Probe of state crime lab sought
HELENA – An advocacy group for the wrongly convicted asked the Montana Supreme Court on Wednesday to order a sweeping investigation into whether more than two men may have been convicted based on faulty analysis conducted at the Montana State Crime Lab.
The New York-based Innocence Project, along with defense attorneys and others, asked the high court to conduct a hearing and ask Attorney General Mike McGrath why he has not ordered such an investigation on his own.
Specifically, the court was asked to find out why McGrath has not scoured the cases handled by former crime lab director Arnold Melnikoff, whose work came under fire in 2002, when Jimmy Ray Bromgard was freed after 15 years in prison when DNA analysis proved he did not rape an 8-year-old girl.
In early May 2003, DNA evidence also exonerated Paul Kordonowy of a rape, though he remains in prison on a separate rape conviction.
Melnikoff provided hair analysis in both cases and testified at both men’s trials that there was less than a 1-in-10,000 chance that hair found at the crime scenes belonged to someone other than the defendants. He used a probability theory on hair comparisons that critics say has no scientific basis.
Melnikoff headed Montana’s state crime lab from 1970 to 1989, when he went to work for the Washington State Patrol’s crime lab in Spokane.
The Washington State Patrol fired Melnikoff last March, concluding his testimony in the Kordonowy case did not meet professional standards.
Melnikoff’s termination was not based on an audit of 100 drug cases he worked over the past four years in the Spokane crime lab, Washington state officials said.
The Washington state internal affairs investigation and audit of Melnikoff’s work was prompted by a letter from the Innocence Project.
Documents filed late Wednesday afternoon with the Montana high court accused McGrath of failing to aggressively investigate possible instances of flawed analysis at the Montana lab.
“This petition follows nearly two years of failed efforts to achieve voluntary compliance by the Montana attorney general with the nearly universally accepted standards for responding to proven instances of misconduct on the part of a crime lab employee,” the petition said.
McGrath said late Wednesday that he had not seen the filing but defended what he called an “extensive review.”
“We think that the review we did is sufficient, and we’re sure that the courts will uphold that,” he said.
The court filing accused McGrath of having a conflict of interest because, as a former county attorney, he relied on testing done by Melnikoff and others at the lab. As a result, McGrath “personally oversaw a superficial, incomplete review of paperwork” related to Melnikoff, the court was told.
In January, McGrath released an investigation his office conducted. It concluded that although Melnikoff made hair associations in 118 other cases while at the Montana lab, there was nothing to indicate any other defendants were wrongly convicted based on his work.
“As far as I’m concerned, we’re done,” McGrath said at the time.
The Innocence Project denounced those findings then, with its attorney, Peter Neufeld, saying the review “violated the most fundamental principles of science and justice.”
Neufeld maintained a more thorough scientific review should have been done, and the filing Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to appoint a special judge or “forensic evidence commission” to perform that task.
The investigation should look for instances of wrongful convictions due to lab analysis errors and make recommendations about operations at the lab, how test results are reported and standards for courtroom testimony by lab staff, the petition said.
The request did not pertain solely to cases Melnikoff personally handled, but asked that an investigation “examine and retest the work of current and former staff … in order to identify cases of wrongful conviction and cases in which the real perpetrator was incorrectly eliminated from investigation.”