Less than two weeks out from the D.C. Council’s first vote on next year’s budget, the future of the city’s independent (unaccredited, beleaguered) crime lab remains in limbo.

In her proposed 2024 budget, Mayor Muriel Bowser suggested moving the department that processes crime scene evidence out of the Department of Forensic Sciences – an executive agency cleaved from the city’s police department more than a decade ago — back under the control of the Metropolitan Police Department.

The crime scene science division, as it’s called, oversees the collection, processing, analysis, and preservation of crime scene evidence, and is intended to be staffed by civilians.

The mayor’s suggested move was meant to free up DFS duties, giving the agency more time to focus on regaining accreditation, Bowser said when she first made the proposal. But experts and advocates are worried her plan would compromise the lab’s impartiality in handling evidence — running counter to the reason the lab was created in the first place.

With the council’s first budget vote nearing on May 16, criminal justice advocates are urging lawmakers to preserve the lab’s independence, warning that police oversight of evidence gathering increases the risk of wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice. Some councilmembers are also concerned that a crime lab housed within the police department will erode trust in the city’s justice system, and increase the number of cases that are dismissed by prosecutors.

“[Transfering the crime scene sciences division to MPD] would reverse scientific progress, decrease quality and transparency, risk increasing bias in our forensic testing, and correspondingly reduce trust in our criminal legal system,” reads a letter sent by Heather Pinckney, director of the Public Defender Service of D.C., to councilmembers this week. “The move would also jeopardize the reliability of forensic testing in the District, potentially leading to wrongful convictions and creating new problems for DFS and grave miscarriages of justice for District residents and their families.”

Experts that analyze the reliability of forensic testing have long touted the necessity of independent labs. A damning report from the National Academies of Sciences 10 years ago said as much, criticizing the lack of scientific standards in forensic analysis across the nation and highlighting concerns around bias. The report recommended that jurisdictions maintain a forensics lab independent of a local police department or district attorney’s office, staffed by civilians — eventually, that report led to the creation of the D.C. Department of Forensic Sciences.

In the decade since its formation, though, high-profile errors, questions of accuracy, and a lack of transparency have beset the lab. The issues culminated in April 2021, when the lab lost its accreditation amid concerns regarding inaccuracies and compromised prosecutions. The agency has been outsourcing much of its processing work since, with the hopes of regaining accreditation in 2024, at the earliest.

But advocates say the problems with the lab don’t mean it should be put under the control of the police department. Beyond the risk of intentional bias and evidence tampering, moving the unit under the police department inherently injects an allegiance that national standards are trying to avoid, according to Dr. Heidi Eldridge, an assistant professor of forensic science at George Washington University and the director of graduate studies at GW’s crime scene investigation program.

“It’s … a subconscious feeling of being part of that team, and feeling like you have shared goals and feeling like your purpose is to secure convictions,” Eldridge told DCist/WAMU in an interview. “We want to always have a very open mind when we’re doing crime scene analysis and laboratory evaluations; the concern is that if you’re working for the police agency, it might be harder to keep that open objective mind.”

During budget season, after the mayor releases her proposed fiscal year budget, councilmembers have a few months to review her proposals, make changes in their committees, and then ultimately vote on their revisions. The council is expected to vote on a final budget by the end of the month.

In the judiciary committee’s mark-up of Bowser’s budget, lawmakers maintained the mayor’s proposal for the crime lab with one caveat: the crime scene science division would become independent again at the end of the 2024 fiscal year, at which point DFS would have hopefully regained accreditation. In the meantime, judiciary committee chair and Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto said the council should hold public hearings and eventually vote on permanent legislation to decide where the crime scene unit should live.

“At the end of the day, reaccreditation for our forensics lab has to be paramount,” Pinto said during a budget work session with councilmembers on Wednesday. “Things that we can do to make that process more likely or easier are things that I think we should be supportive of.”

But advocates and councilmembers aren’t sold on this justification — especially because the crime scene sciences division itself isn’t an accredited unit, so it wouldn’t create any extra obstacles on the path to re-accreditation.

“It is noteworthy that no one at DFS, the office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice, or the Mayor’s office has even attempted to articulate how transferring the [crime scene sciences division] to MPD would aid DFS in obtaining and maintaining its accreditation,” reads Pinckney’s letter to the Council.

Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, former chair of the judiciary committee, said Wednesday that he doesn’t “buy at all” the Mayor’s argument that the transfer is meant to free up bandwidth for accreditation. He said it seems like another attempt by the mayor to erode the independence of the lab, following her opposition to an Allen-sponsored bill last year (set to go into effect in May) that would move the department out of the executive branch completely.

“It’s never an argument the executive made until the last couple of weeks,” Allen said on Wednesday while reviewing the judiciary committee’s budget. “I really think this council should not dismantle and reverse course on what we just did to try to create a stronger DFS. I think our criminal justice system and public safety writ-large depends on having an independent DFS… I would encourage us as the larger council to have a more full conversation about that in the coming weeks.”

The judiciary committee’s budget memo stated that they had received “extensive” feedback on the proposal, both in support of and wary of the move. Many stakeholders said transferring the division to MPD opens up the evidence collection process to the risk of actual bias, while also creating a perception of bias that could impact trials, the committee wrote. “Of note, the Committee heard concerns that defense attorneys anticipate a difference in how (crime scene science) staff may respond to their requests if housed at MPD rather than DFS.”

That sentiment was also issued by the Innocence Project – a nonprofit that advocates for individuals who have been wrongly convicted, among other criminal justice issues. Policy advocate Nathaniel Erb and Forensic Science Policy Advisor Sarah Chu wrote a letter to Pinto and Chairman Phil Mendelson in April, highlighting the human impact of a biased or compromised lab. (According to the National Registry of Exonerations, eight wrongful convictions in D.C. involved either false or misleading forensic evidence.)

“The stories of our clients show us daily the personal toll that failures take on families, communities, and generations. At the same time, it was the advent of forensic DNA testing that allowed our work to flourish,” reads their letter. “In an adversarial system, we need valid and reliable forensic evidence to serve as a neutral tool that brings us closer to the truth…we believe in the original vision of the Department and the ability of the District to achieve it.”

Furthermore, a spokesperson for the Public Defender Service for D.C. said in a statement that as the city attempts to restore trust in the troubled lab, moving the crime scene science unit would only work in the opposite direction, and jeopardize the integrity of cases. In 2021, following the loss of accreditation, a report (commissioned by the mayor) called on the city to review every case handled by DFS’ firearms and fingerprints units.

“Moving DFS’s Crime Scene Sciences Division from DFS to MPD is a step backward that will undermine the quality and integrity of evidence as well as its testing, interpretation, and ultimate presentation in court, and could add to a problem that the District has to date failed to meaningfully address – the need to retest evidence in hundreds of cases where firearms and fingerprint examiners who got their start at MPD and then brought the law enforcement agency’s culture and unsound scientific practices to DFS,” the spokesperson said.

MPD, meanwhile, is in support of the shift, according to the judiciary committee’s report. Because of short-staffing at DFS, officers often have to wait for long periods at crime scenes before the crime scene sciences division was able to send anyone out to a site.

“In response to these issues, MPD began training its officers on evidence collection, which has allowed more expedient collection of evidence,” reads the committee budget report. “As crime scene services are typically a civilian role, however, this has meant that uniformed officers are spending already limited hours on tasks that a non-uniformed staffer could complete. Bringing [crime scene sciences] under MPD will thus allow that work to be done by civilian staff to MPD’s satisfaction.”

Ward 4 councilmember and former prosecutor at the D.C. Attorney General’s office Janeese Lewis George joined Allen in opposing Pinto’s temporary solution on Wednesday, calling the move “a terrible decision” that could lead to cases being dismissed.

“Ask the judges, ask every prosecutor… in the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the [Office of the Attorney General]…they know what impact this is going to have, and we don’t want cases dismissed,” Lewis George said. “We need an independent DFS crime lab, or our cases are just going to get thrown out and what’s the point of that? That’s going to [decrease] officer morale as well. I want real conversations around this before we make this very tragic decision that could hurt really serious cases in our city.”

According to a Washington Post report earlier this year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. declined to prosecute 67% of cases presented by D.C. officers – partially a result of the crime lab’s lack of accreditation and its impact on investigations. Pinto pushed back on Lewis George’s suggestion that the crime scene unit transfer would lead to an increase in dismissed cases. Instead, she said prosecutors were in favor of the move, seeing it as a solution to the problem currently facing the city’s legal system.

“That’s what’s currently happening now, cases are being dismissed today because it is often a defense attorney position that ‘this is an unaccredited lab,’ and the evidence is being thrown out,” Pinto told Lewis George. “Our prosecutors are good with this shift, because their priority is to make sure that cases can move forward and not have the problem you’re describing.”

A spokesperson for Chairman Phil Mendelson told DCist/WAMU that the chairman has not made up his mind about the future of DFS, and was waiting for Wednesday’s work group discussions to learn more.

Dr. Heidi Eldridge at George Washington University said that moving the crime scene unit out of DFS following the loss of accreditation would only complicate prosecutorial proceedings and decrease confidence in the city’s justice system.

“You’re saying ‘well, we had these problems, we lost our accreditation due to those problems. And then rather than addressing those problems, we just took our unit and moved that somewhere else,” she said. “That’s not great optics, that’s much more challenging to deal with in court. Any reasonably competent defense attorney is going to be jumping all over that.”

In a broader sense, she said D.C. has the opportunity to be a model in the national forensic science field. Despite the National Academies of Sciences recommendations over a decade ago, many localities still don’t have independent labs, which can cost millions of dollars to open. Besides Houston, D.C. is the only major city to have followed the recommendations, and reneging on that effort could set a bad precedent for forensic science standards, she said.

“If Washington chooses to put their crime scene unit back under police control, it could be construed a little bit as an example of a failure; you could be sending a message to many other labs saying, ‘D.C. tried it, and it didn’t work,’” Eldridge said. “It would really benefit the broader forensic community for Washington D.C. to continue operating independently and find a way to make that work.”