By Jenny Deam and Luige Del Puerto | Denver Gazette
CBI commissioned the assessment in the wake of the DBA scandal that rocked the forensics lab
An independent report on the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s forensics lab released Tuesday offered a sobering assessment of the beleaguered department, where past leaders ignored internal allegations of misconduct in handling DNA evidence and new leadership was plunged into a crisis that has rocked the public’s trust.
The new report by Forward Resolutions, a small Wisconsin consulting firm commissioned in January to review procedures in the wake of the scandal at the state crime lab, concluded past CBI leaders were “ill-equipped to handle crises and critical incidents.”
The report further stated that, even when told of serious irregularities in evidence handling and analysis, the response by leadership was “slow, fragmented and overly narrow.”
The CBI scandal first broke open in November 2023 after an intern at the lab alerted supervisors of problems with the work of one of its most prolific and revered analysts, Yvonne Woods.
An internal review followed, and, since then, CBI has acknowledged finding 1,022 problems so far in her past forensic work, dating back nearly three decades. That translates to roughly one-in-10 of the more than 10,700 cases she worked on during her tenure at the lab.