The wheels truly must be coming off at Attorney General Roy Cooper's office. Public confidence already was on the rocks after a string of embarrassing disclosures about the State Bureau of Investigation's crime lab and its "creative" handling of evidence. Now it turns out that the man Cooper chose to start fixing the lab decided not to take the job after all - and Cooper apparently didn't want the public to find out.
Retired Court of Appeals Chief Judge Gerald Arnold certainly was entitled to change his mind before stepping into the post of interim crime lab director, as awkward as that was. When Cooper announced the appointment on Sept. 8, there was nothing to suggest that Arnold wasn't fully committed.
Yet on Sept. 16, as The N&O reported yesterday, Arnold formally notified new SBI director Greg McLeod to count him out because of all the time the lab position would take. That's strange enough - surely Arnold must have understood that he'd be busy. But what's even weirder is that Cooper's office treated Arnold's change of heart as something the public had no reason to know about.
The N&O inquired about Arnold's status on Sept. 24 and got the old "we'll check and get back to you" brush-off. There was no response until Arnold himself confirmed that interim SBI crime lab director would not become the latest entry on his resume.
This kind of secretiveness simply feeds speculation that Arnold could not come to terms with Cooper's team regarding the authority he'd be given or the scope of the changes that were needed.
Arnold, for the record, denied any such disagreement or concern about his mandate as boss of the lab while a national search was conducted for a permanent chief. But why wouldn't the attorney general have been forthright about the situation?
The crime lab's misadventures are at the heart of a scandal that cost the previous SBI director her job and, worse, cast doubt over hundreds of cases in which prosecutors relied on the lab's blood analysis. Cooper has vowed to correct the problems and put the lab on a sound scientific footing. Will the new director have sufficient backing to make sure reforms are accomplished? That's a question Gerald Arnold won't have to find out for himself.
