Fatal DWI appeal tied to crime lab dropped

A man convicted of striking and killing two brothers while driving drunk in 2008 withdrew a challenge that his conviction had been based on botched evidence at the Nassau Police Crime Laboratory Thursday in exchange for a jail sentence of no more than a year.

Nassau County Judge David Sullivan asked defendant James Farr, 34, of Garden City, if he understood that, by accepting the "negotiated sentence," he waived his right to challenge the evidence of his blood-alcohol level after the crash, processed at the now closed Nassau police crime lab.

"I'm not saying how I would have ruled, but now those issues will never be addressed," Sullivan told Farr, who said he understood.

Sullivan sentenced Farr to one year in the Nassau jail. He had been facing 11/3 to 4 years at an upstate prison after a jury convicted him of criminally negligent homicide.

Farr's lawyer, Gregory Grizopoulos, of Rockville Centre, said the motion to throw out the verdict based on lab issues was strong, but that Farr wanted closure, both for his own sake and for that of the families of the men he killed, Thomas and Joseph Occiogrosso, of Riverhead and East Meadow, respectively. The brothers died after Farr drove his sport utility vehicle into them as they walked across Hempstead Turnpike in East Meadow on Aug. 23, 2008.

"We basically traded his right to appeal for this sentence," Grizopoulos said outside court.

Dozens of people accused of felonies in Nassau -- five of them already convicted -- have filed legal challenges seeking to throw out charges based on potentially tainted lab evidence.

In December, a national accrediting group revealed many problems at the lab, including a failure since 2007 to calibrate a blood-alcohol pipettor, an instrument used for measuring and dispensing liquids. Prosecutors maintain that not doing so did not skew blood test results. Still, they asked a private consultant to review paperwork on all the lab's blood-alcohol tests dating to 2006 after discovering several paperwork errors on blood-alcohol tests.

Chris Munzing, a spokesman for the Nassau district attorney's office, said, "We strongly believe this defendant could, and should, have been sentenced to the maximum allowable prison term. The blood evidence in this case was reviewed and found entirely accurate."

Friends and family members of the victims did not comment about crime lab problems. Erin Occiogrosso, Thomas's wife, wept as she showed Sullivan her 4-year-old daughter's picture of herself and her mother with her father, a smiley face, hovering in the sky. "I feel so helpless in the face of her grief," she said.