State funds to help contest lab evidence

A state agency has given Nassau County $140,000 to pay for legal help for inmates who can't afford attorneys and want to challenge their convictions based on faulty evidence processing at the police crime lab.

The money from the state Office of Indigent Legal Services could fill a gap in the law that has kept Nassau from paying attorneys to represent inmates seeking to contest their convictions on lab-related grounds.

Under county law, Nassau may pay lawyers to represent the poor through trial and appeals. But once appeals are exhausted, the law does not generally permit county payments to attorneys to represent the poor, except at court hearings. That can leave inmates who can't afford legal help to prepare on their own legal motions seeking to have convictions tossed.

Joseph Wierschem, counsel to the indigent services office, said the state funds will enable Nassau to hire "attorneys and experts to provide the legal and technical assistance to indigents who are primarily incarcerated individuals so that an attorney can review and, if appropriate, challenge their prior convictions as a result of problems arising from the operations and closure of the Nassau County Police Department crime lab."

Nassau must spend its own money, Wierschem said, and be reimbursed by the state.

In December 2010, a private accrediting agency placed the lab on probation after discovering serious evidence processing errors. County officials closed the lab last February.

The lab's shutdown unleashed dozens of court filings on pending cases and past convictions. Judges have tossed two drunken driving convictions, faulting lab evidence. Those cases are under appeal. And a judge has granted a Jan. 30 hearing to a man who wants his conviction for felony cocaine possession thrown out. Court-assigned attorneys were not involved in those cases.

Last March, District Attorney Kathleen Rice mailed letters to nearly 300 people jailed locally and upstate, telling them lab mistakes might have affected their cases and advising them to seek legal help.

About 40 inmates who received the letter contacted Nassau's assigned counsel program -- which pays court-appointed attorneys to represent the poor -- but so far, they haven't received legal help.

Marc Gann, immediate past president of the county bar association which runs the assigned counsel program, said Nassau could start using the state money in a few weeks. Gann said the bar association, County Attorney John Ciampoli and the courts "are working on a way to administer that money."

Gann said once it is determined how to administer the funds within the confines of existing law, the county's supervising judges will be consulted. The bar association will also have to find a way to make the money available to as many inmates as possible.

"Once we have the framework in place for implementing it, then we'll see how far it can be spread," said Robert Nigro, the administrator of the assigned counsel program.