D.C. prosecutors failed to provide criminal defense attorneys all relevant information obtained by police in an unknown number of cases, sparking a “large-scale” review of past and present cases that were potentially compromised by a flaw in the Metropolitan Police Department’s data management system.
On the same day he announced his resignation, U.S. Attorney for the District Ronald C. Machen Jr. and District Attorney General Karl Racine notified criminal lawyers that a glitch in the police department’s data management system inadvertently withheld information that should have been contained on police reports.
“Not all data entered into MPD’s record management system (I/Leads) by its officers over the last three years was necessarily populated into MPD police forms that are provided by OAG in discovery to criminal defendants and respondents,” Mr. Racine wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to defense attorneys.
The revelation had defense attorneys grumbling in court Tuesday, livid about the potential violations of their clients’ rights.
“The time, energy and effort to figure this out is going to be astronomical,” said criminal defense attorney David Benowitz. “I’m sure there are a ton of constitutional violations that occurred.”
Prosecutors said they will review evidence in thousands of cases going back to 2012, when MPD began using the system, and Mr. Benowitz said he plans on reviewing the cases he handled during the time in question and filing requests for further information with prosecutors. “In any criminal case, you don’t know what you don’t know. So you are relying on the prosecutors to disclose information, because you don’t have access to the department file,” Mr. Benowitz said. “Now there is a double layer to that, because the prosecutor doesn’t know what he’s missing, and, once again, it all falls on the back of the criminal defendant.”
Mr. Machen, in a separate letter to defense attorneys that was first reported by Washington City Paper, described the omissions as “minimal in quantity” and “generally administrative in nature.” Regardless, U.S. attorney’s office spokesman William Miller said the office is now undertaking a “large-scale review to determine how this technical issue with the Metropolitan Police Department’s I/Leads program may have affected past and pending cases.”
The Office of the Attorney General, which prosecutes misdemeanor and juvenile crimes in the District, discovered the problem with the I/Leads system Jan. 21 during a trial of a defendant charged with driving under the influence, said spokesman Robert Marus. An MPD officer testified during the trial about tests he performed on the driver, which attorneys noted did not appear in paperwork on file.
“They were not in his paperwork, but he insisted on cross-examination he had filled out the paperwork,” Mr. Marus said.
The trial was stopped, allowing the officer to retrieve the physical paperwork for the case, which showed he had in fact documented the tests.
“Then, working with MPD and our own records over the next couple days, the widespread nature of the problem became apparent,” he said.
Mr. Marus said his office reached out to the U.S. attorney’s office on the matter on Jan. 28. But Mr. Miller said Mr. Machen only learned of the problems last week, noting that it was not until a meeting with all parties that “we recognized the full significance of the issue.”
To respond to the problems going forward, the police department has “updated printed reports and created additional reports to ensure that all information captured in the system is reflected on these hard copies,” said MPD spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump. She added that the department is providing the data in a variety of formats to help with prosecutors’ reviews.
The issues are just the latest in a series of headaches that the I/Leads program has caused for law enforcement since the police department began utilizing the $1.8 million system in Dec. 2011. Mr. Machen noted in his letter that MPD is abandoning the “imperfect system” and is scheduled to roll out a new data management system in August.
In Dec. 2012, glitches in the system prevented police officials from producing a key comprehensive report on city crime rates and led the department to remove online crime data because statistics were not reliable. Issues with the system ranged from the incorrect categorization of crimes to duplication of data from a single crime, and required a team of technology support specialists from the system vendor and the police department to scour and verify thousands of records by hand.
The I/Leads program was also frequently down and not accessible by officers in the field, said D.C. police union chairman Delroy Burton.
“It had a reliability problem,” he said, noting that the department has had trouble with previous data management systems.
He noted that the department is already in the process of designing a new data management system. Ms. Crump did not address questions about the new data management system in an email response to questions.
“Hopefully this new system, when it comes online, will resolve these issues,” Mr. Burton said.
• Andrea Noble can be reached at anoble@washingtontimes.com.
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