Las Vegas police review fired crime lab tech’s work

The discovery that Las Vegas police crime lab technician lied to a supervisor about a simple mistake has prompted a review of her work in potentially dozens of criminal cases, the Las Vegas Review-Journal has learned.

The work at issue involves DNA analysis done by technician Kristina Paulette, who was hired in 2005 and fired in May. She was caught covering up a mistake made during the process of analyzing DNA evidence, according to the department.

Paulette is fighting her termination and, through her union, declined to comment.

Police said that Paulette failed to add a chemical in the DNA analysis process, corrected the mistake, and ultimately received accurate results. But lab policy requires scientists to record every mistake. When a lab official noticed something was amiss in her report, Paulette denied to a supervisor making the mistake, according to police.

Why she would have lied about the mistake is unclear. The mistake alone would not have cost Paulette her job, according to Linda Krueger, who was in charge of the facility until recently being promoted to executive director of the department's criminalistics bureau.

The situation leaves lab officials and prosecutors in an awkward position. Because lab technicians frequently have to testify about their work during criminal trials, the revelation that she lied about a mistake to a supervisor could call into question her integrity.

"It jeopardizes her reputation as a forensic scientist on the witness stand," Krueger said.

Officials are trying to determine the number of cases in which Paulette might have to testify. It could be a handful of cases or as many as two dozen. Clark County District Attorney David Roger said if she is called to testify, prosecutors would have to disclose the fact that she was fired for lying.

How to handle those criminal cases has not been decided, Krueger said. Lab officials don't believe Paulette's work was inaccurate, but the fact that she covered up a mistake is "extremely disturbing" and led to the first firing of an employee at the lab in 17 years under Krueger . A forensic scientist resigned in 2009 after an investigation found he allowed a felon into the lab.

"What you do in the laboratory must be accurately recorded in your case notes," Krueger said. "We take this kind of error extremely seriously."

News of the firing comes the week after Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie admitted that a different lab technician's error involving DNA landed an innocent person in prison for four years. Dwayne Jackson has tentatively agreed to a settle­ment with the department. His court records, which include a 2009 charge of ex-felon failing to register and details of his 2001 case, were ordered sealed by District Court Judge David Barker.

The revelation has been a "sobering moment for everyone" at the lab, Krueger said.

"I can't even put words as to how troubled I am, and how I take that," she said. "I think when you look at it as a forensic scientist, that is one of the worst things that can happen to you in your career."

But she emphasized that officials believe the case was only one of two DNA mix-ups at the lab -- the other was also in 2001, and it almost sent an innocent man to prison -- and that she is confident in the work being done at the lab.

Krueger said such mix-ups are different from typographical errors in reports, which are considered far less serious.

A Saturday Review-Journal article highlighted mistakes made in a report in a death-penalty case that went unnoticed until weeks before the trial. Those included writing down the wrong evidence numbers and, in one case, the wrong address of where a piece of evidence was found.

In another incident, the lab technician came to the wrong conclusion about a piece of evidence.

None of the mistakes was considered critical to the case, although the defendant's attorney grilled the lab technician on the witness stand.

The Clark County district attorney's office caught the mistakes, and a corrected report was written. The case prompted lab officials to conduct an audit of 161 cases, Krueger said. No mistakes were found in 107 of the cases, but typographical errors and other minor mistakes were found in the rest.

As a result of the audit, the lab started requiring that a third set of eyes look over each report.

"Human error is something that we can never wipe out totally," she said.

Contact reporter Lawrence Mower at lmower@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0440.