ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
More than 1,000 criminal cases across Texas may now have a question mark over them. The culprit? Faulty DNA tests. As Texas Public Radio's Paul Flahive reports, the tests were made by one of the biggest manufacturers in the world.
PAUL FLAHIVE, BYLINE: The Houston Forensic Science Center is reviewing hundreds of cases after it detected problems with Qiagen EZ1&2 Investigator DNA test kits. Center CEO Peter Stout says tests were coming back reading no DNA present when there was or that it was just one person's when sometimes it was from multiple people.
PETER STOUT: It introduces a question mark that then the rest of the system has to try and figure out, OK, is this a case that was affected, and if so, what are we going to do about it? Do we need to retest it?
FLAHIVE: The Texas Department of Public Safety is reviewing around 700 cases at just one lab. Qiagen is one of the big three manufacturers in the world of DNA tests. A Qiagen company spokesman told NPR they received less than 10 complaints in the U.S. about the tests. But the company declined to say the total number of potentially affected tests, so measuring the true impact of the issue has been difficult to determine. Experts say it's a national problem.
STOUT: It's a big deal because this is a product that almost everybody uses all across the U.S., really, all across the world.
FLAHIVE: Dan Krane is a professor at Wright University and runs the company Forensic Bioinformatics. He says retesting is necessary if there's enough to retest.
DAN KRANE: A lot of these evidence samples are going to be, you know, swabs of gun cartridges, for instance, and they had one crack at it, and, you know, you just can't go back.
FLAHIVE: The problem raises serious implications for the justice system. Michael Kessler of Kessler Forensic Solutions, which consults on court cases, says labs could lose evidence that proves the guilt or exonerates a criminal defendant.
MICHAEL KESSLER: Texas is a death penalty state, many others are. Justice is a matter of life and death.
FLAHIVE: The culprit for the faulty readings was tentatively identified as the pH balance of one of the chemicals used, the MTL buffer. Qiagen told clients it changed the manufacturing process to fix the issue, adjusting the amount and makeup of the chemical in the cartridge. But private lab Signature Science in Austin, that does testing in criminal cases, said in a letter obtained by NPR that Qiagen may not have identified all the affected kits, saying its testing was impacted into this year. For defense attorneys like Elizabeth Daniel Vasquez, there's a lot of unanswered questions on what happens now.
ELIZABETH DANIEL VASQUEZ: We're going to see a ton of cases where the impact of this is going to be directly clear. I think more likely what we'll see is a whole lot of lack of evidence that nobody realizes was lost in the process.
FLAHIVE: The work has just begun for labs across the country, says Peter Stout.
STOUT: It's going to fall on the labs to do the retesting. And no forensic laboratory in the country has the resources to keep up with just the work coming in the door, much less the rework potential and the audit that's going to come out of this.
FLAHIVE: Leaving many court cases in limbo as potential retesting is addressed. In a statement, Lisa M. Wayne, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, asked, how many lives have been upended? How many souls languish in prison because of compromised science?
For NPR News, I'm Paul Flahive in San Antonio.
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