One of the most pressing issues for the DNAUI after the discovery of Blake’s misconduct was to identify the cases where an Examiner had relied on Blake’s analyses and subsequently issued a report to a requesting party, and then to ascertain the status of legal proceedings in those cases. Completion of this work was not easy, however, because the Laboratory did not have a system to track legal proceedings after its findings were disseminated. As with many other issues, the formulation of the Laboratory’s response to this problem was left to DNAUI Unit Chief Guerrieri and his staff. With Guerierri’s oversight, the Laboratory established a database of Blake’s cases in early summer 2002 to track its remedial work and to stay abreast of case developments.
Guerrieri met with an FBI Assistant General Counsel on April 10, 2002, two days after the discovery of Blake’s actions, to inform her of the Blake problem.55 From the outset OGC recognized the potential gravity of the
situation. The OGC lawyer e-mailed her supervisor on April 15 and explained as follows:
There is a major problem brewing in DNA Unit I that concerns a technician’s work in preparing cases for the overall review of an
examiner. They don’t yet know the dimensions of the problem – it could be huge – implicating all of the cases of examiner Alan Giusti and other examiners as well, for years. They don’t know if mistakes were
purposeful or inadvertent, but they may threaten the integrity of our results across the board (Technicians do most of the underlying bench
54 The FBI Laboratory has a goal for each unit to process its evidence within 60 days of
receipt.
55 At the time, the Assistant General Counsel was the primary OGC point of contact for
work and examiners make the conclusions and write the reports). They are in the process of doing a review to try to ascertain the scope of the problem and whether it implicates other technicians as well (which they don’t think it does). They have not yet notified OPR but they have taken the technician off cases immediately.
We may need a task force on this one – perhaps drawing from ASCLD- LAB expertise, and/or others out there in the forensic community. It’s too early to tell anything just yet . . . .
Approximately one month later, OIG staff who were investigating Blake’s actions met with OGC staff members and were told a management plan would be developed to guide the FBI’s response to Blake’s failure to conduct the required contamination testing and that it would be shared both with the OIG and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General. The OIG similarly was advised by the OGC Assistant General Counsel in May 2002 that “a policy will have to be arrived at in concert with the Lab.” With the exception of the April 30, 2002, memorandum from the Laboratory to the FBI Director described supra, which the Laboratory explained to the OIG was its initial strategy, Laboratory management has acknowledged that no planning material was created to guide its remedial activities and to coordinate the work of the DOJ and FBI personnel working on the Blake matter.56 Our review of documents furnished by the FBI,
including e-mails, did not reveal any communications that outlined prospectively for the various participants what the FBI’s response should entail, what the various participants were tasked to complete and, as appropriate, by when. In addition, in November 2002, the OGC Assistant General Counsel advised the OIG that no policy had been formulated for what she described then as a “fairly fluid” situation.
According to Laboratory employees, throughout the Spring and Summer of 2002 Laboratory management regularly discussed with the OGC how to proceed. The Laboratory Director explained that initially he held regular meetings with his staff to address Blake-related issues. The Department was not directly included in these meetings though, and the Laboratory Director explained that he has never spoken to the DOJ contact who the Criminal
Division assigned to track developments in the Blake matter – Barry Sabin, the Chief of the Counterterrorism Section. According to Sabin, his role was to learn the facts of the Blake case, to identify any legal issues that required attention and advise the FBI accordingly, and to monitor the FBI’s response on
56 The April 30, 2002, memorandum described the Laboratory’s early remedial actions,
such as requiring inclusion of GeneScan® data in the casefile, the removal of Blake’s profiles
behalf of DOJ.57 The Laboratory Director further stated that he did not know
what exactly the Counterterrorism Section was doing.58 He also added that he
has not asked anyone for an explanation of what the Counterterrorism
Section’s role is. He stated that he relies upon OGC to provide the Laboratory with pertinent guidance. Other Laboratory employees explained that they were surprised that there was not more direct contact with DOJ personnel. One senior FBI manager told the OIG that there was no leader overseeing the response of the FBI and DOJ to the problems caused by Blake’s misconduct, and that was a problem because no one was in charge to coordinate activities.