Probe: Crime lab mismatched DWI paperwork

The Nassau police crime lab quagmire deepened with prosecutors' revelation Thursday of wrongly assembled reports on blood-alcohol tests in drunken-driving cases last fall.

In a separate development, a private consultant's assessment that lab technicians made mistakes in cocaine testing could lead to questions of whether thousands of similar cocaine and heroin tests were botched, prosecutors said.

The mismatched paperwork in one blood-alcohol case meant that a person was charged with drunken driving although a blood test had shown the person had no alcohol in their blood, prosecutors said. Further, the test result of that person was attached to the report of someone who had been drinking - and this person never was charged with driving while intoxicated, they said. In both cases, those people faced other charges.

Police discovered the mistakes while reviewing documents in a contested drunken-driving case, prosecutors said, and ultimately pinpointed problems with incorrect paperwork in nine misdemeanor drunken-driving cases handled at the lab, all on Oct. 15.

The nine cases had been reviewed by a lab supervisor who did not catch the errors, prosecutors said. All the tests were done using blood-alcohol kits and can be retested, they said. None of the people in those cases are in jail.

Prosecutors said they moved quickly after learning of the latest lab-related errors to notify William Kephart, president of the Nassau County Criminal Courts Bar Association, Marc Gann, president of the Nassau Bar Association and chief of the local Legal Aid Society.

Separately, prosecutors said consultant Peter Pizzola's recent review of a single cocaine case revealed problems with lab procedures in testing both cocaine and heroin - drugs that last year accounted for more than one-third of all Nassau drug arrests.

"At this point, no one can put faith in anything from that lab," Kephart said. "They must retest anything that's come through that lab and suspend prosecutions until they do."

Det. Lt. Kevin Smith, the Nassau police spokesman, declined to comment on the new findings. A spokeswoman for Nassau District Attorney Kathleen Rice said the flaws point up the reason Rice's office is reviewing much of the lab's work before it was closed Feb. 18.

The police crime lab was put on probation Dec. 3 by a national lab accreditation agency that cited 26 violations. County Executive Edward Mangano and Rice closed the lab's drug-testing unit on Feb. 10 and then shuttered the entire lab after revelations about police managers possibly failing to disclose inaccurate testing.

Pizzola, hired by the county to review paperwork on hundreds of tests done before the lab was closed, found technicians made two major mistakes in testing cocaine: not noting if the scale used to weigh the drugs had been calibrated and not running "blanks" between tests in order to eliminate drug residue, prosecutors said. A scale's calibration can affect its accuracy in reading a drug's weight, a factor in whether a misdemeanor or felony is charged.

Prosecutors said they are trying to figure out how many drug tests the technicians could have flubbed the way they flubbed the one Pizzola reviewed. Because all cocaine and heroin samples are tested using scales and so-called "salt plates" like the ones used in that case, prosecutors fear the problem could be widespread.

Prosecutors said they do not know how many scales or salt plates the lab had.

Last year, cocaine and heroin arrests amounted to 1,271 of the 3,621 drug arrests in the county, prosecutors said.

Meg Reiss, Rice's chief of staff, said the district attorney's office already is retesting 10 percent of all drug evidence since 2007. Reiss said she does not know how far back any problems with the lab's cocaine and heroin testing may extend.