Nassau crime lab's credibility questioned

Is it time to put the Nassau County lab out of the public's misery by shutting it down completely? It's a fair question given last week's shuttering of the lab's chemistry section after a review of nine drug-case-related samples showed errors in testing.

As it is, the Nassau County Bar Association is advising defense attorneys not to agree to pleas in drug-related cases because it has no confidence in the lab.

And the district attorney's office, meanwhile, now has a deputy bureau chief at arraignments for all drug cases determining whether prosecutors should ask that defendants be released into their own custody or probation or be held until they can make bail. In serious cases, the district attorney's office will send evidence to an outside lab for testing.

"I never thought I'd be saying this a month ago, but with the latest findings the credibility of the entire lab has been undermined," said Marc Gann, a Mineola attorney and former prosecutor who is president of the county bar association.

"I never fathomed it would get this far," he said, noting that up until December he never had reason to question the quality of the lab's work.

Gann said he now favors shutting down the entire lab - which would include the ballistics, latent fingerprint and other sections - and that he was meeting with other defense attorney organizations to determine their next move.

Gann had praise for the district attorney's office and for the lab's interim director, Dr. Pasquale Buffolino. "To their credit, they are working hard to see things through," Gann said.

Kathleen Rice, Nassau's district attorney, last week demanded that the chemistry portion of the lab, which does drug testing, be shut down after the retest results came back.

She said Tuesday that officials were now working to determine whether drug case-related samples from among 9,000 cases between 2007 and 2009 could be retested. Some samples may have degraded, she said.

Rice said that, as of now, she continues to have confidence in the other parts of the lab. And that she will keep working with other officials to ensure that "Nassau residents have the kind of world-class lab they deserve."

She said that three elements were essential for change at the lab: hiring civilians to do work (now done in part by police officers); getting new, high-tech lab equipment; and continuing Buffolino's work of establishing better protocols.

"We are working with everyone and trying to take a lead on this," she said.

Which is a good thing. Because, thus far, through two county executives and two police commissioners, nobody's stepped forward to take the blame for the lab being put on probation twice since 2000.

Should the entire lab be shut down, although the chemistry section took the brunt of criticism from a national accrediting agency? The agency that put Nassau's lab on probation - making it the only lab in the nation with that dubious distinction - didn't think so in December.

But Buffolino has sent samples from the latent fingerprint section for re-testing too. The hope is that the re-test comes back clean. The last thing public confidence needs would be a second batch of bad results.