A consultant’s review of 100 cases involving drugs tests by the St. Paul police crime lab found errors in most of them, giving momentum to public defenders gearing up to challenge potentially thousands of drug convictions.

Errors ranged “from minor typographical errors to misidentification of a controlled substance,” according to one of three reports released Thursday, Feb. 14.

The police department hired two consultants to work on improving the lab after a Dakota County District Court hearing last year disclosed flawed drug-testing practices. A judge is considering admissibility of suspected drug evidence in four cases. The police chief halted the lab’s drug testing and fingerprint analysis over the summer, but the lab recently resumed fingerprint work by certified analysts.

One report said the unaccredited lab’s drug analysis didn’t meet minimum standards recommended by the Scientific Working Group for the Analysis of Seized Drugs.

Another said that while there was no evidence of erroneous identifications by latent fingerprint examiners, there were numerous examples of examiners missing opportunities to identify suspects with fingerprints.

“This has been a long, arduous and sometimes painful process, but I want to make one thing clear … this came to light under my watch,” Police Chief Thomas Smith said Thursday.

“I told the citizens and everybody … that I was going to address it decisively, take corrective action and do what we have to do to make sure that we ensure the public trust in our crime lab as we go forward.”

The department has begun to make changes. Among them:

— The city is seeking forensic scientists with more background in science than the previous workers had, experience working in an accredited laboratory and certification in drug analysis or latent print examination.

— Hiring a forensic lab manager and a quality assurance specialist will be critical, Smith said.

— Police will seek to have the lab accredited in latent-fingerprint examination and crime-scene processing, Smith said.

— The city will fund two people to conduct drug testing at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s accredited lab.

State Public Defender John Stuart said public defenders have identified more than 13,000 convictions going back a decade in which evidence had been tested by the lab.

An attorney and six law clerks have been working to identify cases and prioritize the ones needing immediate action, he said. Post-conviction relief can be sought in the courts.

The first priority is defendants still behind bars, Stuart said. The second is people whose drug convictions have marred otherwise clean records.

“There might be somebody who is walking around now as a convicted criminal who really didn’t do anything wrong, and they’ve been labeled — with all kinds of consequences for their job and family and housing and education based on a poorly done lab test,” Stuart said.

“If you have to have consultants from Texas come to look at the underlying work on every lab report to see if the lab equipment is being cleaned every once in a while, that’s very disappointing for the entire justice system in Minnesota,” he said.

Smith said that in the past, the lab struggled with funding.

“The science has advanced so fast, yet our budgets have diminished, and that’s kind of a recipe for struggles … and I think that’s one of the hard lessons that we learned here,” he said.

The city council released an additional $1 million last week for the lab; its budget had been about $800,000.

REACTION, RETESTING

It was public defenders’ inquiry, including that of Lauri Traub of the Dakota County public defender’s office, into several drug cases that exposed flaws in the crime lab.

“This is really far-reaching and really serious for a lot of people, their lives,” Traub said.

Before the problems came to light, Washington and Dakota counties sent drug cases to the St. Paul lab for analysis. When they severed their relationships, prosecutors from those counties, plus Ramsey County, sent cases to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s certified lab for retesting.

The BCA retested evidence from 192 cases; the results in three cases differed from what the St. Paul lab had found. Ramsey County prosecutors dropped a drug case in which the evidence — originally identified by the St. Paul lab as methamphetamine — came back as negative for the drug in a later test. In two Dakota County cases, the BCA found drugs the St. Paul lab failed to detect, said Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom.

The fact that problems weren’t found in retesting the Washington County cases “gives me a better sense of confidence,” said Washington County Attorney Pete Orput.

While Orput commended the decision to call in consultants to review the lab, he said there’s work to be done before full confidence is restored.

“In my view, from what we know now and what we’ve read about the problems with the St. Paul lab, we think it’s incumbent upon any lab to seek accreditation,” Orput said.

“Juries have come to expect that evidence. … So, to guarantee its quality is in all our interests.”

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said the reports, which he had not read completely by Thursday afternoon, were disturbing but not surprising.

“I think the shock factor was back in July,” when court testimony disclosed the problems, Choi said.

The good news, he said, is that the reports don’t seem to point to criminal activity.

“One of my greatest fears in all of this was there may have been some sort of intentional or fraudulent effort to cover things up or avoid work, and I’m glad that that wasn’t the case,” Choi said.

He said he, Backstrom and Orput would meet Wednesday to discuss the lab. He said they would meet with public defenders later. Those meetings had been planned before the release of the new reports, he said.

Ramsey County public defenders have filed motions to re-examine about 20 cases in light of the lab’s problems, said Pat Kittridge, head of the Ramsey County Public Defenders office.

FINDINGS

The report by one of the consultants, Integrated Forensic Laboratories of Euless, Texas, said of drug testing at the St. Paul lab:

“(S)ubstances were identified using methods that were inadequate or blatantly wrong. Chromatograms showed that the instruments were not maintained, were dirty and columns were used long after they should have been discarded. Presumptive color tests, an essential tool in the identification of unknown substances, were rarely used.”

There were indications the staff had “a gross lack of understanding of the instruments” for drug testing, along with not understanding chemical processes, industry standards, instrument maintenance, standardization and statutory regulations.

Among examples of drug-testing problems in the consultant’s report:

Ã¢- “In one case, Wikipedia was used as a technical reference.”

Ã¢- “In one case, a Post-it note indicated a questionable practice of opening and weighing evidence by someone other than the employee.”

Ã¢- In one case, a sample number wasn’t transcribed properly, leading to an incorrectly labeled result.

Ã¢- “In many cases, writing on worksheets was illegible.”

Ã¢- “The term ‘PROVES’ was used repeatedly with only presumptive analysis.”

A review by the other consultant, Schwarz Forensic Enterprises of Ankeny, Iowa, of 73 drug cases analyzed by the lab found no evidence of contamination from one case to another.

But it found “nine instances in which the data indicated potential contamination from one item on a case to another item from the same case,” the report said. “That is, when multiple samples are analyzed in a single case, the amount of drug analyzed in an initial sample may carry over to the analysis of the next sample.”

The Schwarz report said “actual contamination was not a substantial problem, in general, although it may have been a problem in specific cases.”

In a separate report, Schwarz studied the crime lab’s latent fingerprint comparison, processing and crime scene units. The report noted that personnel appeared to have attended seminars and training, but there wasn’t formal competency testing or a program to assess ongoing proficiency.

“Despite these deficiencies, no evidence of erroneous identifications by latent print examiners was found; but we did find numerous examples of cases wherein examiners had failed to claim latent prints as suitable for identification and/or to identify prints to suspects,” the report said.

A review of 246 fingerprint cases found the unit successfully identified prints only “in cases where the print detail is of extraordinarily high quality,” the report said.

Elizabeth Mohr and Marino Eccher contributed to this report. Mara H. Gottfried can be reached at 651-228-5262 or mgottfried@pioneerpress.com. Follow her at twitter.com/MaraGottfried or twitter.com/ppUsualSuspects. Emily Gurnon can be reached at 651-228-5522 or egurnon@pioneerpress.com. Follow her at twitter.com/emilygurnon.