Prosecutors Accused of Hiding Crime Lab Problems From Public

Defense attorneys on Tuesday accused the Ventura County district attorney’s office of illegally hiding problems in the Sheriff’s Department’s crime laboratory that have exposed about 620 drunk-driving cases to a massive legal challenge.

The attorneys launched the first stage of that challenge Tuesday in Superior Court, trying to get county prosecutors thrown off the case and replaced with lawyers from the California attorney general’s office.

Ventura County’s defense bar has alleged that the district attorney’s office knew that the crime lab was violating some laws on personnel and procedures in drunk-driving cases between December and May.

Yet prosecutors failed to notify defendants until April 10, they argued. That announcement prompted defense attorneys to flood the courts with hundreds of appeals and other legal challenges.

Judge Steven Perren and several dozen attorneys spent the morning wading through the lists of drunk-driving defendants, who have swelled from an estimated 300 to about 620 since the first challenges were filed.

Then Deputy Public Defender Brian Vogel introduced the defense’s case.

“The district attorney actively participated in . . . and did nothing to stop a decision to intentionally violate state law, the lawful order of a state entity and the constitutional rights of DUI suspects,” Vogel said.

The district attorney’s office, he said, then withheld information about the lab’s breath-testing program that could help the defense. Furthermore, he argued, prosecutors failed to tell defendants that the lab had flunked a state Department of Health Services proficiency exam and was operating in violation of several state laws.

Vogel argued that this conflict of interest should prompt the judge to replace Ventura County prosecutors with assistant attorneys general.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter D. Kossoris replied, “Even if all the acts the defense alleged were true, they would not meet the requirements for [our] removal from the case.”

He added, “If one reads their brief, between the lines, their real gripe is that they don’t like that our office prosecutes drunk-driving cases aggressively.”

And Deputy Atty. Gen. Steven Matthews argued that state law says that in order for the defense to win its motion, “They have to demonstrate a conflict of interest . . . so severe that the defendants will receive an unfair trial.”

Defense attorneys then called the crime lab director to the witness stand, beginning testimony on the lab’s recent problems. The testimony is expected to last several days.

Capt. Leslie Warren testified that she learned in November that the lab’s license was to expire, and that she obtained a license extension from the state Department of Health Services.

When state regulators wrote on March 19 that the lab should stop doing alcohol testing because the license extension had run out, lab staff decided to send all blood and urine samples to a state-run lab in Santa Barbara, while continuing to oversee breath testing locally, Warren testified.

Warren said that she and other lab staff feared that they could be violating drunk-driving suspects’ constitutional rights to due process if they failed to provide breath testing or to certify breath testing in the field for other police agencies.