It took two years, but D.C.’s troubled crime lab appeared to make some progress in recent weeks. The Department of Forensic Sciences, as the lab is formally known, is trying to recover from the scandal that got it banned from its primary job of testing most of the evidence in D.C.’s criminal cases. Behind the scenes, however, the lab’s chief oversight body has become embroiled in messy fights with DFS over concerns the agency is simply repeating its past mistakes.
Loose Lips hears that things have gotten ugly over at the department’s Science Advisory Board, a collection of independent experts convened to guide the lab on technical questions and review its most controversial cases. The full board voted to issue a diplomatically worded “position statement” back in June complaining that its “advice or input has not been routinely sought or utilized to support DFS plans or priorities.” Its relationship with the department has only deteriorated since then.
One board member resigned Nov. 15 in protest over these clashes, according to a letter sent to D.C. officials and forwarded to LL. Two others were booted off the board by Mayor Muriel Bowser’s deputies amid all the bickering. One person familiar with the board’s operations, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, describes the whole situation to LL as a “shitshow.”
“These ‘firings’ are simply the latest example of the DFS leadership abusing its authority,” Rick Tontarski, a longtime forensic analyst who has worked with a variety of federal agencies and joined the board last year, wrote in his resignation letter. “This lack of interaction with the SAB creates the perception that the laboratory does not want an advisory body.”
Disputes between the SAB and DFS are not exactly uncommon over the crime lab’s turbulent 11-year history. The board has frequently complained that DFS has withheld critical information from the SAB about its mistakes, prompting federal prosecutors to circumvent the board in ordering various reviews of the firearms testing errors that prompted the lab’s present problems. But the D.C. Council tried to change some of this dynamic with legislation passed last year, aiming to give the SAB new power to prevent future scandals. This latest meltdown suggests that the bill, which still has not been fully funded by lawmakers, has yet to achieve much.
“We appreciate Science Advisory Board members past and present that choose to volunteer to serve the District in this capacity,” DFS Interim Director Francisco Diaz, who also services as the city’s chief medical examiner, writes in a statement to LL. “The board appointments are for a set term and as such it creates transition based on term expiration.”
“We can unequivocally confirm that no board members were asked to resign in 2023,” Diaz adds, though multiple SAB members and the person familiar with the matter contradict this characterization.
Much of the present dispute has focused on the department’s attempts to win back its professional accreditation, which it lost back in 2021. The lab relies on the certification from independent experts that its methods for testing evidence, ranging from DNA to fingerprints to ballistics, are scientifically sound. Without accreditation, DFS can’t fulfill its basic functions, leaving the city stuck outsourcing evidence testing to private contractors and federal agencies (disrupting criminal prosecutions in the process).
The agency told councilmembers last month that it had finally applied for reaccreditation for its DNA and drug testing units after repeated promises to do so, which was generally hailed as a positive step for the lab. But LL hears that board members have never gotten the chance to fully review the steps the agency has taken to reform its practices and prepare for that application, undermining confidence in its methods.
The SAB’s position statement argued that the board “has not yet been consulted on key forensic rehabilitation decisions including development of new protocols and priorities in preparation for reaccreditation, despite offering suggestions to assist the DFS,” and that the agency has not yet undertaken the sort of “systematic reexamination” of its evidence testing that was needed in the wake of the 2021 scandal.
“While the DFS has engaged consultants and reports progress toward reaccreditation, the details of those efforts have not been entirely transparent to the SAB,” the board wrote. SAB Chair Jeanne Jordan, a public health professor at George Washington University, did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Some of these arguments have spilled out into the open at the board’s public meetings. Board member Henry Swofford, a forensic scientist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has repeatedly raised these concerns during board meetings, according to minutes posted on the DFS website. For instance, he asked in June whether the department was developing policies aligned with federal standards for forensics testing, generally regarded as a best practice for crime labs around the country.
Things got especially heated at the board’s October meeting. Swofford and Tontarski raised concerns that the department was trying to censor its description of the critical “position statement” in the minutes of the board’s June meeting. The full board voted to post the statement publicly and edit the minutes accordingly. Swofford also “questioned why the SAB was being denied a version of the Mock Assessment Report,” according to the meeting minutes. DFS had essentially done a practice run of what accreditors would look for in the lab and tried to grade itself on the results, but would not hand that function over to the board.
The board was also due to receive a guided tour of the department’s facilities, but members became alarmed when they learned they wouldn’t have the opportunity to ask questions of DFS staff during the tour. The person familiar with the board’s deliberations says the board then hoped to discuss this lack of transparency during the meeting. But this suggestion prompted DFS General Counsel Hillary Hoffman to step in and demand the meeting be adjourned, and Diaz obliged. (Notably, the department still has not posted a recording of these proceedings, even though it uploaded videos of the previous two SAB meetings shortly after they concluded. A department spokesperson blames this on a “technical issue” with the recording.)
Shortly afterward, the Mayor’s Office of Talent Appointments (which manages such advisory boards) told Swofford and another board member, Michael Pentella, that they were no longer needed on the SAB. Their ousters prompted Tontarski’s own resignation, and he said in his letter that the MOTA’s move “appears to be blatant retaliation by the DFS for issues the SAB raised at our [October] open meeting.”
“Such retribution cannot be condoned,” he added. Neither he nor Swofford responded to emails seeking comment. Pentella, a public health professor at the University of Iowa, writes in an email that “I was willing to stay on, but they decided to find someone else.”
“I am fine with that decision,” he says in the email, declining to comment further. His term on the SAB was set to end this year, and Bowser had introduced legislation reappointing him in September before withdrawing it two months later. Similarly, Swofford said at the board’s March meeting that the mayor’s team had asked him to serve another term, and “the process [of drafting legislation to that effect] has begun.”
LL will forgive his readers who are experiencing a bit of deja vu. Just last week, Bowser moved to reduce oversight and transparency of the overburdened juvenile justice system over objections from councilmembers and experts on the issue. The question is whether someone will do something about it.
Tontarski wrote in his resignation letter that the SAB “provided examples of the DFS conduct” to the Council’s judiciary and public safety committee, chaired by Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, last month. But neither Pinto nor any other councilmember has addressed the matter publicly (and her spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from LL).
In previous interviews, Pinto has raised concerns that the SAB is “not yet equipped” to properly oversee the department, as it was not yet fully staffed. But that was before Bowser appointed several of its current members.
“It is disheartening the DFS makes no concerted effort to comply with requirements, nor seeks to meet the spirit, in the enabling legislation [for the crime lab],” Tontarski wrote. “This not only undermines the purpose of the advisory board, but also erodes trust and confidence, leading me to ask what information is not being disclosed, and why, to an advisory board intended to support the DFS scientific missions.”
LL has similar questions. The department is certainly long overdue in pursuing accreditation again, but there’s little reason to expect that the agency will achieve real reform if it tries to hide the ball (or cut corners) as it works to get back on track. Prosecutors have exploited the lab’s missteps before in order to seize more control over the evidence testing process. And though the lab’s fiercest critics have moved on, it doesn’t seem wise to give them any more leverage to erode its independence.
This sort of posture doesn’t come as too much of a surprise to LL considering the way Bowser has handled the lab since its meltdown two years ago. She pledged a transparent accounting of the department’s errors to ensure no one was wrongfully convicted on faulty evidence, then basically gave up when the process got complicated. Why should anyone expect anything different when it comes to reaccreditation? The agency didn’t even make an announcement about its application; the news only became public after DFS informed Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau during a tour of its facilities.
The Council might need to step in if lawmakers want real oversight of the department, either by using its own authority to ask probing questions or by funding the reform legislation it passed a year ago. That bill was widely regarded as imperfect, but it has key provisions giving the SAB new teeth, more resources, and more independence from DFS. The bill was passed “subject to appropriations,” so pretty much none of that has taken effect while councilmembers wait to scare up some money.
Without some real attention to these issues, the Council will have simply passed reforms in name only. And that will leave a key part of D.C.’s criminal legal system just as broken as ever.