HEADLINE: Mislabeled rape kits could doom cases

ASHEVILLE   An inventory of the evidence room at the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office found 16 rape evidence kits with no name, bar code or case number.

That missing identification uncovered in a county audit makes it unlikely the kits could be used as evidence in a court case, according to the audit. They were collected at some time during Sheriff Bobby Medford's 12-year tenure, but it is not clear when.

Buncombe County District Attorney Ron Moore said Wednesday that he did not know whether any of the evidence could be salvaged because he has not seen the condition of the boxes. 

Moore said he knew of no court case that has been dismissed because of compromised evidence. The 16 kits constitute about a year's worth of cases, though it is unclear if they were from recent cases or ones more than a decade old.

Victims' advocates said the discovery is disturbing.

"The message this sends to victims is that their cases never really mattered," said Barbara Anderson, executive of Our VOICE, the sexual assault crisis center for Buncombe and Madison counties. "It leaves everyone wondering whether their evidence is safe, and it hurts the credibility of the whole process."

Eight to 15 rape cases are reported annually to the Buncombe County Sheriff's Office, according to State Bureau of Investigation figures from 1998 to 2005.

Victims

Anderson questioned whether anyone whose case is pending could submit more samples for DNA analysis to find their unlabeled box.

Moore said that would not be possible.

"We would have to test all 16 boxes," he said.

Renee Colette, who coordinates the sexual assault nurse examiner program at Mission Hospitals, said the hospital's program might have records that could identify the kits if information containing the date of the exam remains with the kits.

But the program has been in existence just four years, and some of the kits could be older than that.

"When someone who has been raped comes in, she has to agree to the evidence collection before we do it," Colette said. "The process can take four to six hours."

When evidence is compromised or lost, Colette said, "It's bad. It's really bad. The court can throw the whole thing out. So, what do we tell the patient?"

Evidence

Colette said great care is taken when the evidence is being gathered.

"The nurse gathering the evidence never lets the kit out of her sight," Colette said. "If she has to leave the room, the kit goes with her. Everything is sealed."

"We don't even lick the envelopes   we seal them with a moist paper towel to avoid contaminating the evidence," she said.

To collect evidence for a rape kit, nurses must swab any place the perpetrator could have left evidence   mouth, genitals and anal area   and pull both head and pubic hairs for DNA analysis. The patient is interviewed extensively, and the clothes worn are collected. The patient usually has to call someone to bring clothes for her to wear after the exam.

The kits go through a formal "chain of custody," Colette said. They are sealed and then sent to the law enforcement agency. Until law enforcement sends someone to pick up the kit, the nurse keeps it in her custody. Since most victims of rape are women, most of the nurses also are women.

Anderson said the agreement to the testing is a commitment on the part of the victim.

"It's not so much the matter of the evidence being compromised," she said. "It's that it just sat there. Nothing was done with it. The process of collecting this evidence is extraordinarily excruciating, and after someone has gone through all this, to have the evidence just sit there, it's a betrayal of trust."

HEADLINE: Sheriff's office evidence (or lack of) room bungling boggles the mind

Say what you will about former Sheriff Bobby Medford, but he's one colorful dude and I'm not talking about his clothing.

Medford   scorched by a county audit that showed a couple of hundred handguns, a couple of hundred grand and a couple of hundred parties' worth of drugs disappeared from his evidence room   shot back Friday in our paper. 

The laconic lawman, known to loathe reporters of all varieties, told the Citizen-Times no money had been stolen.

"As you can tell, if I had any (expletive) money I wouldn't be living in any $350-a-month apartment," Medford said.

My first reaction to this is, "Somebody found an apartment in Asheville for $350 a month?"

At any rate, if anyone had any doubt that Medford's law enforcement career is over, they should rest easy now.

This has got to be the final nail in the coffin for Medford, who served 12 years as sheriff and lost last fall to Van Duncan, a former detective Medford fired in 2004.

Heck, I might even go so far as to say that Medford's former high-ranking staffers who might've been considering a run for sheriff in 2010 can forget about it. That's how deep this pile of muck runs   it's going to stick for years.

While Medford blamed a lack of room and overlooked renovations for the missing evidence, that just doesn't wash.

Come on, nearly $218,000 in cash is missing, rape kits have no labels on them, drugs have vanished, evidence bags are broken open and you blame it on the room being too small?

That's like your car throwing a rod after you let all the oil run out and then claiming it's because your garage is too small to work on cars.

Medford says some of the guns are now in the concrete of the new jail addition, but a county official says that's not possible.

Those guns destroyed two years ago were from a gun buy-back program.

The bottom line is it seems clear that Medford just has no idea what happened to the guns   or anything else, for that matter.

(The whole guns-in-concrete issue raises other intriguing points: Is it routine practice to dispose of guns this way? Will escaping convicts find themselves serendipitously armed? But I digress.)

Being a top cop requires a meticulous approach to evidence.

You have to be a stickler for detail and set a tone that simply does not allow slack cops to mishandle evidence.

Justice is at stake. People's lives are at stake.

What happened at the sheriff's department has nothing to do with space. It's just plain sloppiness.

This is the opinion of John Boyle. Contact him at jboyle@citizen-times.com