The Houston Chronicle has reported that over 300 guns are waiting to be tested as well. The lab director has defended her team by explaining that new staff members are on the way and that in a little over a year, robotics will help speed up the testing process even more. She says their current priorities are crimes that involved violence and crimes where suspects have already been identified.

Houston criminal lawyers seem to agree that while the backlog is disappointing, the police department has set its priorities right, as testing evidence in cases with suspects can help reduce the number of persons wrongly charged and arrested for crimes.

Image via Svadilfari [Flickr]

Unfortunately, the backlogs will have to wait a while, because only $475,000 has been allocated for this fiscal year. For now, the Houston Police Department is expected to prioritize their cases in order to process the most important and pressing matters first, particularly those where suspects have already been identified. Houston criminal attorneys say these are the most critical situations because they also may help release innocent suspects from wrongful accusations.

The huge backlog has been able to pile up as the police forensics department has been understaffed for some time.

To read more about the issue, see the article in the Houston Chronicle. Image via NobMouse [Flickr].

This new report is all too timely for many local Texans, who are still grieving the death of 16 year-old Jorge Steven Lopez Mercado, who was recently murdered in Houston in what many believe was a hate crime against his sexuality.

“Coming just weeks after President Obama signed new LGBT-inclusive hate crimes provisions, the rise in reported hate crimes against the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community is sobering, whether due to increased reporting or increased frequency of the crimes, or both. We all must do more to send the message that these attacks are unacceptable,” said Jason Marsden, executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Houston criminal lawyers, while sympathetic to the impact of these statistics, worry that an increased attention to homophobic hate crimes may result in more people being charged with hate crimes, even in cases when crimes were not based on a person’s sexual orientation. The issue remains one of the complex problems in the prosecution of hate crimes –how to tell what a suspect’s motives were at the time a crime took place.

To read more about the FBI findings, see the article in Pink News. Image Via dbking [Flickr]

Curvis Bickham was connected to a homicide based on a scent lineup, where a dog was provided with scents from the crime scene and then walked by a series of containers holding swabbed samples of scents from the suspect and other persons not accused of the crime. If the dog finds a match, it barks or otherwise signals the handler to the container that matches the scent from the crime.

Critics of scent lineups say that the chances of cross contamination are very high in these types of tests, they also claim that the tests are usually not controlled very well. Many states will not allow scent lineups to be entered into evidence, but Texas is not one of those states.

The specific trainer of the dog in Mr. Bickham’s case, Deputy Keith A. Pikett, is now under fire and the subject of around six lawsuits. One of the attorneys filing suit against the trainer called him a “charlatan.” In many of these cases, the scent lineup served as the primary evidence, even when contradictory evidence readily pointed to the suspect’s innocence.

In Mr. Bickham’s case, he and his Houston criminal lawyer found the murder charges to be outrageous, as he suffers from bone spurs, diabetes and partial blindness. The main evidence linking him to the crime was the crime scent lineup conducted by Deputy Pikett. Since his arrest, Bickham lost his home and was forced to sell his car to afford his defense attorney. “I lost everything,” Mr. Bickham said, because of “a nothing case.”

To read more about these cases, see the article in the New York Times. Image Via ann-dabney.

DNA evidence was said to have pointed to Napper’s guilt, but his court-appointed defense attorney was unable to independently test the evidence because the Houston police had used the entire sample in their lab. While it seems the crime analysts had a lack of understanding of DNA evidence, his attorney at the time was not knowledgeable enough about the subject to thoroughly cross examine the lab technicians.  Napper was sentenced to life in prison without parole, but has continued to maintain his innocence. His chance at a new trial may exonerate him for the crime.

Napper’s current Houston criminal lawyer, BobWicoff said, “This is what we had hoped for, Judge Barr recognized the injustice of a crime lab destroying the only available forensic evidence in the case before Napper was even arrested, much less being given an attorney or his own expert.”

To read more, see the article in the Houston Chronicle. Image via ynse [Flickr]