The technician, Deborah Jean Madden, 60, has not been charged, though the San Francisco police say she is under investigation. Ms. Madden, who retired last month, did not return calls for comment.
The laboratory was closed in early March after the police reported that Ms. Madden had been questioned. But an accounting of exactly how many cases Ms. Madden had worked on or might have influenced is continuing, and escalating.
Brian Buckelew, a spokesman for District Attorney Kamala D. Harris, said Friday that his department was looking at cases dating to 2007, many of which involved felony possession.
Some 600 cases have already been dismissed or discharged since Ms. Madden’s suspected thefts and the closing of the laboratory were brought to light by the police, though Mr. Buckelew said many of those cases would be pursued after testing is done by an independent laboratory. Mr. Buckelew said his office was hoping to salvage some dismissed cases by using other types of evidence, including witness testimony and confessions.
“Where there’s a way to prove it,” he said, “we intend to prove it”.
But the scandal has confirmed many public defenders’ long-held suspicions about the quality of work at the laboratory, concerns that were echoed by a blistering independent audit released in late March.
The audit, conducted at the request of the police chief, George Gascón, in the wake of the laboratory’s closing, revealed an array of other problems, including inconsistencies in the chain-of-custody record-keeping for seized drugs; a cramped and potentially dangerous work space, with hazardous chemicals left unlabeled and stored in hallways; a lack of maintenance of microscopes and balances; improperly-sealed drug envelopes; and overworked technicians.
“Good laboratory practices have been repeatedly short-changed in favor of high case throughput,” the audit found. “Evidence tampering,” it added, “could have been prevented had good laboratory practices been in place”.
The audit also showed that Ms. Madden had been “repeatedly counseled” for an incident in which she failed to properly describe in her notes the packaging of seized items.
An audit in November had also found problems in the laboratory, including understaffing to the point that mandatory overtime had become the norm, necessitated by the need to complete testing within 48 hours to prevent the dismissal of criminal charges. The November report also found insufficient training in some areas, and the laboratory’s common areas were in “a poor state of housekeeping and repair”.
The police said they began investigating possible evidence tampering in December and interviewed Ms. Madden in late February. About a week later, a search warrant was served for her home in San Mateo County, south of the city, and she was arrested by county sheriff’s officers on a separate gun charge.
But there are signs that problems at the crime laboratory might have been percolating since before 2007. On Friday, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that four grams of cocaine handled by Ms. Madden and being used as evidence at a federal racketeering trial disappeared in 2005, expanding the time frame for potentially corrupted cases.
Jeff Adachi, who heads the city’s public defender office and has called for the establishment of a crime laboratory independent of the Police Department, said that thousands of cases, dating back a decade, might have to be re-examined.
“This is a tsunami of incompetence,” Mr. Adachi said on Friday. “There weren’t just red flags, there were burning red flags”.
Chief Gascón, in his first year on the job, has forcefully defended his department. “There has been no fabrication of evidence; no one was framed for crimes they did not commit,” he said in a statement. “Even though this regrettable incident has occurred, our crime fighting will continue”.
The New York Times
