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CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Blame the lab!
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN
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About four months after Christa Worthington’s murder in January 2002, Michael O’Keefe — then first assistant district attorney, now DA for the Cape and Islands — was furious at the state crime laboratory. The slow DNA testing is "an absurdity," O’Keefe railed to the Boston Globe. Thanks to "twisting arms and holding hands," the tests were now getting done, but nevertheless, he said, "The investigation proceeds with one arm tied behind its back." And its head up its behind, apparently. O’Keefe made this complaint in April 2002, shortly after Christopher McCowen first offered to give a DNA sample to police, who had him on an initial list of potential suspects. While O’Keefe complained about the lab’s delays and twisted arms to get those tests done, his team did not actually bother to collect DNA from the man they now claim is the murderer. They finally got the sample from McCowen in March 2004, and even then did not submit the sample until that July. In response to complaints about the slow work on the Worthington case, the state police replaced the head of the crime lab, sending in Mark Delaney "with the authority to give certain cases higher priority," according to an official quoted in the Boston Herald at the time — clearly meaning the Worthington case. But O’Keefe was doing his best to help bog down the state’s woefully backlogged DNA lab, with samples from everyone other than McCowen. By 2003, undercover investigators had collected discarded cigarette butts, soda cans, and other refuse from dozens of possible Worthington lovers for DNA testing. In early 2005, over the objections of civil libertarians, O’Keefe began collecting voluntary samples from all male residents of Truro, and obtained more than 200. God knows how many other cases have been delayed while the lab gave high priority to the lip gob of every Tom, Dick, and Harry whom O’Keefe’s crew could imagine having slept with Worthington. Take Dean Morin, convicted of vehicular homicide in July 2003, thanks primarily to DNA proving that Morin was in the driver’s seat. Two months earlier, the judge had threatened to make the prosecution try the case without the DNA evidence, because the state lab had forced so many postponements. In the end, if allegations against McCowen are true, Cape residents had a vicious sexual predator living among them for three years. Meanwhile, hundreds of men were asked to surrender their right to privacy for an effort that would only slow the state’s crime-fighting resources further. Way to go.
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