In August, the manufacturer of DNA test kits sent a letter to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department warning them to stop using certain test kits that have been proven to have a tendency to produce incomplete results.
The letter eventually landed in front of civilian employees of the department’s Department of Science Services, but the staff did not throw away or send back the kit, sheriff’s officials said Wednesday.
Instead, the department continued to use the broken kit for another six months, testing thousands of samples from various criminal cases and investigations.
It wasn’t until Monday that the Department of Science Services supervisors discovered the test kit company’s notification and officials realized what had happened.
Now, authorities have launched an internal management investigation into the case as they face the difficult task of retesting 4,000 samples and figuring out how much the defective kits have had on criminal cases. In some cases, existing samples may be too small to retest, the department said.
“We are very seriously considering the integrity of our criminal investigations and the reliability of forensic tests,” Sheriff Robert Luna said in a news release Wednesday afternoon. “The Sheriff’s department is committed to assessing the impact and preventing such a situation from happening again.”
The department did not provide a copy of the company’s letter and rejected the company’s name. Sheriff’s officials said the civilian employee involved in the incident is no longer part of the department but did not specify whether the person left or when he left.
In total, the department used the defective kit for eight months from July 2024 to February 2025.
“Based on the information provided by the DNA test kit manufacturer, the department said, “It is possible that the use of the affected kits has led to incomplete or suboptimal results, but it may not incorrectly identify the individual.”
Atty, Los Angeles County. Nathan Hochman said his office worked with the sheriff’s department to assess the scope of the matter and ensured that officials, including the defendant, victims and the public, were being provided with information.
“We will make full decisions on the law as to follow the facts in the direction they take us to individual cases and how to rectify certain circumstances that require such repair,” he wrote in a statement. “Building and maintaining confidence in the outcomes is paramount as we move forward, in order to ensure the integrity of our criminal justice process.”
Public Defenders Union Chairman Brooke Longuvan called the situation “deeply concerned.”
“The failure has definitely been to delay the criminal case and to detain clients for longer as their trial progresses,” she said. “Severe surveillance not only puts the integrity of individual cases at risk, but also sows public distrust into the criminal legal system and raises questions about the effectiveness and accuracy of criminal investigations.”
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