The Unraveling: ASCLD and the Fall of America’s Crime Labs

It has been happening for a while, but no one was really paying attention: crime labs have been falling apart. But as science has gotten better and defense attorneys have become more informed and- much more alarmingly- as some crime lab managers and their accreditation body have shown themselves to be callous and shameless in their incompetence and corruption, it has become obvious that the long-standing system of walled-off self-government of crime labs is fatally flawed.

In the Beginning…

It is hard to pinpoint exactly when the press started to catch on to the problem of inexcusably bad management of crime labs. At first, whenever a problem was discovered or became too big to deny, crime lab managers blamed it on a single rogue analyst.

This was good enough for the press and the public. The thought that entire crime labs were degrading to the point that they were so thoroughly harmful to the public that they are supposed to serve was probably a thought from which most minds would recoil.

While it was sometimes true that a single analyst was at fault, it was (and still is) much more often a systemic problem of which both crime lab managers and their accreditation board, ASCLD/LAB, were plainly aware and took great pains to conceal.

But those of us working in the labs have always known.

There are many examples to choose from of this behavior of heaping all responsibility for a crime lab’s problems on a single analyst, but one case that illustrates it very clearly is that of the New York State Police Crime Lab in Albany’s Trace Evidence Section.

The New York Trace Evidence Section and Gary Veeder

I have talked about this case before, but I think it bears repeating. During an ASCLD/LAB audit in 2008, auditors discovered some discrepancies in the casework of one of the NY lab’s Trace Evidence analysts, Gary Veeder. ASCLD/LAB issued two Corrective Action Requests to the NY lab relating to the deficiencies in Veeder’s training and testing that would have to be addressed before the lab could be reaccredited.

In order to allow the lab to be reaccredited, lab management at the NY lab decided to simply drop that section of the lab from accreditation, meaning those tests would no longer be performed. Problem fixed.

Lab management conducted an “investigation” in which Gary Veeder confessed that his supervisor upon entering the Trace Unit in 1995, Anthony Piscitelli, had never trained him in how to actually conduct the examinations he was supposed to be carrying out, but rather taught him how to dry lab- fake the tests- and gave him a crib sheet with which Veeder carried out all of his work.

Over the course of several days of interviews, Veeder stuck by his story, providing the crib sheet that he used to dry-lab all his test results. Veeder also repeatedly told lab managers that he believed this type of training and work was widespread.

Lab managers wrote up a report saying that they believed Veeder’s work over the course of close to 15 years was not impacted by his misconduct and did not try to find out anything else about further misconduct in the lab, instead heaping all the responsibility on Veeder alone.

One of the lab managers who interviewed Veeder, Keith Coonrod, went to great lengths to try to discount any possibility that there were problems that went beyond Gary Veeder, according to the Inspector General’s report.

According to that report, Coonrod gave misleading information at the conclusion of his investigation so as to make it appear that Veeder “recanted” his statements that there were others involved in misconduct in the lab. Coonrod probably thought that he could get away with that since dead men can’t talk. Veeder had killed himself shortly after sitting through his days of interviews with Coonrod.

Veeder wrote in one of his suicide notes that he had been able to avoid detection in ASCLD/LAB audits for at least 10 years, even though he could not adequately describe how to perform the tests he was supposed to carry out in his work and many of his proficiency tests had unacceptable blank answers.

Luckily, the Inspector General’s office decided to conduct a more thorough investigation into the problem than either the lab managers or their accreditation board, ASCLD/LAB had bothered to do.

When the IG’s office interviewed Anthony Piscitelli, Veeder’s original supervisor that Veeder told lab managers had given him the crib sheet with which to dry lab his results, Piscitelli told the IG’s office that he had indeed given Veeder the crib sheet with instructions on how to dry lab fiber tests. Piscitelli also testified that he “was not a ‘believer’ in the determination of refractive index.”

According to the report, Piscitelli also said that, while he was supervisor of the Trace Evidence Section, he did not require analysts to perform this test even though it was required by the lab’s protocols. This is something that does not appear to have ever been discovered by ASCLD/LAB.

The IG’s report also found that other analysts had complained to lab management about Supervisor Piscitelli’s incompetence and lax attitude toward technical reviews over the years. The response from lab management was what you will come to see is standard protocol for many lab managers: ignore the complaints and, if they get too loud, retaliate.

One highly trained fiber analyst who was assigned to do peer reviews, Cathryn Levine, finally filed a formal complaint regarding the problems with Piscitelli in 1994, which is supposed to be the right thing to do when you see misconduct. She received no response from lab management to her complaint. However, she was removed from her duties in conducting peer reviews.

After Piscitelli retired, R. Michael Portzer was appointed Veeder’s supervisor and technical reviewer even though Portzer had only performed three fiber analyses ever, none in the previous 10 years, and had been disqualified from performing fiber analyses because he had failed his own proficiency test.

Indeed, Portzer signed off on Veeder’s reports, which were blatantly out of protocol, each approval stating “work performed is in compliance with applicable technical test methods, procedures and instructions.” This was something that was not discovered by ASCLD/LAB, evidently.

The IG’s report even found that the Trace Evidence Section was not keeping their manuals current with the protocols and instrumentation calibration standards that were required in the lab, according to the standard set forth in their own Quality Assurance Manual. Again, this appears to have been something that was not caught by ASCLD/LAB.

As for the lab managers’ claims that Gary Veeder’s actions had no impact on his case work… the IG’s office ordered a review of 322 of Veeder’s fiber and trace cases dating back to 1993. They “determined that 29 percent of Veeder’s cases were substantively deficient either in their conclusions or documentation.”

Who, us? Responsible?

The mantra lately from ASCLD and ASCLD/LAB representatives for all their failures, as you will see, is that they should not be judged by today’s standards for not catching failures in years past. But if they weren’t even catching Quality Assurance failures and proficiency test failures, what exactly have they been doing all these years? These things are and have been at the core of what accreditation has been about.

Even in the case of Gary Veeder, ASCLD/LAB auditors discovered a problem with training and competency… and stopped. ASCLD/LAB did not question how Veeder passed proficiency tests. ASCLD/LAB did not look to Veeder’s one and only technical reviewer who had failed proficiency tests and was not qualified to perform his job. ASCLD/LAB did not question why Veeder’s reports that were so suspicious to draw their attention were approved with the words “work performed is in compliance with applicable technical test methods, procedures and instructions.” ASCLD/LAB evidently didn’t look at the Unit Manual that wasn’t up to par according to the Quality Assurance manual.

ASCLD/LAB discovered a problem and stopped. ASCLD/LAB even gave the lab an easy way out: just drop these tests- this one employee- and you’re reaccredited. And that’s what happened. That’s what always happens.

Lab managers tried to heap all responsibility for wrongdoing on one guy- Gary Veeder- when in fact it was a systemic problem that had been happening for years, long before Gary Veeder even entered the Trace Section, with the full knowledge and endorsement of lab management.

Lab management knew of the problem. Rank and file lab workers knew of the problem but, as in any lab, they also knew what would happen if they spoke up: nothing good. It happens over and over and over in labs all over the country.

This is just the first one we’re going to be talking about.