath of the exact same air as we were just talking about.

As I’ve discussed here before, Sheppo very carefully misled the Inspector General’s office of Illinois to get them to approve his involvement with the NFSTC so he could subsequently sole-source training projects to them. An Illinois State Inspector General’s investigation found that FQS actually carried out some if not all of the training.

Not only that, but NFSTC provided training that cost much, much more than in-house training would have ($750,000 estimated by Sheppo to send the analysts to NFSTC versus $228,315 for in-house training). And the training was deemed to fall far short of the standards of the Illinois State Police by the Acting Training Coordinator of the DNA section and the Director of Training for the Illinois State Police.

Also, the NFSTC charged the Illinois State Police $81,200 for the use of facilities, even though it was specifically stated during an NFSTC board meeting regarding the Illinois State Police training contract that “the NIJ funded facility and equipment will be used free of charge.” AND… Illinois State Police paid NFSTC for the entire contract up front- $755,398- even though they only ended up owing $612,200. NFSTC gave Illinois State Police a “credit” back. Like “NFSTC Bucks”, to be used on other NFSTC products and services. They ain’t gonna give the money back. That is definitely not how it works.

The entire reason for the above mentioned investigation was that Sheppo retaliated against two employees who complained about the NFSTC sole-source contract, resulting in their 30-day suspensions, without pay. The investigation into Sheppo’s misconduct ordered that the employees be reimbursed for that loss in pay.

The investigation also resulted in Michael Sheppo lying, repeatedly, to the Inspector General’s office. The investigation recommended that Sheppo be disciplined for his failure to cooperate with the investigation. This discipline was apparently never carried out before Sheppo left to go work at NFSTC in the capacity of Special Envoy to NIJ Office of Sending Money to NFSTC as Sole-Source Funding (or something like that).

Mike Sheppo left his post on the Board of Directors of NFSTC in 2006, just before heading over to NIJ. Wouldn’t want the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Just before Sheppo took the helm of the forensic science grant office at NIJ, the office was being directed by Kevin Lothridge, the current CEO of NFSTC. Kevin Lothridge is another past-president of ASCLD. Lothridge went to NIJ from NFSTC and returned to NFSTC from NIJ. But he sent Sheppo and Mark Nelson to keep the NIJ forensic science grant office running smoothly. Mark Nelson is the Senior Program Manager (read: Senior Grant Manager) for Sheppo’s office. And he went to that office on yet another “Interpersonnel Loan” from NFSTC. Yeah.

Mark Nelson is also the guy who wrote the evidence withholding policy for the DNA unit at the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation that sent Gregory Taylor to prison for 17 years for a murder he didn’t commit. And now Nelson’s in charge of the DNA funding for the country. Because NFSTC put him there and paid his salary from 2006 until at least 2008. Prior to that Nelson was in charge of recruiting and training auditors for NFSTC’s DNA audit program and reviewing the work of the NFSTC’s DNA audit team. Because he’s the guy you want doing that.

A 2009 DOJ Inspector General’s report found that Kevin Lothridge wasn’t completely honest with them about whether or not he was involved with NFSTC’s grant funding when he was running the NIJ forensic grant office. Wish I could say I was surprised.

Some Stuff About NFSTC

I started talking to Kevin Lothridge about NFSTC over a year ago. My impression of him is that every time I talk to him he sounds like I just caught him burying a body and he thinks I can’t see the shovel behind his back.

At one point in August of last year, Lothridge asked me to be a lobbyist/spy for NFSTC. The lobbyist part was clear: speak for them on Capitol Hill. The spy part was to show up at meetings like the ASCLD Symposium and start trouble. One of the problems with this is that, as a 501(c)3 organization, the NFSTC can’t have a lobbyist. This hasn’t stopped them from hiring lobbying firms in the past, but that’s something I’ll get to later.

So, I sent Lothridge a proposal, with two quotes, with and without expenses, for what he was asking for, to see what he would do. His immediate response was that NFSTC didn’t want to retain me right now because they “like to stay above the fray.” From what I can tell, NFSTC is the fray.

I continued watching Lothridge, talking to him occasionally, and doing research. Then I wrote the piece on this website regarding the “competitive advantage” that ASCLD Consulting (a for-profit) was whining about that the NFSTC (a supposed nonprofit) had from offering free DNA audits versus the fee-for-service audits that the now-defunct ASCLD Consulting was offering. I concluded that, when it comes to free vs. fee-based, that’s probably the source of the competitive advantage and that ASCLD Consulting needed to stop whining. And stop filing official documents with fake business addresses.

A few days later, NFSTC posted an announcement on their website that they had opened a new for-profit business, the Forensic Innovation Center. This was basically an identical move to that tried by ASCLD.

I looked at the companies involved in the Forensic Innovation Center (FIC), and whaddya know, one of them is ICx Technologies. ICx is the highest paying client of the CFSO’s lobbyist, Beth Lavach. Pays her 4 or 5 times what the CFSO, mortal enemy of NFSTC, is paying.

I asked Kevin Lothridge about FIC and about the connection to Lavach. He plead ignorance. ICx was also in the midst of being bought out by FLIR Systems, Inc, a very large company. I asked if Lavach was going to be replaced or if Lothridge felt that this was a conflict of interest since I had heard so much from him about how the CFSO was out to get him. I got a lot of mumblings in the general direction of “I don’t know.”

I decided to keep watching and see what the merger and the next quarter’s lobbying disclosure forms brought.

Lavach has never been replaced by ICx. In fact, Lavach is now the only lobbyist for ICx Technologies (they had a couple of other lobbyists they paid much smaller sums in previous years). ICx has been Lavach’s top paying client for the past 5 years. In February 2011, FIC changed the attribution of ICx as a partner company on their website to ICx’s parent company, FLIR. That was not to throw me off; Lothridge knows I was aware of all those relationships.

As I reported last time, the CFSO is a mess, FQS has defected, and, judging by the presentation given by Beth Lavach at the International Association for Identification (IAI) a couple of months ago, it does not appear that the CFSO has Beth Lavach’s full attention. I just wonder if the CFSO knows that their lobbyist’s biggest paycheck comes from a partner company for the NFSTC’s new for-profit venture. Seems like they would want to know that.

But here’s where the problem with FIC becomes a legal one: a nonprofit can’t found a for-profit that is operating in direct conflict with the nonprofit. Duty of care, right of first refusal, conflict of interest, etc., etc. And all those members of the nonprofit and board members who, no doubt, had to have signed off on the formation of FIC? Yep, you’re liable. Officers of the corporation, too. Can’t do that, fellas. HUGE no-no with the IRS. And with anyone who feels like suing you for violating your duty of care as board members and officers of the corporation.

But there’s all kinds of screwy things that NFSTC has done with their finances that are soooo far from kosher (with lots of help from NIJ, of course), which I’ll get to next time (with possibly a short post in between). And how there are all kinds of people floating in between the two camps (ASCLD/CFSO and NFSTC) and who knows what those relationships are about.