Crime Lab Director Says Too Busy to Search for Forensic Science Errors

OC WEEKLY | by R. SCOTT MOXLEY | JULY 11, 2018


Bruce Houlihan enjoys puzzles, but the Orange County Crime Lab director is purposely failing to solve one of the biggest riddles of his career: Why did his office quietly give conflicting, pro-prosecution, expert testimony in two cold-case, rape/murder trials?

Houlihan met that question—pending at least since 2016, when the Weekly revealed the controversy—with palpable silence until February, when he briefly emerged to deny wrongdoing. Hoping his word would be enough to sidestep an inquiry, he gave no meaningful explanation for his declaration. That misstep only drew additional scrutiny. So Houlihan decided he’d become tight-lipped again, unless commanded otherwise by court order.

Providing irreconcilable inconsistencies in murder cases isn’t the typical bureaucratic snafu. It’s a crisis. Because the overwhelming majority of jurors nationwide have little understanding of forensic-science minutia heard in court, they rely on the credibility of the crime lab officials’ sworn analysis.

But humans we want to trust aren’t always honest. For example, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reported in 2017 that as many as 21,000 criminal convictions over the years had been tainted by Annie Dookhan, a veteran forensic scientist. While her bosses ignored red flags, Dookhan forged test results, doctored evidence, lied about her misdeeds, wrecked thousands of innocent lives and eventually landed in prison.

In Orange County, our two top law-enforcement officials, District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and Sandra Hutchens—the boss of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD)—spent years proving they can’t be trusted either. They’ve allowed deputies to run self-described “cappers,” or unconstitutional scams to help prosecutors win weak cases; hid exculpatory records from defendants; tolerated perjury when uttered by badged individuals; ignored lawfully issued court orders; and operated public-relations campaigns posing as untarnished protectors of justice.

It’s no surprise that Houlihan found allies in Rackauckas and Hutchens. The trio is fighting efforts by Assistant Public Defender Scott Sanders to solve the mystery of People v. Lynn Dean Johnson and People v. Wendell Lemond. How could the crime lab originally declare matching semen-deposit-timing findings at the outset of the 1985 Anaheim cases, denounce those findings as junk science when the cops wanted to nail Johnson in 2008, and then, without announcing their flip-flop on the flip-flop, regurgitate the original findings as gospel to nail Lemond in 2009?

See this link for the entire article: https://www.ocweekly.com/crime-lab-director-says-too-busy-to-search-for-forensic-science-errors/