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The old switcheroo: How Alaska's crime lab resembles my parents' liquor cabinet

When I was a teenager, I used to sneak vodka shots out of a big jug of my parents kept in their bar. Employing a time-honored adolescent trick, I cleverly replaced the missing liquor with water so the level of liquid in the jug remained the same. This same type of subterfuge has apparently been going on at the State of Alaska Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory -- only instead of cheap vodka, someone has been sampling oxycodone, morphine, opium, codeine and methamphetamine and replacing the missing narcotics with something that visually approximates those substances.

Earlier this month, this information was disclosed to those of us who practice criminal law by John Skidmore, the guy who supervises district attorneys' offices around the state for the Department of Law, via email. "Foreign matter," he wrote to us, had been found in the crime lab's reference standards. Reference standards are pure forms of various narcotics the crime lab keeps on hand to check the accuracy of its testing equipment.

My colleagues and I had already been getting hints that something was up with the crime lab about a week before this disclosure. Prosecutors in courts across the state started asking for drugs cases to be continued, citing the possibility that "exculpatory evidence" from the crime lab might be forthcoming. By the time Skidmore sent out his email, he had already concluded that there was "no new exculpatory evidence." He assured us that "(t)he irregularities found do not impact the Crime Lab's ability to identify submitted suspected controlled substances or the scientific validity of past lab tests."

Right... Oh, except for the fact that someone in the crime lab has been tampering with the drugs stored there, and willing to risk prosecution and imprisonment for multiple felonies in order to do it.

Let me explain why this is a big deal. Drugs do not have distinctive identifiers. When police seize a baggie of white powder from someone, there's nothing that specifically ties it to that person and nothing that distinguishes it from any other similar-looking substance. So when it's sent to the crime lab to be tested, the container storing the powder is marked, it's stored in a secured evidence locker, and any person who removes the powder from the locker has to sign for it.

This is called the chain of custody. It's supposed to account for everyone who accessed the powder and to track the movement of the suspected drugs through the lab. But the chain of custody is designed to eliminate accidental mix-ups, like an analyst confusing two similar-looking bags lying out on a counter. It does nothing to protect the integrity of the white powder from a criminal actor, from someone inside the crime lab who is deliberately manipulating drugs for their own personal gain and doesn't care if those actions are illegal.

The integrity of most of the testing done at the crime lab relies, at least to some extent, on the honesty of the examiner. Most of the folks at the crime lab -- in fact, everyone I've met -- are good people and competent forensic scientists. But a criminal actor inside the crime lab could potentially do all kinds of damage. That person would have access to the drugs sent in to be tested, not just the reference standards. He or she could falsify tests, steal drugs, switch around drug containers, or even conduct testing while under the influence of narcotics.

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A bad actor can get away with quite a bit in a system that requires some degree of trust. My parents, who never locked their liquor cabinet and apparently didn't notice that their cocktail parties were becoming increasingly subdued, remained unaware of my antics for years. The crime lab may have been similarly vulnerable.

At this point in time, we have no information from Mr. Skidmore or the crime lab to eliminate the possibility that drugs submitted to the crime lab have been tampered with: no identification of potential suspects, no idea which drugs the potential tamperer had access to inside the lab, and no information about any protocols in place to safeguard against a criminal actor working at the lab. Without this information -- without the ability to rule out tampering -- Mr. Skidmore's bald assurances that everything is just fine at the crime lab have all of the potency of a vodka tonic from my parent's bar.

Marcelle McDannel has been working in criminal law for almost two decades, both as a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney. She currently practices criminal defense statewide.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, e-mail commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.

Marcelle McDannel

Marcelle McDannel is a criminal defense lawyer, animal lover, and passionate defender of bad dogs.

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