I'm a native Houstonian, who fled the pervasive Bush fascism there, four years ago, for the Great Blue Northeast. I lived the story I'm going to relate to you, the White Republican Totalitarian Feudalism that was and remains Houston and Texas.
This is not a single story, about an issue limited in scope. It is about the shithole that was and remains Houston, Texas, a shithole not because there aren't a lot of good people there- there are- but because the truly rich and powerful call Houston their "base" for a reason. The institutions there are completely corrupt, and there remains a huge inoculum of despicable white racist scum there. Namely, Bush's Brownshirt "Base."
Below are excerpts of the Houston Chronicle's story today on the investigation into the Houston Police Department's Crime Lab. As you read this story, consider how such conspiracies involving groups of people can organize and persist. Consider the importance of apocalyptic rhetoric in this regard.
Police lab tailored tests to theories, report says
Investigators hope to establish whether mistakes were deliberate
By ROMA KHANNA and STEVE MCVICKER
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Houston crime lab analysts skewed reports to fit police theories in several cases, ignoring results that conflicted with police expectations because of a lack of confidence in their own skills or a conscious effort to secure convictions, an independent investigator says in his latest report on the scandal.
In more than 20 cases reviewed in this stage of the ongoing probe, the investigative team concluded that analysts at the Houston Police Department crime lab failed to report the results of blood-typing and DNA tests that did not implicate the suspects police had identified.
"We have found a clear and troubling pattern of reluctance in the serology and DNA sections to report typing results that were not consistent with the blood types or DNA profiles of either the victim or a known suspect; in many such cases the results were reported as inconclusive," investigator Michael Bromwich wrote.
...
To date, investigators have identified 93 cases involving DNA or serology analysis with "major issues" that raise doubts about the reliability of work and the accuracy of analysts' conclusions.
Efforts to determine what went wrong in those cases were hampered by a lack of cooperation from former lab chief Donald Krueger; James Bolding, who led the DNA and serology divisions; and analyst Christy Kim, the report says. Bolding and Kim analyzed evidence in many of the cases in which investigators found problems.
"Our inability to gather information from them in connection with our case reviews has hampered our ability to determine whether any of the most troubling cases we have found were the product of intentional scientific fraud," Bromwich wrote.
HPD chose Bromwich, a former U.S. Justice Department official, to investigate the crime lab in 2005, three years after the DNA division was closed because of problems with practices and personnel. Since 2002, errors also have been exposed in the lab divisions that test firearms, body fluids and controlled substances.
Two men have been released from prison, with one receiving a pardon on the basis of his innocence, after the discovery of problems with the lab's handling of evidence in their cases.
...
The latest report offers insight into how the lab's practical deficiencies -- such as poor training and inadequate standards -- affected reports and testimony in individual cases.
At the gruesome scene of the 1988 slayings of two Houston Grand Opera tenors, James Bolding swabbed dozens of samples from a blood-spattered bathroom and bedroom, the report states. He found blood that matched the victims and the suspect, and a sample that could not have come from any of the three. Bolding, a serologist who went on to head the lab's DNA division, did not report the incompatible finding, Brom- wich's team found.
More than six years later, however, after a fingerprint database pointed police to a new suspect -- one who was consistent with the sample Bolding never reported -- he added that conclusion to his report on the evidence, the team reported.
"This case is a troubling example of the head of the crime lab's serology section seemingly tailoring his reported results to fit with investigators' pre-existing expectations," the report states.
Bolding did not return a phone call seeking comment.