By Mary Flood
The Houston Chronicle
Lee P. Brown testified Wednesday that crime lab mistakes made during his tenure as Houston police chief weren’t his fault and that he worked hard to get the lab the resources it needed.
Brown appeared before a jury that’s been asked to decide whether the city owes any money to George Rodriguez, who spent 17 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl. A crime lab employee falsely testified during Rodriguez’s criminal trial that blood evidence linked him to the attack.
Brown, who is also a former Houston mayor, said that as police chief he fought to fix the only crime lab problem he knew about - understaffing.
“There was a consistent desire of people in the lab to get more people and consistently I tried to get more people for them,” Brown said. But, he said, in the mid-1980s the city had a hiring freeze, the police academy was closed and he couldn’t get all the required positions or even overtime approved.
Rodriguez’s conviction was one of several overturned when DNA testing showed the Houston Police Department crime lab reported false results.
Brown was HPD chief from 1982-1990. Rodriguez was wrongly convicted in 1987 and released in 2004 when DNA results showed someone else committed the crime.
Brown said he understood the lab problems centered on getting and retaining quality employees and having enough personnel to process all the cases.
Brown said he did not learn about shoddy lab work and falsification of evidence until the media revealed the problems in 2002.
Showing Brown several police department memos about the crime lab, Rodriguez’s attorney questioned Brown about being told the lab was understaffed and that people lacked training and supervision.
A 1986 memo said the lab was “cutting additional corners” and had “diluted quality assurance” and that it could be “embarrassed” because of lab deficiencies.
Brown testified he considered staffing problems to be the root cause of all those references to unreliable lab results and failure to meet professional standards.
“It was tough for the city,” Brown said. “I fought hard to get them what they needed.”
“It turned out it was tough for some criminal defendants who were not guilty, too,” shot back defense attorney Mark Wawro.
Rodriguez’s lawyers contend that city policymakers, including Brown, knew about training, supervisory and quality problems in the crime lab but did nothing. They argue serologist James Bolding’s false testimony convicting Rodriguez was the result.
A key piece of evidence in the criminal case was a pubic hair found in the young victim’s underwear. Bolding, whom Brown had approved for a promotion based on a glowing report from an underling, testified falsely that the serology report on that hair eliminated another suspect, Isidro Yanez, but not Rodriguez.
The case was tried before DNA evidence was used in court. DNA tests done 17 years later showed the hair belonged to Yanez.
City lawyers Robert Cambrice and Rick Morris hope to show that no city policy led Bolding to lie, but that it was bad lawyering that caused the wrongful conviction.
Morris asked Brown whether anything about the staffing problems would have resulted in Bolding’s lie and Rodriguez’s conviction. “I don’t see the correlation between the two,” Brown said.
Copyright 2009 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company