Crime lab scandal rocked Kamala Harris’s term as San Francisco district attorney

San Francisco-Kamala D. Harris was this city’s top prosecutor, running to become California’s elected attorney general, when a scandal stunned her office and threatened to upend her campaign.

One of Harris’s top deputies had emailed a colleague that a crime lab technician had become “increasingly UNDEPENDABLE for testimony.” Weeks later, the technician allegedly took home cocaine from the lab, possibly tainting evidence and raising concerns about hundreds of cases.

Deborah Madden was one of three lab workers. Madden later admitted that “she had taken some cocaine salt from the lab for personal use,” according to her attorney’s sentencing memorandum. She pleaded no contest to the state’s cocaine possession charge, which was removed from her record after she completed a drug-treatment program, according to her lawyer, Paul DeMeester. Madden declined to comment. 

During the three months after Woo’s email, Harris’s office prosecuted cases that relied on crime lab testing, but defense attorneys were not told that evidence might have been tainted or that Woo had questioned the credibility of a key prosecution witness. 

Neither Harris nor the prosecutors working for her had informed defense attorneys of the problems — despite rules requiring such disclosure. Harris “failed to disclose information that clearly should have been disclosed,” Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo wrote in a scathing decision in May 2010.

Massullo said in her ruling that when Woo wrote the email, “individuals at the highest levels of the District Attorney’s Office knew that Madden was not a dependable witness.” The judge did not name the individuals. 

Massullo put the blame directly on Harris. In her ruling, she excoriated the district attorney for having “failed to disclose Madden’s criminal record, her suspension, and information relating to her ability to perform her work as a lab criminalist.” 

Harris, asked why her office had not developed a written Brady policy after six years in office, said she had been working on it for two years but had not completed it due to complications over who had access to police personnel information.  

Harris’s opponent in the Democratic primary for attorney general, former Facebook general counsel Chris Kelly, said at the time that the ruling showed Harris had “systematically violated defendants’ civil and constitutional rights” because her office hid “damaging information about a police drug lab technician and was indifferent to demands that it account for its failings.”

A review of the case, based on court records and interviews with key players, presents a portrait of Harris scrambling to manage a crisis that her staff saw coming but for which she was unprepared.

It also shows how Harris, after six years as district attorney, had failed to put in place written guidelines for ensuring that defendants were informed about potentially tainted evidence and testimony that could lead to unfair convictions.

One of the most important players in the case was Jeff Adachi, the city’s elected public defender, who was at odds with the way Harris handled the scandal.

“When all that happened, I think she was slow to respond,” Adachi said, while not blaming Harris directly. Some of the attorneys in Harris’s office “knew it was a problem and never informed us, the defense, that there was a problem with this.”

Adachi spoke at his office in an hour-long interview with The Post nine days before he died on Feb. 22.

“We held a press conference and publicized the fact that all this misconduct was occurring, and I immediately said, ‘This is going to result in dismissal of hundreds of cases,’ ” Adachi said in the interview.

“Her response was something like, ‘Yeah, this might affect a dozen cases.’ Right away, I knew this is much bigger, and you know as it happened, we got over a thousand cases dismissed.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/crime-lab-scandal-rocked-kamala-harriss-term-as-san-francisco-district-attorney/2019/03/06/825df094-392b-11e9-a06c-3ec8ed509d15_story.html