It’s not just rare to have a crime lab implode, but unheard of.  In Nassau County, the impact of incompetence and deceit that caused closure of the crime lab is just beginning to be felt.  To some, it’s a slap in the face.  To others, it’s a caress.

An email sent out by William Kephart, president of the Nassau County Criminal Courts Bar Association said that in technical reviews conducted, “so far in 11 cases [the NYS Inspector General’s review] have in fact discovered errors in all 11.”  How cool is that?

This was a lab not only run by the cops, of the cops and for the cops, but physically situated in police headquarters.  And nobody there gave a damn whether its work was legit.  Shocking.  Of course, they learned a little from the spray after feces met fan.

Now that the laboratory, which had been at Police Headquarters in Mineola, is closed, county officials said they were sending evidence elsewhere to be tested. The county is also constructing a new laboratory in New Cassel under new leadership.

If you move it down the road, everything is different.

Errors in technical reviews, of course, don’t mean that defendants are innocent.  It does, however, mean that they haven’t been proven guilty.  Nassau DA Kathleen Rice at first proposed retesting 10% of the results to achieve some statistical basis to conclude that the lab might have been messy as can be, but the defendants were all guilty as charged. 

That didn’t fly well, and so she shifted gears to retesting everything.  Kinda.  Provided it was tested since 2007, which, according to Newsday, covers about 3000 cases.

Marc Gann, president of the Nassau County Bar Association, called Rice’s pumped-up testing plans “a major step in the right direction” but said they should reach back to 2005, when the lab was first placed on probation.

One might take it a step further, and wonder why 2005 is enough, since the lab wasn’t placed on probation for the failures that started that day, but for the systemic failures that existed beforehand.  Probation comes as a result of fundamental failure.  It doesn’t make a good starting point.

As the interested parties duke it out in Nassau County, with the NYSACDL notably AWOL on a major criminal justice issue, again, there’s a nagging problem facing every defendant, lawyer and judge.  There are a whole lot of people sitting in state prisons on drug convictions that aren’t. 

Whether a substance in issue in a drug prosecution is in fact a controlled substance is entirely controlled by the lab report.  If the lab says coke, then coke it is. Heroin? Same.  Right down the line.  This is a necessary element of every drug conviction.  There can be no valid conviction if an element of the crime was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt.  As we now know, nothing coming out of the Nassau County Crime Lab can be taken as proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

But what to do with all those nice men and women languishing in prison on drug convictions?  In hard terms, they should be restored to their preconviction status, including bail, since the presumption of innocence was never removed by a valid conviction. 

And then there’s the question of what to do with all those nice men and women convicted of drugs prior to 2007, or 2005 should the pushed envelope be opened.  What of those 2004 or 3 or 1 convictions, where the defendants were sentenced to decades in prison for being heinous drug felons because they sold or possessed . . . something.

What a flaming mess.