The city Medical Examiner is shielding the identities of DNA lab analysts whose blunders may have led to the convictions of innocent people, the Legal Aid Society Claims in new filings.
The Manhattan civil petition charges that the Chief Medical Examiner’s office and its records access officer redacted the names of “criminalists” — lab analysts who test DNA — “who committed errors, and the criminal cases to which those errors relate” when they responded to a freedom of information law request from Legal Aid lawyer Richard Torres.
Torres received reams of paperwork with blacked out identities, which the Medical Examiner claimed was to protect employee privacy.
But the only employee privacy worth protecting is personal history, not potentially dangerous mistakes made by bumbling employees, the Legal Aid Society argues.
“Major missteps committed by public employees in the process of identifying murder and rape suspects are not a private or personal matter,” reads the filing, which asks that the criminalists’ names and the corresponding cases — some of which date back to 2011 — be revealed.
“The only apparent privacy issue appears to be that the OCME employees would probably not want the public to know whether they were involved in laboratory errors,” the papers say.
The petition argues that “embarrassment or loss of prestige” criminalists may suffer if they are outed “is justified by the overriding public interest in making the process of identifying the most dangerous criminals as error-free as humanly possible.”
Tina Luongo, the Attorney-in-Charge of The Legal Aid Society’s Criminal Practice and its DNA Unit, told The Post she hopes the court will compel OCME to share the full reports.
“These employees are OCME forensic technicians that perform the casework on evidence used against our clients and who are often witnesses for the government at hearings and trials,” Luongo added.
The state Inspector General discovered a former medical examiner’s office employee had mishandled a decade’s worth of cases after a 2013 investigation.
OCME spokeswoman Julie Bolcer said her office “maintains that the redactions were appropriate and warranted under the Freedom of Information Law.”
