Why weren't problems at the SBI crime laboratory caught and corrected years ago? One answer, with troubling nationwide implications, is that the North Carolina-based agency that accredits most such labs around the country fell down on the job - repeatedly.
The private accrediting agency, ASCLD-LAB, may need a shakeup as badly as the SBI lab does.
Following up on The N&O's Agents' Secrets series and an outside review conducted for the state Attorney General's Office, reporters Mandy Locke and Joseph Neff took a look last week at how and why ASCLD-LAB, which gave the SBI lab its seal of approval every five years, could have missed problems turned up by the newspaper and in the review by two former FBI agents.
Indications are that the nation's largest accreditation agency of its type (the full name is American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board) does not conduct sufficiently tough-minded reviews. Among the reasons why that may be the case:
Inspectors from ASCLD-LAB can be employed by crime labs that are themselves reviewed by the agency, creating a tendency among examiners to go along to get along.
In reviewing analysts' work, ASCLD-LAB allows laboratory supervisors to pick cases to be examined at their labs. That saves time - but how likely would it be that a case involving, say, the SBI lab's failure to report a test for human blood that didn't pan out would be volunteered for outside review?
The agency seeks to have every lab accredited and works to help the labs achieve it. That's not an attitude calculated to keep lab personnel on their toes.
When it comes to examining the SBI lab, ASCLD-LAB faces a special situation. In a sense, it's an SBI offshoot. The agency is headed by two former SBI agents - both of whom held ranking positions at the SBI lab during years that poor practices were allegedly allowed - and its headquarters are in Garner. Even with the two former agents staying away from audits of the SBI (as is their practice), the ties of familiarity must work against searching examinations of the home-state lab.
No wonder, when asked about multiple audits that failed to turn up the bad news about the SBI lab, ASCLD-LAB's chairman said "Am I surprised that we didn't see a problem? Not really."
Such blindness is costly, as recent reporting has revealed. Just ask the inmates convicted on flawed or incomplete evidence. Ask the taxpayers who'll pay to have past cases reviewed. For that matter, ask the SBI officials who've lost their jobs. These are important issues, with life and death consequences. They cannot be handled on a business-as-usual basis.
ASCLD-LAB, no doubt, does some good work. It now says, in light of developments, that the SBI must prove to it that it has reformed. But the agency's ties to the SBI lab are too close for comfort and, overall, its failure to turn up long-running shortcomings there raises a deeper question: Who accredits the accreditors?
