| Illinois State Police Drops ChoicePoint Unit Contract |
Ill Drops ChoicePoint Unit Contract; Claims Bad DNA Tests
9:47 AM EDT August 19, 2005
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP)--Illinois State Police said they will no longer use a nationally known DNA laboratory in Virginia because they claim it has botched so many tests - saying they were lucky the errors did not result in turning anyone free.
After conducting quality checks on several dozen rape kits sent to Bode Technology, Illinois authorities discovered that nearly a quarter of the tests were incorrect, Doug Brown, a first deputy director with the state police, said Thursday.
He added that state police were fortunate to have caught the mistakes and that no one appears to have been freed as a result of the errors.
"We're very angry about it, we are very disappointed," he said. "We are very lucky that our quality assurance caught this. We need to get the samples back to the system."
State police sent a letter to Springfield, Va.-based Bode on Thursday canceling a three-year, $7 million contract with the private firm, Brown said.
The quality control tests were done on more than 50 out of 1,200 rape kits Bode had said contained no semen, Brown said. But of the kits state police checked again, nearly 22% were found to have semen present despite Bode's finding, he said.
Illinois State Police will seek to have up to $750,000 that they spent on the 1,200 samples refunded and will also ask Bode to pay to have all its samples retested at different labs, Brown said.
A message left Friday for Chuck Jones, a spokesman for Bode's parent company, Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc., was not immediately returned. On Thursday, Jones said the lab had not been made aware of any specific complaints.
"Bode Technology has successfully processed more than 2,000 cases for the Illinois State Police over the past year," he said. |