Evidence withholding could send cops to jail

The State Bureau of Investigation has been being investigated for about a year "amid disclosures that lab analysts failed to turn over blood test results favorable to defendants."

The Raleigh News & Observer "reported last August that problems went deeper; some agents bullied the vulnerable and some lab analysts pushed past the bounds of accepted science to deliver results that bolstered prosecutors' cases. And an audit ordered by Attorney General Roy Cooper, who oversees the SBI, cited 229 cases where lab analysts withheld test results that could be favorable to defendants."

Seven of the cases involved cases where defendants were sentenced to the death penalty, and three of them have been executed.

 

So far little has been done about it. But at least the state is considering changes that would make this activity less likely in the future.

http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/01/23/938176/evidence-withholding-could-send.html