D.C.’s New Crime Lab Goes Under the Microscope

WHAT’S THE point of spending millions of dollars on a crime lab if people don’t trust its findings and won’t use it? That is one question D.C. officials should be asking in light of the unsettling revelation that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has stopped sending DNA evidence to the new Consolidated Forensic Laboratory because it claims there have been serious mistakes. Far more than money is at issue: Forensics plays a key role in determining the guilt or innocence of crime suspects. The concerns of federal prosecutors must be investigated and the integrity of the lab assured.

In January federal prosecutors stopped sending evidence for DNA testing to the crime lab, which is operated by the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences, opting instead to pay for tests at outside labs. The move, as The Post’s Keith L. Alexander reported, came after an outside expert, in a routine review of evidence for an upcoming case, found errors in the interpretation of test results; a subsequent review of 116 cases by two nationally known experts found what federal prosecutors characterized as...