Our series on rogue agents and junk science at the State Bureau of Investigation, which starts Sunday, grew out of a couple of the agency's most shameful and embarrassing moments.
The first was agent Dwight Ransome's investigation of the 1995 killing of Allen Ray Jenkins, a retired truck driver in Eastern North Caro lina.
According to a case summary by his own lawyer, Ransome decided that Alan Gell was guilty early on, despite having statements from 17 witnesses who saw Jenkins was alive after Gell was jailed on unrelated charges.
Gell was convicted and sent to death row. He was acquitted during a second trial in 2004. Gell sued, and the SBI agreed last year to a record $3.9 million settlement.
The second incident involved the work of agent Duane Deaver, considered an expert in bloodstain pattern analysis. Deaver was involved in the 1993 case of Greg Taylor, a Wake County man wrongly convicted of murder.
Taylor's conviction was erased this year by a panel of judges in part because Deaver reported that a stain on Taylor's truck was blood, even though he had performed tests that proved it wasn't.
Our series, "Agents' Secrets," was reported by Mandy Locke and Joseph Neff, with photo and video work from Shawn Rocco and Travis Long. It was edited by Steve Riley. It will show agents cutting corners and the SBI's crime lab hiding test results.
We interviewed SBI Director Robin Pendergraft about our findings on July 23.
Pendergraft had been SBI director for nearly 10 years. Yet she said she wasn't familiar with several bureau policies. She didn't know about several cases and practices that have raised questions from defense lawyers and independent scientists. And she defended Deaver.
Pendergraft's head-in-the-sand strategy wasn't going to solve the SBI's problems.
Her boss was state Attorney General Roy Cooper, a Democrat first elected in 2000. We interviewed Cooper on July 29. In the interview, he said Pendergraft was being reassigned and that he was stopping the work of the bloodstain pattern analysts until he was sure their work is sound.
In public relations terms, this is called getting out in front of a story. Cooper wants to show that he's on top of the problems at the SBI.
But he hasn't been. He has known - or should have known - about the problems described in the series.
Last year, a federal judge found that an agent gave false testimony about blood evidence in a 1993 murder trial. In another case, the foreman of a Davie County jury that acquitted a murder suspect last year summed up the SBI's casework this way: "fraud."
Most troubling may be the case of Floyd Brown. He spent 14 years at Dorothea DixHospital until a judge freed him in part because of a questionable confession written by an SBI agent. Questions about that confession first surfaced publicly in 2005.
That agent now works in Cooper's Medicaid fraud unit.
Read more Sunday.
