San Francisco drug-lab technician crimes put hundreds of cases at risk

SAN FRANCISCO — Hundreds of drug cases have been dismissed and hundreds more are being examined in San Francisco by prosecutors scrambling to deal with the fallout from accusations that a technician in the Police Department's crime laboratory was stealing cocaine for personal use.

The technician, Deborah Madden, 60, has not been charged in the lab case, though San Francisco police say she is under investigation.

She took a leave of absence from the lab in December after an audit found cocaine was missing from the lab and retired last month. She was a criminalist for 29 years.

Madden did not return calls for comment.

The laboratory was closed in early March after the police reported that Madden had been questioned. But an accounting of how many cases Madden had worked on or might have influenced is continuing, and escalating.

Brian Buckelew, a spokesman for District Attorney Kamala Harris, said Friday that his department was looking at cases dating to 2007, many of which involved felony possession.

Some 600 cases have been dismissed or discharged since Madden's suspected thefts and the closing of the laboratory, though Buckelew said many of those cases would be pursued after testing is done by an independent laboratory.

Buckelew said his office was hoping to salvage some dismissed cases by using other types of evidence, including witness testimony and confessions.

"Where there's a way to prove it," he said, "we intend to prove it."

But the scandal has confirmed many public defenders' long-held suspicions about the quality of work at the laboratory, concerns that were echoed by an independent audit released in late March.

The audit, conducted at the request of Police Chief George Gascon after the laboratory's closing, revealed an array of other problems, including inconsistencies in the chain-of-custody record-keeping for seized drugs; a cramped and potentially dangerous work space, with hazardous chemicals left unlabeled and stored in hallways; a lack of maintenance of microscopes and balances; improperly sealed drug envelopes; and overworked technicians.

"Good laboratory practices have been repeatedly shortchanged in favor of high case throughput," the audit found. "Evidence tampering," it added, "could have been prevented had good laboratory practices been in place."

The lab had at least three technicians working there between July and December, each handling 5,000 to 7,000 cases a year. The state's average is slightly more than 1,000 a year, the report said.

Gascon said the department will hire at least six more technicians to decrease the workload.

The audit also showed that Madden had been "repeatedly counseled" for an incident in which she failed to properly describe in her notes the packaging of seized items.

An audit in November had also found problems in the laboratory, including understaffing to the point that mandatory overtime had become the norm, necessitated by the need to complete testing within 48 hours to prevent the dismissal of criminal charges. The November report also found insufficient training in some areas, and the laboratory's common areas were in "a poor state of housekeeping and repair."

The police said they began investigating possible evidence tampering in December and interviewed Madden in late February. About a week later, a search warrant was served for her home in San Mateo County, south of the city, and she was arrested by county sheriff's officers on a separate gun charge.

During a recent search of the home, police discovered small amounts of a "white powdery substance" believed to be cocaine. She was charged Friday with a felony cocaine-possession count and ordered to appear in San Mateo County Superior Court on Monday. Her attorney, Paul DeMeester, said she will plead not guilty.

There are signs that problems at the crime laboratory might have been percolating since before 2007. On Friday, The San Francisco Chronicle reported that four grams of cocaine handled by Madden and being used as evidence at a federal racketeering trial disappeared in 2005, expanding the time frame for potentially corrupted cases.

Jeff Adachi, who heads the city's public-defender office and has called for the establishment of a crime laboratory independent of the Police Department, said thousands of cases, dating back a decade, might have to be re-examined.

"This is a tsunami of incompetence," Adachi said Friday. "There weren't just red flags, there were burning red flags."

Gascon, in his first year on the job, has defended his department.

"There has been no fabrication of evidence; no one was framed for crimes they did not commit," Gascon said in a statement. "Even though this regrettable incident has occurred, our crime-fighting will continue."

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.