D.C.’s beleaguered crime lab isn’t set to regain its accreditation until at least 2024, continuing a messy saga of mistakes costing the city money and potentially compromising investigations.

The Department of Forensic Science will –hopefully — resubmit an accreditation application this spring or summer, interim director Anthony Crispino told lawmakers Wednesday. But realistically, he notes, that means the department, responsible for DNA analysis, fingerprints, and other evidence processing, won’t be accredited until at least the next year. By the start of 2024, the crime lab will have been without accreditation for nearly three years.

“Once the agency is at a point where we feel that everything — all of the reviews that are required to ensure that we meet all of the provisions of accreditation, and all those boxes have been checked — the application is submitted,” Crispino said Wednesday. “Absent any unforeseen circumstances, we hope to be able to put in the application for it in late spring, early summer.”

This comes as the DFS is set to become independent of the Mayor’s office in May, with a restructured board and new quality assurance standards to ensure acccuracy.

DFS lost its national accreditation by the ANSI National Accreditation Board (ANAB) in the spring of 2021 over concerns about the accuracy of its evidence analysis and the agency’s alleged attempts to cover up mistakes. In the years since, as more audits and reports uncovered issue after issue and confidence waned in the agency’s ability to fix itself, the lab has had to rely largely on outside contractors to process evidence samples. While Crispino said it’s hard to say exactly how much money that outsourcing has cost the city, DFS has received $1.5 million in 2023’s budget to cover the cost of outsourcing a lab — and will likely overshoot that budget, he said.

New procedures

During Wednesday’s oversight hearing, Crispino attempted to paint a more optimistic portrait for the future of the agency’s three divisions (Forensic Science Laboratory, the Public Health Laboratory, and Crime Scene Sciences) in the coming months and years. He touted new procedures surrounding evidence handling and document retention, a new online complaint form for stakeholders to use, and the increase in cases that have been processed using contracted labs.

“I couldn’t be prouder of the work the DFS has done under my leadership,” he told Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, the new chairperson of the council’s Judiciary and Public Safety Committee. “I am confident that DFS will deliver even greater returns for the residents and visitors of the District of Columbia.”

In his testimony, he cited various other markers of improvement in fiscal year 2022: the agency handled 1,582 crime scene service requests, processed more than 600 vehicles, and outsourced 271 sexual assault kits. He also said the agency received over 600 requests for testing, completing 84% of those requests within the 60-day window. They’ve also outsourced around 500 fingerprint analysis requests.

Ward 6 Councilmember Allen, the previous committee chair, asked if the agency had begun implementation of every recommendation outlined in a 157-page, Bowser-sanctioned 2021 audit, completed by a consultant group in the wake of the accreditation loss. The audit prompted officials to pledge to reviewing a decades-worth of convictions that relied on evidence processed by DFS.

Crispino said that yes, some recommendations had not been acted on yet due to the need to prioritize certain improvements over others.

“Because of the some of the the obstacles that we’ve encountered as we’re implementing bigger recommendations, we just have not been able to get to some of the lesser ranked recommendations at this point, but we continue to work towards doing that,” he told Allen, who asked for a specific follow-up cataloguing which changes have not begun.

MPD overseeing digital evidence unit

Other issues came out during the lawmakers’ questioning, including the fact the Science Advisory Board, which is supposed to review the scientific procedures conducted at DFS, has only met two times since the agency lost its accreditation. This is in part due to vacancies and an inability to call a quorum, according to Jean Jordan, a member of the board who testified Wednesday.

“Many of the forensic scientists who are new to this board, they have no history, no institutional knowledge about what occurred, so they have no ability to really ask questions,” she said.  “We are hopeful that we can work with DFS to help advise them as to how to go forward, but that’s going to require a really in-depth discussion and briefing on their part so we can get up to speed.”

Crispino also confirmed that the digital evidence unit, dedicated to preserving and analyzing digital crime scenes like on a cellphone, had been moved under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police Department. The answer seemed to stump Pinto, seeing as the point of creating a crime lab independent of a police department in the first place was to ensure fair and objective handling of evidence.

“It’s my understanding that the whole reason in standing up DFS 10 years ago, was because of the MPD’s evidence collection services and the concerns about having an impermissible risk of bias or the appearance of bias,” she said. “And so I’m wondering why that same risk is not now present, 10 years later?”

Crispino said the decision was made collectively by stakeholders, including the United States Attorney’s Office, and Pinto expressed concern that this could lead to additional units falling back under MPD’s purview.

“I think it’s fair to say we are on the same team in hoping to regain accreditation,” Pinto said. “But I’m worried that it seems as though there’s a pattern of continued outsourcing of much of the work, and several of the forensic units are transferred to another agency.”

Moving from under the Mayor’s office

The loss of accreditation in 2021 wasn’t the first issue for the problematic agency. In 2015, just a few years after the lab opened, the ANSI National Accreditation Board  ordered the lab to suspend all DNA analysis after their audit concluded the lab’s procedures were “insufficient and inadequate.” (D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had ordered the office after the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. claimed it had uncovered numerous errors in the lab’s DNA analysis.)

The lab has also been at the center of local probes — including a recent report from the D.C. Auditor. Released in December 2022, the Auditor’s office concluded that DFS had failed to act as an independent part of the justice system, failed to comply with its own policies, and did not maintain adequate resources for function properly as a crime lab. The auditor’s report also found that the Stakeholder Council, a group meant to ensure the lab is functioning properly, did not in fact operate properly in its goal of performing oversight.

Oversight over the agency may see large changes soon, however, with the passage of a bill from Allen last year that makes DFS independent. While it’s currently housed under the executive branch, come May, DFS will become its own agency, with a restructured review board that will investigate complaints and make them public. Crispino said he did not agree with the decision, but vowed to follow the new law accordingly.

“I think having the agency under the chief executive gives it an additional layer of oversight and also a degree of protection from stakeholders or outside entities that might be trying to exert a greater level of influence over the lab,” Crispino told Pinto when asked about his views on the upcoming change. “I think just given the environment that we’re in and the unique structure of our judicial system, it may have made sense for the agency to reside under the mayor but the legislation is passed and we’ll work with it accordingly.”