WHEN LABS FALTER, DEFENDANTS PAY ; Bias toward prosecution cited in
Illinois cases
Series: TRIBUNE INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: FORENSICS UNDER THE
MICROSCOPE; [Chicago Final Edition]
Steve Mills, Flynn McRoberts and Maurice Possley, Tribune staff
reporters. Chicago Tribune. Chicago, Ill.: Oct 20, 2004. pg. 1
Abstract (Article Summary)
THE ACCUSED: JOHN WILLIS John Willis, shown with his wife,
Lisa, at their Peoria home, was released from prison after he was
cleared of rape. "I kept hollering about the DNA," Willis said. "I knew
it would free me...." The DNA linked another man to the crime. Photos by
Alex Garcia.
THE ACCUSED: JOHN WILLIS John Willis is escorted out of
prison after he was cleared of rape. Test results from crime lab analyst
[Pamela Fish] might have backed Willis' claim of innocence, but his
lawyers didn't get to see them until he had been behind bars for nearly
eight years.
THE ACCUSED: [Dan Young] AND HAROLD HILL The two were
convicted of a 1990 Chicago rape and murder, but DNA tests in recent
years have excluded them, turning up two other genetic profiles. This
year, the state police's Chicago crime lab was asked to examine clothes
for additional DNA evidence. The lab said its tests found none, but a
private lab reported finding DNA evidence on the clothes. The men's case
is being reinvestigated.
THE EXPERT: ED BLAKE Blake, hired by the
defense, concluded a lab analyst's testimony was mistaken in a 1986
case. Four men were later exonerated.
THE ACCUSED: [Calvin Ollins],
[Omar Saunders], MARCELLIUS BRADFORD, LARRY OLLINS The four men speak to
reporters after their 2002 pardons in the 1986 rape and murder of [Lori
Roscetti]. DNA tests cleared them years after crime lab analyst Pamela
Fish gave trial testimony that helped convict three of them. GRAPHIC:
Key lab notes from the Willis case In 1991, crime lab analyst Pamela
Fish analyzed evidence in the prosecution of rape suspect John Willis
using a test called absorption inhibition analysis, which is designed to
detect the presence of blood types. Fish tested a piece of tissue
wrapper that contained semen from a crime scene. Below are her test
results from her analysis, which were not turned over to Willis' lawyers
until 1998.
THE TEST For blood types A and B, a score of zero indicates
the presence of that blood type, while a higher number (+2 or +3)
represents an absence.
THE RESULTS Entries 1-4 are controls used to
ensure readings are accurate. Entry 5 represents an unstained portion of
the tissue wrapper. - Fish cited the +1 in the center column as evidence
that the sample may have had a faint presence of blood type B. Entry 6
represents a test of Willis' saliva. - The 0 in the center column
indicates that Willis has blood type B. Entries 7 and 8 represent test
results on the semen-stained portion of the wrapper. - The 0s in the
left-hand column indicate that blood type A is present. - The +3s in the
center column indicate the absence of blood type B. The test of Willis'
saliva had shown that he has blood type B. FISH'S TESTIMONY Fish
testified at Willis' 1992 trial that her test results were inconclusive.
But her notes showed that the test failed to find Willis' blood type in
the semen. Willis was convicted, but a DNA test later exonerated him. He
was freed in 1999. After Fish was sued by Willis, she contended that the
faint presence of blood type B on the unstained portion of the wrapper
rendered any test results on the stained portion inconclusive. Note: On
the notes above, the name of the victim has been blacked out. Sources:
Tribune, court documents Chicago Tribune - See microfilm for complete
graphic.
Full Text (5071 words)
(Copyright 2004 by the Chicago Tribune)
As John Willis sought to prove he had been wrongly convicted of a rape
in the Chatham neighborhood, the Illinois State Police crime lab in
Chicago came across a potential key to his innocence.
It was a single sheet of paper containing the lab results of analyst
Pamela Fish, written in a tight scrawl. They showed she did not find
Willis' blood type in semen recovered from the crime scene.
At his 1992 trial, though, Fish had testified her results were
"inconclusive," meaning she could neither include nor exclude Willis as
a potential source of the semen. Her testimony effectively denied him
the scientific evidence that could have undermined the state's case.
Dubbed the "beauty shop rapist" for a series of similar attacks, Willis
was convicted and sentenced to 100 years. Seven of those years would
pass before he walked free and DNA linked another man to the crimes.
The question of who was responsible for Fish's crucial test results not
being provided for Willis' trial remains a matter of heated debate.
What is not disputed is that Willis served 8 1/2 years behind bars for a
crime he did not commit. The city and Cook County paid him $2.5 million
and the state $100,000 to settle his wrongful conviction lawsuit, though
no one admitted wrongdoing and the city said Fish followed protocols in
her testing.
And Fish's career is in ruins. Earlier this year, the highly touted
scientist, who once trained Illinois State Police DNA analysts, was
quietly let go.
By her own account, Fish could have redone the tests in the Willis case
to clarify the results, and even her bosses still say she should have.
"Was her interpretation one of the possible answers? Yes," James
Kearney, Fish's former boss at the state police lab in Chicago, said in
an interview. "Should her work have been redone? You know my answer to
that--the work needed to be redone."
The behind-the-scenes drama of the Willis case, revealed in documents
the Tribune went to court to unseal, provides a rare look inside the
often-closed culture of Illinois' crime labs and is a vivid example of
how faulty lab practices can help convict the innocent.
Labs are supposed to be where science and the pursuit of justice merge,
but too often they are a place where mistakes, omissions and a lack of
rigor lead investigators down false trails that end in wrongful
convictions. A Tribune investigation has found that across the country,
forensic science is being undermined by unproven theories and experts
who testify in a misleading fashion.
For years, Fish has been a focus of criticism by defense attorneys and
state legislators because her testing has been at the center of two
major wrongful conviction cases involving five men, three of whom still
have lawsuits pending against her.
But the work and testimony of other Illinois state lab analysts also
have been challenged.
Two lab examiners asserted in a 1997 murder trial in Kane County that
they could definitively link the defendant to the crime through his lip
prints, even though the FBI has never validated the practice.
Two years ago, after a Cook County public defender questioned as
misleading a drug analyst's report, lab officials had to step in and
clarify policy.
And earlier this month, a DNA analyst pleaded guilty to charges of
falsifying thousands of dollars of overtime claims, raising questions
about her credibility as a prosecution witness.
Through city attorneys, Fish declined to be interviewed for this
article. The city is defending her in two lawsuits involving her testing
while she worked at the Chicago Police Department crime lab.
Her supporters say she has been unfairly maligned and held to scientific
standards that have rapidly evolved in the years since she completed the
disputed Willis tests in 1991. Her testing in that case, for instance,
involved serology, a less exact method of identifying potential suspects
than current DNA analysis.
"Dr. Fish has never been found to have testified falsely or reported
false forensic results," wrote city attorney Thomas Samson in a letter
responding to Tribune questions about her work. "Despite this, unproven
allegations have ruined the career and reputation of a dedicated public
servant and a smart, educated, forward-thinking scientist."
But even Fish's current and former bosses at the lab said in interviews
that there were times she fell short. The commander of the Illinois
state crime labs, Michael Sheppo, echoed Kearney's criticism that she
should have retested the evidence in the Willis case.
Like many of her fellow analysts at the state police lab on Roosevelt
Road in Chicago, Fish joined the state system when it took over the
Chicago police lab in 1996.
Defenders of the state system object to any suggestion that the
reputation of their labs is tied to the troubles at the old Chicago
Police lab, which they say was underfunded and poorly run.
"You can't judge the Illinois State Police laboratory by work that was
done by the Chicago Police laboratory," Kearney said.
Fish testified roughly a hundred times in court over the course of her
career, most of them while she was with the Chicago police lab.
State police reviewed only casework after she left the Chicago lab and
joined the state. Sheppo said that amounted to "very few" cases because
she was a supervisor for most of her tenure at the state police lab; he
said they found no errors.
"We did not do a complete case-file review of the work that she did for
CPD," Sheppo said. "There was never anything to indicate that there was
a need to do so."
The city noted that the Chicago police lab was audited by outside
experts before the Illinois State Police took it over and that "the
audit praised Dr. Fish."
But her former boss, Kearney, acknowledged that a review of all her
cases might have been warranted.
"Maybe we should have gone back and looked at them," he said in a recent
interview. "But it didn't happen."
The specter of bias
In crime labs across the country, DNA testing has unraveled convictions
built on faulty lab work, and crime analysts have been accused of
slanting their test results to help prosecutors win convictions.
Concerns about lab bias in Illinois were enough that former Gov. George
Ryan's death penalty commission, which included prosecutors and retired
judges, recommended forming an independent state crime lab "with its own
budget, separate from any police agency or supervision." Such
independent labs are rare.
The state legislature rejected the proposal, one of several steps urged
by critics to make the crime labs' work more transparent.
"There needs to be vigorous disclosure and vigorous scrutiny in any
adversarial system," said Greg O'Reilly, chief of the Cook County public
defender's forensics unit and one of Willis' attorneys as he sought a
new trial. "In our American system of justice, we don't just rely on the
government to tell us everything is right."
In Illinois, not only do the paychecks of crime analysts come from a
police agency; state law mandates they serve the prosecution, calling
for the state police to operate a lab system to provide "forensic
science and other investigative and laboratory services to local
law-enforcement agencies and local state's attorneys"
But the commander of the state's crime labs flatly rejected any
suggestion that the labs are slanted against defendants.
"Even though we are mandated to directly work with the prosecution and
law enforcement," Sheppo said, "I totally disagree that in any way have
we been biased against any particular individual."
Even staunch defenders of the crime labs, however, note that the culture
inside the labs is more complex.
Don Plautz spent 24 years in the Illinois crime lab system as a
supervisor and director before retiring in 2002. He said he had a
different philosophy from many of his colleagues.
Many forensic scientists at the state police labs, Plautz said, saw
their role as members of the state's attorney's team. "They thought they
were prosecution witnesses," he said. "They didn't understand they were
just scientists.
"If a defense attorney called, I'd talk to them," he said. "A lot of
people felt they had to be very careful talking to them."
It was that attitude that Cook County Circuit Judge Daniel Locallo
cautioned against in a hearing earlier this year to consider releasing
internal lab documents disclosed in Willis' lawsuit.
"If I'm a defense counsel and there's science involved ... [I] should be
able to go to that examiner and be able to say, 'What did you do? What
was your method? What were your findings?'" Locallo said in a hearing.
"And the people who are working at the state crime lab should not take
the position that 'we are an arm of the prosecution.'
"They're scientists. They should be an arm of the truth."
The sometimes-cozy relationship between lab analysts and prosecutors
played out in the case of Delmont Dobson.
In 2000, Dobson was charged with possession of cocaine. In June of that
year, Amy Johnson, a forensic scientist in the drug chemistry section of
the Chicago lab, reported that she had found a trace amount of cocaine
in a piece of evidence weighing less than 0.1 grams.
But Johnson stated that she had "not analyzed" a second, larger sample
that was seized.
Brendan Max, an assistant Cook County public defender, subpoenaed
Johnson's lab testing data. The data showed that, in fact, Johnson had
made a preliminary finding of possible cocaine, but she was unable to
confirm that in repeated testing.
In March 2002, prosecutors dropped the case against Dobson because the
lab tests only found trace amounts of drugs, according to a spokeswoman
for the Cook County state's attorney's office.
About that time, Sheppo said, state lab administrators learned that some
drug analysts in the Chicago lab were reporting their findings the same way.
Prosecutors had been requesting that analysts "just put 'not analyzed'
rather than giving a preliminary result in a report," Sheppo said. "They
should have reported preliminary testing indicated the presence of
cocaine, however positive confirmation was not obtained."
He said it was a holdover from a policy of Cook County prosecutors who
didn't want preliminary test results reported.
After determining that some analysts were still following that procedure
six years after the state lab took over the Chicago lab, Sheppo said,
"We immediately, immediately made the policy clear that this will not
occur. ... It's definitely more accurate to report exactly what you find."
A spokesman for Cook County prosecutors, John Gorman, said, "To my
knowledge, there's never been such a policy."
The perception of crime-lab bias is further reinforced by the fact that
of the roughly 260 accredited U.S. forensic labs, 90 percent are
affiliated with law-enforcement agencies, according to the American
Society of Crime Laboratory Directors' Laboratory Accreditation Board.
The accreditation board grew out of an effort to ensure that the federal
government did not dictate the operation of crime labs. Though the
federal government regulates labs that test everything from drugs to pet
food, those that handle the evidence introduced into America's courts
are self-policed.
Under a system set up by the organization, teams drawn from the nation's
crime lab directors visit each other's facilities to grant the
industry's seal of approval.
Critics say this encourages weak-kneed audits that do little to evaluate
the true quality of forensic work. The consequences, they say, are the
crime-lab scandals that have erupted across the country.
Lab defenders, on the other hand, say the scandals are the result of
effective self-policing.
"The bulk of problems I've dealt with in forensic science have been
identified by the fellow forensic scientists," Plautz said. "They police
each other carefully. ... If we weren't watching ourselves, these
problems wouldn't come to light. We blow the whistle on ourselves."
Lab star stumbles
For years, Pamela Fish was a star analyst, first for the Chicago Police
Department's crime lab, then at the state police lab. More than just a
line analyst with technical skills, she had impressive academic credentials.
A native of Evergreen Park, Fish, now 46, graduated from Mother McAuley
High School in Chicago before getting her bachelor's and master's
degrees in biology from Loyola University. Her 1982 master's thesis
explored the homing habits of largemouth bass and other fish.
Over the years, she rose through the ranks at the Chicago police lab.
The lab was housed at the old department headquarters at 11th and State
Streets in a facility so inadequate that evidence was sometimes dried on
the roof.
In 1991, the year she completed the serology test in the Willis case,
Fish was in charge of the lab's serology unit.
She later became training coordinator for the state police lab's DNA
section. She also obtained her doctorate in biology from the Illinois
Institute of Technology, working nights and weekends for nearly seven
years while still full-time at the lab.
"She really has excellent bench skills. She's really meticulous about
keeping records," said Benjamin Stark, an IIT professor who was Fish's
doctoral adviser.
A former boss at the lab also lauded Fish's work, noting that her
imprint remains there. "The scientists that she trained in DNA
analysis--they're the ones making all the cases now," said Laurence
Mulcrone, a former director of the state police Chicago lab.
Fish's background could not be more different from that of John Willis.
Growing up in the Arkansas Delta, he never finished the 4th grade,
chopping and picking cotton instead of going to school. Even today, at
age 56, he can barely read or write.
Yet, armed with little more than his own innocence, a dogged persistence
and a rudimentary understanding of DNA gleaned from television, Willis
cut through the opaque world of the crime laboratory.
"I kept hollering about the DNA," Willis said last year in a sworn
deposition as part of his lawsuit. "I knew it would free me because I
hadn't did nothing."
A self-described career tire thief and gambler, Willis told anyone who
would listen that he had not committed a series of rapes and assaults
that terrorized the Chatham neighborhood on Chicago's South Side in 1990.
According to his deposition, Willis denied his involvement to police
from the beginning and was equally vocal in the courtroom.
"I didn't be quiet," he said. "I jumped up and I started screaming. ...
I was telling the judge, I didn't rape nobody."
Cook County prosecutors, though, had compelling evidence: The victims of
the sexual assaults had told police that Willis was their attacker.
In July 1991, as Willis neared trial, prosecutors and his lawyer, public
defender David Eppenstein, agreed on serological testing of a
semen-stained piece of toilet paper wrapper.
Although Willis had demanded DNA testing, at the time that technology
was still in its infancy; the first conviction in Illinois in which DNA
evidence was allowed came in 1990. Serology, which analyzed blood types,
was the primary tool used in sexual assault cases in Cook County.
Willis was certain the serology tests would clear him. He believed he
even knew who had committed the rapes: Fellow inmates in Cook County
jail had told him that a man named Dennis McGruder had been arrested on
sexual assault charges in Chatham and that he bore a striking
resemblance to Willis.
At Willis' trial, Fish took the witness stand and told the jury that the
serology tests were inconclusive.
In a letter to the Tribune, Samson asserted that even if Willis had the
test results at his trial, they would not necessarily have cleared him,
given that victims of the beauty shop rapist said he was their attacker.
"In a best-case scenario for the defense," Samson wrote, "Dr. Fish's
serology analysis would have been the basis for a disagreement among
experts, leaving the jury to rely upon the 11 eyewitness identifications
of Mr. Willis as the perpetrator."
Samson also noted that the FBI expert who wrote the lab protocol
involved in the testing "was prepared to testify on behalf of Dr. Fish
that she properly followed" it.
Nevertheless, her test results--in the form of a handwritten log she
kept as she performed her analysis--would have been a powerful piece of
evidence for his defense. They showed Willis' blood type was different
from the source of the semen.
He had blood type B and was a secretor--that is, his blood type could be
determined from his bodily fluids, such as semen or saliva. The semen
taken from the toilet tissue wrapper came from someone with blood type A.
After Willis was convicted and sent to Stateville penitentiary, lawyers
from the Cook County public defender's office began pursuing his appeal.
In 1997, they sought DNA testing.
The lab official responsible for handling such requests was Marian
Caporusso, a veteran of the Chicago police lab who, like Fish, had made
the move to the state lab.
Caporusso pulled the Willis file. After reviewing the handwritten notes,
she went into Kearney's office and told him she would have interpreted
the results differently than Fish did, according to Kearney's deposition
in the Willis lawsuit.
Kearney's response: He was relieved to learn that Fish had done the test
while working at the Chicago police lab, he said in the deposition.
"In other words, it wasn't on your watch?" Willis' attorney, Locke
Bowman, a lawyer at the MacArthur Justice Center at the University of
Chicago, asked.
"That's correct," Kearney replied.
Kearney said he then told Caporusso, who helped train Fish in serology
testing, to talk to her about the case. Fish was in the middle of a
training session when Caporusso approached her in a lab hallway.
Descriptions of what happened next vary widely, not only among the
individuals involved but between their own accounts, first to state
police investigators, then during Willis' lawsuit.
What is not in dispute is that Caporusso gave Fish the file. Fish told
state police investigators that Caporusso asked her to interpret the
results and Fish reiterated her view that they were inconclusive.
In her deposition, Fish explained why. "If your controls don't work
properly, it's not a proper scientific procedure to call the results of
that particular test," she said. "Therefore, the tests would be called
inconclusive."
Fish told state police investigators that Caporusso responded, "I
wouldn't have interpreted it that way." During the lawsuit, both women
contended that there was no confrontation.
Why Fish did not re-run the serology test is likely to remain a mystery.
In a deposition taken during Willis' lawsuit, Fish said that she
considered running it again and that it would be "my laboratory
practice" to do so, but acknowledged there was no evidence that she did.
Breakthrough in case
While DNA testing has dramatically improved the precision of evidence
testing, the Willis case centered on a more basic issue: whether
information helpful to him was improperly withheld.
Lab officials adamantly deny that contention and say Willis' attorney
never asked for her handwritten notes. Had he specifically asked for
them, they say, he would have received them.
The attorney, Eppenstein, made a standard request for documents before
trial and received Fish's typewritten lab report. It included her
finding of "inconclusive," but none of her handwritten notes.
"Before John Willis, nobody in my office or the private bar let it enter
their mind that a forensic scientist would do what was done here,"
Eppenstein said. "There was no reason to ask for notes. I didn't suspect
something was there, that it was different from the final report."
Finally, in 1998, Willis' post-conviction attorneys had a breakthrough.
Responding to a subpoena specifically asking for the test results, a
clerk in the Chicago lab faxed the public defender's office the crucial
page.
His lawyers soon began to pursue a separate motion for a new trial. But
it took months for DNA tests to exclude him as the rapist- -and for
McGruder to be implicated--partly because slides containing the semen
evidence initially could not be found.
He was set free in February 1999. McGruder pleaded guilty to rape.
Fish's legacy is still being written.
She is still a defendant in a lawsuit stemming from the prosecution of
four teenagers in the 1986 rape and murder of medical student Lori Roscetti.
In that case, one defendant pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the
prosecution. The others--cousins Larry and Calvin Ollins and Omar
Saunders--were tried separately.
Fish testified that her serology test could only exclude Saunders. But
Dr. Ed Blake, a DNA expert retained by a defense lawyer in another
lawsuit, analyzed her testing and concluded that she should have
excluded all the defendants. In a report for the defense, he called her
testimony "scientific fraud."
City lawyers contended Blake's criticism was unfair and based on "20/20
hindsight."
DNA testing later cleared all four men after they spent as much as 15
years in prison. After they were pardoned in 2002, Chicago police linked
two other men to the murder and said both gave videotaped re-enactments
of the crime; they are awaiting trial.
While Calvin Ollins has settled his lawsuit for $1.5 million last year,
lawsuits filed by the other three are pending. Citing that litigation,
city lawyers declined to comment on the Roscetti case.
Last month, the Appellate Court ordered an evidentiary hearing in the
case of former Death Row inmate David Smith, whose attorneys had alleged
that Fish testified falsely against him at his murder trial.
The court noted that some of Fish's testimony was similar to her
testimony against Willis--in particular, serology tests that she termed
inconclusive. The panel said Smith's lawyers should be allowed to
examine Fish's lab work.
City lawyers said that once the hearing is held, "the evidence will show
a very different story."
The court, though, wrote that Smith's allegation "raises the question of
whether Fish provided testimony inconsistent with her lab notes and lab
results as she did in the Willis case."
Problems elsewhere
The work of Fish has drawn the most attention to the state crime labs,
but it isn't their only trouble.
Earlier this month, Amy Rehnstrom, a DNA analyst at the Chicago lab,
resigned after she was accused of felony theft for falsely claiming
$2,400 in overtime.
Sheppo, the lab system's commander, would not comment on the Rehnstrom
case. But he said any time questions are raised about analysts,
officials review their work "to ensure the accuracy of the analysis."
Gorman, the state's attorney's spokesman, said prosecutors are confident
in her work. "She has said that she stands by her work and that she
didn't do anything untoward with her work," Gorman said, "and we have no
reason to disbelieve that."
Authorities said they would notify defense attorneys in cases that she
worked. But that may have little effect because under a plea deal,
prosecutors allowed her to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and she was
placed on court supervision.
Because Rehnstrom did not admit to a felony, some defense attorneys are
concerned that judges may prohibit them from questioning her about the
wrongdoing--preserving her credibility as a witness in the scores of
cases she has handled.
"The question for the judge or the jury is this--is her testimony
reliable if she says, 'I did this work,' because she told the lab she
was at work during certain hours, and someone has determined that was
false," said Ruth McBeth, an assistant Cook County public defender.
Attempts to reach Rehnstrom for comment were unsuccessful.
Sheppo said the state labs' quality assurance program thoroughly checks
analysts' work. One of the first of its kind when introduced in the
1980s, he said, it includes occasional courtroom visits by supervisors
to make sure analysts are properly testifying.
Still, questions about the proficiency of the labs' analysts have been
raised in a number of instances. In the case of Harold Hill and Dan
Young, the state police's Chicago lab failed to detect semen on a piece
of evidence.
Hill and Young were convicted of the 1990 rape and murder of Kathy
Morgan but have long insisted they were innocent. A series of DNA tests
over the last three years--using genetic material from Morgan's
fingernails as well as from her clothes--has excluded the two men,
turning up two genetic profiles of other individuals.
Earlier this year, the crime lab was asked to examine other pieces of
clothing in an effort to detect semen. The lab said its tests found none.
But Hill and Young's attorneys pressed to have a private lab in New
Orleans inspect the same evidence. In August, the lab, ReliaGene
Technologies Inc., reported finding semen and sperm.
The Cook County state's attorney's office said ReliaGene was able to
find the evidence when the state lab could not because the private lab
used more sophisticated tests.
Sheppo said it was wrong to assume the state crime lab had erred and
suggested the evidence could have been contaminated. He noted that the
lab had done other DNA testing that had helped Hill and Young, including
the fingernail tests.
"My question would be, is ReliaGene correct or are we correct? I don't
know," said Sheppo, adding that the lab reviewed its work in the case
and found "no major inconsistencies."
Prosecutors hope to complete a reinvestigation of the case soon.
Two lives forever changed
The day after John Willis was released from prison, in February 1999,
the woman whose testimony helped convict him was the guest speaker at an
Illinois judges seminar in Chicago. Her role: explaining DNA profiling
and evidence to the jurists.
A few weeks later, Pamela Fish was promoted to oversee biochemistry
testing at the lab.
In the summer of 2001, a state legislative committee holding hearings on
prosecution misconduct questioned state police director Sam Nolen about
Fish's work. At the time, State Rep. James Durkin (R- Westchester) urged
Nolen to transfer Fish because of the questions about her work.
"I think right now it's probably not a good idea that she's in a
position of authority in the crime lab," Durkin said. "I'm not asking
for her head. I'm not asking for her to be fired. But I think the
integrity of the crime lab is first and foremost."
Lab bosses then moved her into a research position where she would no
longer be involved in criminal casework.
This summer, after Willis settled his lawsuit, Fish's contract was not
renewed and she left the agency.
For his part, Willis bears Fish no ill will.
"I don't got nothing against her," Willis said in a deposition for his
suit. "Like I said, I'm glad to be out. You know, whatever she do, she
got to live with God herself on it."
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