Since the criminal justice system in the state is decentralized, each affected county is responding to this in different ways:
Each district attorney may handle the situation as he or she chooses. Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healy told the Houston Chronicle that he was waiting for retesting of cases by DPS before alerting defendants and their lawyers.The story provides a link to the appelate court's ruling on a case involving a man sentenced to serve 32 years on a fabricated charge.
Jack Roady, the district attorney in Galveston County, said he looked at each case and dismissed every one in which evidence had been destroyed or possibly "tainted by Salvador's involvement." Of the 700 convictions in this category, he said he focused on the 26 cases in which the defendant was still in prison.
In Harris County, Sara Kinney, a spokeswoman for the district attorney, said all pending cases connected to Salvador's work were dismissed. "Now we will just review, case by case, any writ we get as a result of that problem," she said.
Bob Wicoff, who heads the appellate division of the Harris County Public Defender's Office, said that his staff is beginning to file appeals, "armed with the Galveston cases," for some of the more than 400 Harris County cases that involved Salvador's work. He said that just four Houston defendants whose cases were handled by Salvador remain in prison; Harris County was less affected because it relies on a range of labs, not just the one where Salvador worked.
While the tests were the result of one employee, the report from the forensic commission finds that the DPS had a culture that tolerated such work, so the blame is being spread around.
The DPS employee responsible for the misconduct, Jonathan Salvador, has been the subject of an investigation by the Texas Forensic Science Commission. At the commission's last meeting in January, Nizam Peerwani, a member of the committee and the chief medical examiner for Tarrant County, said that Salvador was part of an office culture that "tolerated under-performance." Commissioner Sarah Kerrigan said that after multiple interviews with Salvador's colleagues, the commission concluded that his work was "marginal" and of "low quality."
Salvador, who could not be reached for comment, was suspended from his duties as a forensic scientist with DPS in February 2012, when the department discovered problems with his work, including the falsification of results in numerous cases involving marijuana, cocaine, heroine, pharmaceuticals and other controlled substances. Salvador had worked on 4,900 drug cases in 30 counties since he took the job in 2006, DPS spokesman Tom Vinger said.
After an internal investigation by DPS and the Texas Rangers, Salvador was brought before a Harris County grand jury in May 2012, which chose not to indict him. In August, he resigned from DPS.
"The department implemented more stringent quality control measures to help prevent similar issues in the future," Vinger said, adding that the department continues "to provide assistance in cases worked by this former employee, including re-examining evidence when requested."
DPS Laboratory Manager Keith Gibson also sent a letter to district attorneys around the state with a list of nearly 5,000 convictions that could've been affected by Salvador's work.
