Buncombe County DA Ron Moore announced the evidence in eighty to ninety of his criminal cases was analyzed by SBI lab technicians who failed their certification test. Moore said this is significant only for two cases because guilty pleas were achieved in the others without the need for testimony from the analysts.
Certifications were not required until last year. The NCGA passed the law in response to claims that analysts were “overstating or falsely reporting blood evidence [and] ignoring evidence or tailoring it to fit crime theories favored by prosecutors.”
Now, we should all be very interested to see what kind of test determines who will handle data honestly. Perhaps it was designed to weed out those clever enough to understand objective lab technique and identify ways of manipulating data. Perhaps it did so by declaring those who missed easy questions to be deceivers, or those who got them to be deceivers posing as honest dummies, or . . . Oh, these cop things get me so confused.
