Lab woes might delay Entwistle murder trial

The beleaguered State Police crime laboratory, under fire for not testing 16,000 crime scene samples, could now cause a delay in the murder trial of Neil Entwistle.

The lab has yet to complete tests on forensic evidence taken from the Hopkinton house where police say Entwistle shot his wife and infant daughter, even though the samples were submitted more than five months ago. And Entwistle's lawyer said that once those tests are available, he will probably seek to have the samples retested by a private lab, which could take several more weeks, to make sure the state lab's findings are accurate.

"We just have to deal with the reality that the workings of the state crime lab have been called into question," Elliot M. Weinstein, Entwistle's lawyer, said yesterday. "When the lab gets these results, we have every reason to question the results and to be able to have the public and trial juries be mindful that just because the state scientists say something does not mean it's accurate."

The Middlesex district attorney's office strongly downplayed the chance of a delay in the closely watched trial, which is scheduled to start in October, but the possibility represents the latest fallout from the problems at the crime lab.

Lawyers and law enforcement officials have been scrutinizing thousands of cases since the release last week of a highly critical study that uncovered the backlog and concluded that quality control at the lab was sorely lacking.

Yesterday, the state's public defender agency said it would request a list of all 16,000 untested samples to see whether any convictions could be overturned on the forensic evidence. The samples, which date to the mid-1980s, include 1,000 deaths and more than 6,600 sexual assaults.

"We are very concerned about innocent people who have been found guilty based on inadequate evidence," said Stephanie Page, senior trial lawyer for the Committee for Public Counsel Services. "There are many cases where allegations have been made where there is no forensic evidence to support them. And if any of these cases where someone has been found guilty are part of that backlog, we are obviously going to make that a priority to see if we can get evidence to exonerate them."

Geline W. Williams, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of District Attorneys, said it was appropriate for the public defenders to seek a thorough review of the cases.

"The DAs keenly remember when the newspapers were full of horrific stories of men who were wrongfully convicted and went to prison for very long periods of time," said Williams, referring to a high-profile series of such cases in the 1980s and 1990s. "Because they may find that needle in a haystack that makes a big difference in somebody's life, we're going to go through and weed out cases . . . and then hone in on what is untested and that maybe needs a second look."

Essex District Attorney Jonathan W. Blodgett agreed with the review, as well, pointing out that district attorneys have cooperated for years with the Innocence Project, a national organization that seeks to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners through DNA testing.

"It's a DA's function to find justice and to exonerate innocent people," Blodgett said yesterday. "It's not just about convictions."

State officials have pledged to use the $267,000 study, which was commissioned by Public Safety Secretary Kevin M. Burke and conducted by an independent consultant, to fix the crime lab. Among other findings, the report said that the lab fails to make sure mistakes are caught and corrected and that samples take 359 days to test, much longer than in other states, in part because of confusion about procedures and a shortage of chemists.

Burke has said it will probably take months and millions of dollars to sort through the 16,000 cases and determine those in which the evidence could prove crucial.

Blodgett said district attorneys are particular concerned about 2,000 active investigations and prosecutions in which samples have yet to be tested. He said some of the cases involving deaths might be less crucial because they were suicides or drug overdoses.

DNA and other crime scene evidence could be crucial in the Entwistle case.

Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. said he was confident that the evidence would be tested in time for the trial.

"The Entwistle case is proceeding in the normal course, and the trial date is still scheduled for October," Leone said in a statement yesterday. "We fully expect to be ready for trial at that time. We have not asked for, nor do we anticipate asking for, a continuance in the trial date. We also do not anticipate that the scientific forensic testing being done in this case would be a reason for a continuance in the trial."

Police say Entwistle's DNA was found on the grip of the .22-caliber handgun used to kill his wife, Rachel, 27, and their 9-month-old daughter, Lillian, in the master bedroom of their Hopkinton home in January 2006.

The gun was owned by Rachel Entwistle's father and kept in a locked case at his Carver residence. Police say Entwistle used the gun and returned it just before fleeing to his native England.

Late last year, Weinstein unsuccessfully urged a Middlesex Superior Court judge to dismiss the charges against Entwistle, arguing that the DNA samples used to obtain his arrest warrant were faulty.

Weinstein argued that authorities matched his client's DNA by improperly relying on DNA taken from the victims and from a water bottle found in the BMW that Entwistle allegedly parked at Logan International Airport when he went to England.

The judge, however, allowed prosecutors to obtain another DNA sample from Entwistle through a cheek swab and authorized the crime lab to conduct further tests on several ammunition boxes, gun locks, gun cases, and a pistol to determine whether Entwistle's DNA is on them.

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.