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The Tucson Police Department’s crime lab is working to fix a number of problems identified earlier this year in an inspection by a national accreditation board.

While still accredited, the lab has until December to correct all 14 of the identified by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors as being out of compliance by the, according to Vicky Bode, the lab’s quality assurance manager.

Bode says the violations are mostly a matter of having proper documentation rather than anything that would compromise the outcome of an investigation.

“If people look through the review, they would think they were nit picky details but it’s all part of the process,” Bode said. “In my opinion none of it has affected the quality of work.”

Even though the lab remains accredited, Alex Heveri — a defense attorney for the Pima County Legal Defender’s Office in the appeals department — said the issue is very concerning.

“While the lab hasn’t lost it’s accreditation, it hasn’t been bound and compliant with the standards,” she said. “People have been convicted since then based solely on forensic evidence.”

Pima County Public Defender Bob Hirsh agreed that the findings in the report were troubling.

“We have to rely in large part on the crime lab because it is nearly impossible financially to go out and duplicate every test and drug to do backup testing,” he said. “We, like the public, are dependent on the lab and hope that we get reliable results.”

According to Bode, the results of the inspection have not created any problems in the judicial system thus far.

The Pima County Attorney’s Office has also said that no cases were impacted by the results of the inspection, according to David Berkman, Pima County’s chief criminal deputy county attorney.

The report indicates that maintenance and calibration was not being performed on some equipment as required. Another violation occurred when a piece of evidence being examined for fingerprints had been stored unsealed in the laboratory evidence room for more than a year.

According to Bode, the handling of that piece of evidence did not affect the analysis. Rather, the lab simply had to institute a two-year cap on how long evidence can be considered to be in the process of examination because there was not a specific time period before, she said.

The lab has also had three documented cases in which a latent print trainee contaminated three evidence items with the trainee’s DNA, the report said. The lab has since implemented corrective action procedure to prevent it from happening again, according to the report.

A number of the violations stem from procedures not being properly noted in manuals.

Defense attorney Michael Bloom who is representing Glenda Rumsey — a woman accused of driving under the influence of alcohol when she struck and killed a teen on a bicycle — wrote in a motion that the inspection report “reveals failures so pervasive that it calls into question the overall quality of the work product of the laboratory.”

Bloom’s client gave blood samples that were tested by a Tucson Police Department crime lab analyst, which indicated that her blood had an alcohol concentration substantially in excess of the legal limit.

Because those results will be used as critical evidence, Bloom says in the motion that the defense is entitled to the widest possible latitude in doing discovery concerning the laboratory.

Bloom declined to comment for the story.

The report did not indicate any violations under the toxicology standards and criteria.

Heveri also said she is concerned about the fact that the Pima County Attorney’s Office has yet to notify defense attorneys in Arizona of the failures from the inspection.

However, Berkman stated that the County Attorney’s Office does not have an obligation to do so because none of the issues raised in the report affected any cases.

Being involved in the accreditation process is voluntary and serves the purpose of demonstrating that lab management, personnel, operational and technical procedures, equipment and physical facilities meet established standards.

Once the department provides all of the documentation, the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors will either accept the documentation, request more documentation or will schedule a time for a re-inspection, Bode said.