Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice has asked for the appointment of a special prosecutor to lead the investigation into possible past impropriety of the now-shuttered county crime lab.
Rice requested that former state Superintendent for Insurance Eric R. Dinallo lead a team of attorneys who will be guiding the investigation and determining what happened at the lab.
The lab was closed last Friday after a lab audit uncovered testing errors that police supervisors were aware of but did not report. The inaccurate test have resulted in thousands of drug cases being put in jeopardy.
Dinallo is a former Manhattan assistant district attorney and investigative bureau chief in the New York Attorney General’s Office. He is currently a partner at the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton LLP in Manhattan.
“He’s the ideal special prosecutor and I am supremely confident that he will get to the bottom of what happened at the crime lab so our county’s legal system can ensure the fairness and integrity I believe is required of it,” Rice said.
The decision to close the lab was made “out of an abundance of caution” by county officials after the county medical examiner’s office learned that six prior cases involving the drugs ecstasy and ketamine were the subject of inaccurate testing results, according to Rice.
The discovery made it impossible for prosecutors to offer narcotics evidence to the court with the fairness and integrity, said Rice, who requested that Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano shut down all sections of the crime lab “until a review is complete and scientific and procedural standards are being met.”
“Let me be clear, at this time we have found no evidence of wrong doing or compromised analysis outside of the drug chemistry section of the lab,” Rice said in a statement issued Feb. 18.
In December, a state forensic oversight agency documented a series of procedural and policy violations related to the drug chemistry section of the police department lab in their annual report. The lab was placed on probation and the county executive placed the county’s medical examiner in charge of the crime lab. Mangano also put the medical examiner in charge of implementing corrective actions and the design and the planning of a new ‘state of art’ laboratory.
Rice said county police supervisors were informed of the inaccuracies in ecstasy drug testing at the crime lab before the publication of the state audit, before disclosures were made to the medical examiner’s office concerning the testing of ecstasy and ketamine and before all the drug chemistry testing was halted as a result of those two events
At Rice’s request, Mangano ordered the immediate closure of the remaining sections of the police lab last week.
Evidence is now being sent to an independent lab.
According to published reports about 9,000 drug cases from 2007 through 2009 could be put in jeopardy as a result of the testing inaccuracies.
The new lab will shift from a police department controlled lab to a county-run facility, according to Rice.
“The district attorney and I are making every effort to ensure the criminal justice system remains credible and fair to all,” said Mangano in a statement.
Mangano said the county has hired an architectural firm to design a new crime lab at the Public Safety Center in New Cassel.
