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The defense’s DNA data in a Washington, D.C. rape case was thrown out by a judge in 2015, due to technical errors by a Pennsylvania forensic laboratory.
Now the Texas Forensic Science Commission has cited the laboratory’s failings in an extensive report on the case, touching off a series of reviews and changes at the private lab.
The report has prompted a lab-wide review of about 1,500 DNA analyses handled by National Medical Services (NMS), Inc., a Pennsylvania-based forensic and medical facility, to see if “overblown data” may have affected other cases across the country. The NMS lab has agreed to a major “course correction” requested by the Texas forensic watchdog agency.
Part of that course correction involves two scientists specifically cited in the TFSC report. Both are no longer affiliated with NMS. However, both men are still part of the national forensic community’s standards-setting board: the Organization for Scientific Area Committees, or OSAC.
While a handful of government crime labs have been implicated in sweeping scandals over several years, the latest report is one of the few official actions taken against a private laboratory.
THE CASE, THE DNA
The case was U.S. v. Torney, a rape case in the nation’s capital. Cardell Torney was arrested and charged with sexual assault in 2012, about two years after an attack on a woman in the doorway of her home.
The DNA led to the identification and arrest of Torney, then 40—and was key to the prosecutor’s case, authorities said.
But a 2013 analysis of that swabbed DNA became the central debate of the case, early in the proceedings.
The public defender hired NMS Labs, of Willow Grove, Pa. They also enlisted the help of Phillip Danielson, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Denver.
Together, the NMS scientists used Promega’s PowerPlex 16HS System. Amid their amplification and interpretation of the genetic data, Danielson and scientists led by Christian Westring, then the head of the criminalistics section of the NMS lab, determined they had a DNA mixture. That mixture potentially included other men, based on the signals they interpreted.
The prosecution’s expert was Bruce Budowle, former FBI scientist and currently head of the Institute of Applied Genetics at the...