FBI begins review of crime lab

FBI analysts downloaded more than 20,000 DNA profiles over 15 hours Thursday and yesterday, starting a top-to-bottom review of the State Police crime laboratory a week after an administrator was suspended for failing to tell prosecutors of DNA matches in nearly a dozen unsolved rape cases.

The audit, sought by the head of the State Police, is expected to last weeks, if not months, said a State Police spokesman, Lieutenant Detective William Powers.

The two analysts from the FBI crime lab in Quantico, Va., are trying to determine whether Robert E. Pino, the civilian administrator of the state's Combined DNA Indexing System, may have mishandled more DNA test results than the 15 disclosed by the State Police last week, when the agency announced his suspension with pay, Powers said.

State Police have said that Pino received results last year indicating that DNA tested in 11 old rape cases matched genetic samples from convicted felons, but that he failed to report the information to police departments for months, during which the 15-year statute of limitations for rape expired.

In four cases, Pino prepared reports to police saying that tests linked DNA recovered at crime scenes to suspects, when, in fact, they had not. Pino did not mail all four reports, and no one was arrested because other officials discovered Pino's mistake, Powers said.

"By looking at all the different cases he would have reviewed, [the FBI] will determine whether there were more notifications which he should have made," Powers said. The FBI will also determine whether Pino reported other matches when none existed.

The data being audited by the FBI had been stored in a computerized databank that matches DNA profiles of convicted felons with samples collected at crime scenes and analyzed by civilian scientists at the Sudbury facility or at private labs. A 2004 state law requires anyone convicted of a felony to submit a blood sample, so the lab can identify the DNA.

Pino has declined to comment, saying that he remains an employee and that the allegations are under investigation. However, the Massachusetts Organization of State Engineers and Scientists, the union that represents him, has issued a statement saying the mishandled cases stemmed from years of underfunding and inadequate staffing.

"This investigation shouldn't be about an individual; it should be about an office that hasn't grown with the advances in technology," the union's president, Joseph Dorant, said in the statement released Sunday.

The mishandling of DNA test results is an embarrassment for Colonel Mark F. Delaney, who became superintendent of the State Police in May after running the forensics lab for four years and overseeing what the Romney administration characterized as a dramatic overhaul of the troubled facility.

The Legislature increased funding of the lab from $6.2 million in fiscal 2005 to $16.2 million in fiscal 2007, in part to address a mammoth backlog in DNA analyses that reached 1,000 cases in 2005. In addition, lawmakers created the post of undersecretary for forensic sciences in the Executive Office of Public Safety to oversee improvements at the lab and the state medical examiner's office.

Senator Jarrett T. Barrios, who expects to be reappointed as cochairman of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, said this week that he wants to hold hearings to determine how the mistakes in the lab happened and who was overseeing Pino.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.