BPD to hold briefing on evidence warehouse probe
By O’Ryan Johnson | The Boston Herald | Friday, January 4, 2008
Boston police officials today are announcing a portion of the results of an investigation into the theft of seized drugs at the BPD Hyde Park evidence warehouse.
Police are expected to release information related to a yearlong audit, but are not expected to discuss what if any criminal charges or internal discipline will result.
Police sources have said BPD officers are suspected in the theft of evidence from the warehouse, and the Boston police department’s anti-corruption division was assigned the case.
The investigation was launched in August 2006 after prescription drugs that had been taken as evidence in criminal cases and locked in the facility were determined to be missing.
The missing evidence prompted police brass to close down the facility and transfer 12 employees until a thorough audit could be performed. The department also reached out to the state police for help in evidence management.
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DA, lawyers laud Davis for drug evidence audit
By O’Ryan Johnson | The Boston Herald |Sunday, January 6, 2008
Boston police Commissioner Edward Davis is getting praise from defense lawyers and his one-time foe, Suffolk District Attorney Dan Conley, for his work in completing an exhaustive audit of 110,000 pieces of drug evidence that date back to 1990.
“As far as drugs go I don’t know many police departments that want to go back that far,” said Jack King, staff lawyer with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
King said many states use a system that destroys the drugs immediately after they return from a testing lab. Otherwise, he said, “they have a tendency to grow legs and walk away.”
That is exactly what a 14-month Police Department audit uncovered when it found 700 missing bags of drugs, and another 265 that had been tampered with, including some where a thief replaced narcotics with aspirin.
Davis wants state lawmakers to adopt a similar system to California, where drug destruction is mandated by law rather than on a case-by-case basis by a judge. Under existing law, in order for the Police Department to get rid of all the drugs in its inventory, judges would need to order each from the 74,465 cases destroyed.
In response to the audit’s shocking findings, Davis improved security and record-keeping at the evidence locker, which has been closed since December 2006.
Among the upgrades are a $100,000 computer system used for tracking drug evidence, more personnel added to the facility and a new system for organizing the bags of drug evidence.
“I welcome the commissioner’s reforms, which should avert the type of long-term neglect and mismanagement that allowed this corruption to occur in the first place,” Conley said.
Conley, along with Boston Police Department internal affairs and the FBI, has launched a criminal investigation into the missing and tampered-with drugs. The FBI is on hand for laboratory and technical support, Davis said. Massachusetts-based defense lawyer Tim Burke, who also represents the state police troopers union, said by doing the dirty work and uncovering the scandal, Davis has saved the department’s reputation in court.
“You have to start fresh,” he said. “That’s exactly what he’s done. I think it’s helped the credibility of their drug investigation tremendously.”
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Probe targets cops over missing drugs Evidence was stored in BPD warehouse
By O’Ryan Johnson | The Boston Herald | Saturday, January 5, 2008
Some 700 bags of drugs are missing from a Hyde Park evidence warehouse, a 14-month-long audit has revealed, and now police have launched a criminal probe into officers who had access to the facility.
The audit found that, in addition to the missing drugs, someone had tampered with another 265 evidence bags, in some cases replacing prescription narcotics with aspirin tablets.
The scandal creates a nightmare legal scenario for prosecutors and could be a ticket to sentence reduction and early release for repeat offenders, said criminal defense lawyers.
If a person was convicted using the now missing or tainted evidence, and was later arrested for a second drug crime, they could be jailed longer as a repeat offender, said Jack King, staff attorney with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Washington, D.C.
However, if the evidence from their first case has vanished or is compromised, the suspect can appeal the stiffer sentence they received as a repeat offender, King said, and they stand a good chance of winning.
“I saw that come up in my own experience in a couple of cases,” he said. “The defendant who appealed his prior conviction was able to get his sentence on the second conviction reduced. . . . If the evidence is missing, the city or the state doesn’t have much of a case.”
The Suffolk District Attorney’s Office said that while all of the cases involving the drugs have moved through the courts, it is now investigating how many repeat offenders that scenario may apply to. Since many of the cases involving the missing or tainted evidence date back to 1990 and could number in the dozens, spokesman Jake Wark said it is “simply too early to say at this point whether or how any defendants’ subsequent sentences may have been affected.”
After an initial audit in October 2006 found tampering in eight cases, police Commissioner Edward Davis ordered auditors to search all 110,500 pieces of drug evidence seized by police from 1990 through 2006.
In the 265 tainted plastic evidence bags - which police found sliced or ripped open and a portion of the drug removed or replaced - there were 32 items of cocaine, heroin, 40 items of marijuana and 272 prescription pills. In 90 of those cases, aspirin was used to replace prescription narcotics, police said.
Cocaine is the most prevelant drug missing among the 700 bags of evidence gone from the shelves in the drug locker.
Davis said the drugs could have been lost, legally destroyed and not accounted for, however the audit suggests that “department employees perpetrated fraud or other criminal activity.”
As a result of the audit, the evidence warehouse is monitored by 21 video cameras instead of the one previously used, officers are no longer allowed inside the vault alone and the drug vault is no longer left open when it is not being used.
But Davis wants lawmakers to allow cops to destroy drugs after they have been photographed and tested.
“There are default warrants on suspects that require us to hold drugs for decades and that really is inappropriate. This is an area that’s ripe for a problem,” Davis said. “Maintaining evidence is a difficult and complicated problem across the commonwealth. I think every police administrator in the state is worried about this.”
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Police find widespread drug tampering Nearly 1,000 cases affected
By Maria Cramer, Globe Staff | The Boston Globe | January 5, 2008
A sweeping, 14-month investigation into evidence tampering at the Boston Police Department's central drug depository has found that drugs confiscated in nearly 1,000 cases over 16 years were stolen or improperly discarded, Commissioner Edward F. Davis said yesterday.
The FBI, prosecutors from Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley's office, and Boston police have launched a criminal investigation to determine who took the drugs.
The drugs included cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and Oxycontin, Davis said. The Oxycontin was often replaced with a substance similar to Tylenol or aspirin, he said.
An officer or officers were almost certainly involved, Davis said, because only police are allowed into the Hyde Park depository.
Davis said he plans to inform defense lawyers involved with the drug cases to let them know about the audit's results.
None of the drug cases in which evidence was missing are still open. Jake Wark, spokesman for Conley, said the district attorney's office is investigating whether any of the closed drug cases were compromised because of the missing evidence.
"It's simply too early to tell," he said. "We will be looking closely at whether and how any defendant's closed cases may have been affected."
The revelations have sparked Davis to conduct an audit of all department units, including hiring and personnel.
"We're really going to shake the place out and make sure that every department is up to national standards," Davis said.
The audit examined 110,000 individual quantities or batches of drugs from more than 74,000 cases between 1990 and 2006. Police officials had initially planned to audit only a small portion of the evidence in storage, an investigation launched in 2006 as a precautionary measure because evidence was being moved to another part of the warehouse.
But department officials decided to conduct the more extensive investigation when they learned that drugs that had just been inventoried were missing. As a result of that discovery, the 12 officers who worked at the depository were transferred to other areas in December 2006. None has been charged.
"It's an unprecedented step to do a complete inventory of drug evidence," Davis said. "I don't know anybody else in the Commonwealth who has done that."
Police officials found that bags of drugs were often cut open and the contents sometimes replaced with other substances.
In other cases, the drugs were simply stolen from the bags.
Police found problems with 965 cases, which were defined as one or more envelopes containing drugs. In 265 cases, 368 drugs were missing from the envelopes or showed some type of tampering.
In 700 other cases, the envelopes were missing entirely from warehouse shelves, and police are still investigating whether they were stolen or just thrown out. In those missing envelopes were hundreds of bags of drugs, including: 467 bags of cocaine; 125 of heroin; 197 of marijuana, and 20 pills, tablets, or capsules.
Officials do not know how many people were involved. "This could have all been perpetrated by one person," Davis said.
Finding the culprit will be difficult, officials acknowledged. Davis said investigators do not know when most of the drugs were taken.
Many of the affected cases involved investigations conducted between 1991 and 1997.
Superintendent Daniel Linskey said whoever stole the drugs might have tapped older cases in a belief that officials were less likely to discover they were missing.
"If the drugs have been sitting there for a while and I'm going to do this, what's the likelihood of me getting caught?" he said.
But Davis said many drugs lose their potency after a year, making it more likely they were taken during those earlier dates.
Police are also looking into whether some of the evidence may have been lost during moves between department units during the 1990s.
Drugs were moved from district stations to a central drug unit in Jamaica Plain. In 1996, the evidence was permanently moved to Hyde Park, into a 13,500-square-foot building that also stores evidence from gun and homicide cases.
Commanders overseeing the warehouse were concerned about security from the time the facility opened. There was only one camera recording who went in and out of the facility, and officers were allowed to go alone inside the warehouse. Since the audit, the department has installed 20 cameras at the facility and officers must enter the warehouse in pairs.
At least three commanders of the warehouse had asked for audits of the depository. Department policy recommends that an audit of 1 percent of the drug evidence be conducted annually, but the only other audit conducted was in 2004, by Lieutenant Detective John Fedorchuk, who worked in evidence management at the facility for eight months in 2000.
When the most recent audit was ordered, Fedorchuk was again assigned to conduct it, a decision that raised concerns over a conflict of interest from union officials, who decried the transfer of Captain Frank Armstrong. Armstrong had been assigned to oversee the warehouse in 2006 and recommended the audit that uncovered so many problems.
But Davis defended the decision, stating Fedorchuk has extensive experience in auditing and review.
Fedorchuk made several recommendations, including installing more cameras, but they were not implemented at the time. Driscoll said officials do not know why the recommendations were not adopted or why yearly audits were not conducted.
Davis said the audit is an opportunity to request changes in state law that will allow police to destroy drug evidence immediately after it is confiscated.
Currently, Boston police are not allowed to destroy evidence until a convicted felon's appeals process has been exhausted, which can take decades.
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