Clerks store evidence that tells tales of crime and justice, but such a service costs money / By Maria Sprow
Barbara Anderson is the pack rat of county government. It is her job to store the thousands upon thousands of pieces of evidence entered as exhibits during a criminal trial in Harris County. She must also keep those thousands of items organized, so that they can be found during an appeal or at an attorney’s request.
It’s safe to say she has a lot of junk in her closet, but that the junk is valuable to the defendants and victims of crime in her county, since it tells the truth of whether a person is innocent or guilty, or of how a person was killed or harmed. The junk in Anderson’s closet holds fingerprints, ballistics, splatter patterns and other keys to solved mysteries.
Anderson works inside the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, where she is one of only five people with unaccompanied access to the county’s evidence locker, a room filled with metal shelves and cardboard boxes, which are filled with plastic bags filled with paper. Each box is labeled with numbers, which correspond to a criminal case taken to court within the county.
That room leads to another room, which is also filled with metal shelves and cardboard boxes, which are filled with plastic bags filled with paper. There are other items, too – rakes, crutches, tools, a sword disguised as a cane, a bloodied suitcase. There are also other rooms, located in another building nearby, and it’s Anderson’s job to make sure there’s always space in the main room for new exhibits. So in a sense, she’s sort of a human conveyer belt, too.
“Every one of these boxes is just filled with plastic envelopes, and the envelopes are filed in numerical order, so you can reach in and get what you need,” Anderson said. “I find the space. If I run out of space here, I have to move boxes over there.” Her organization is necessarily meticulous, though also hackneyed: it’s done largely via post-it notes and inventory index cards, though the index cards are backed up via computer file. The exact location of every item in the evidence locker is documented and indexed, though some items are easier to find than others. For instance, the shattered glass within a wooden door, in which prosecutors used expert testimony to prove to a jury that football coach David Mark Temple was lying when he originally told investigators that his wife had been killed by a unknown burglar while he was running errands with his son. Among other evidence, the door’s shattered glass gave Temple away: it hadn’t been broken from the outside, which would have indicated a robbery. It had been broken from the inside, a sign of Temple’s failed attempt to cover up his crime.
Jurors convicted Temple of murder on November 16, 2007, almost nine years after the tragedy. As the case goes through appeals and until the county can dispose of the evidence by law, it falls to the district clerk’s office to keep that door and other evidence safety stored, hopefully in the same condition in which it arrived. Sometimes, that can mean storing an item for years or decades, or indefinitely, as required for evidence used in capital murder trials. According to law, the county clerk is responsible for storing exhibits in civil cases for one year after the judgment is signed if no appeal has been perfected, or for two years if the person involved was served by publication instead of in person. District clerks are responsible for storing criminal exhibits, which must be kept for one year after the final conviction if the item is related to a misdemeanor or felony for which the sentence imposed by the court is five years of less, or for two years after the final conviction if the sentence is for more than five years, so long as it is not related to a capital case.
Exceptions are made for firearms and contraband, the storage and destruction of which generally falls to sheriffs departments or the responsible law enforcement agency. The rules for any biological material are also different. Evidence containing DNA must be stored until the defendant dies, completes his or her sentence, or is released on parole. While some clerks do hold biological evidence in their lockers, Harris County gives its blood samples, semen and DNA to the Houston Police Department crime lab, and county medical examiner or the Department of Public Safety for storage, said District Clerk Loren Jackson, who was first elected in 2006 and has spent some time since then delving into how his staff secures and preserves evidence.
The statute does not give a retention period for capital case exhibits, so most district clerks do not dispose of those items. In Harris County, items in capital exhibits include mannequins that at one time were used by ballistics experts to demonstrate where bullets entered and left a body. There is also a large rocking chair covered in plastic that was used as a torture chamber during one crime, as well as hundreds of boxes of exhibits that tell the truth behind other tragedies.
“We have a bloody suitcase that we cannot get rid of,” Jackson said. The item is not stored with another agency because the blood is a type of illustrative evidence, rather than biological evidence. Still, it needs to be somehow preserved, but Jackson said the office can’t really afford any special packaging that would protect it from dust or air or other elements that may degrade the evidence over the course of years or decades.
“The blood on the suitcase is not there to prove DNA, it’s just there to prove there is a lot of blood on the suitcase,” he said. “The clerks office was created and funded to be responsible for records storage, but we are also responsible for evidence storage, and we don’t get the necessary funding for that.”
After an exhibit’s retention time has expired, non-capital items that have not been ordered by the court to be returned to their original owners can be incinerated. However, the destruction is often even more costly than the storage, so exhibits stay put with no other place to go, Jackson said.
“It costs money to destroy things such as doors and windshields, and sometimes $3,000 can make a huge impact in your office if its spent on other things,” he said. “Most county departments have undergone budget cuts.”
Some of the items stored by the county and marked for destruction are valuable, he added, which is why he pushed for a piece of legislation that, if passed, will grant clerks in some counties the authority to sell the items in order to pay for more proper storage and preservation of evidence.
Though Jackson takes pride in the organization of the four Harris County evidence lockers – there’s a room for capital case evidence, a room for items marked for destruction, a room for items getting ready for destruction and a room for newer exhibits – he said he’d like to see the office employ better security practices, such as the use of cameras to ensure that evidence is not stolen, as well as better preservation practices, such as plastic boxes and other protective packaging for evidence that could otherwise become damaged or contaminated over time. Currently, the county can only afford to store items in cardboard boxes and plastic bags, and its only defense against contamination is the required usage of latex gloves by anyone who enters the lockers.
Valuables stored inside the Harris County lockers include Rolex watches, gold jewelry, coins and cash money. There are also other odds and ends of some value – laser disks for anime collectors, bicycles, luggage, cameras, a fur coat, a kid’s picnic table, a brand new reciprocating saw. Many of the items originated from theft or possession of stolen item cases, Jackson said, where a thief is caught after having robbed a number of houses or stores. Businesses will opt to be reimbursed by their insurance companies rather than take the items back, whereas private owners may never have reported the items as stolen.
Many of the items have already qualified for destruction, meaning that they are no longer needed for a trial and no attorney has requested that the items be returned to their original owners. The related bill, SB 1744 written by Sen. John Whitmire, is currently in the Criminal Justice Committee. Jackson testified in a public hearing in support of the bill on April 14, and it was reported back to the full Senate with a favorable recommendation and certified for the Local and Consent Calendar.
The bill authorizes some clerks to deliver unclaimed valuable items to the county purchasing agent for disposal as surplus or salvage property, which is sold via public auction or competitive bid. Those items can also be donated to charities if the purchasing agent determines that the selling price would be less than the expenses of the auction or that the donation serves a public good. The bill also requires that commissioners court take the proceeds and give half back to the clerk’s office, to cover evidence storage and preservation costs, and give the other half of the proceeds to the state crime victim’s assistance fund.
The legislation only pertains to counties with populations of more than 1.7 million. It’s somewhat less likely that clerks in counties with populations less than that will have many valuable exhibit items in storage since the law requires those clerks to provide written notice to attorneys notifying them of the intent to destroy the items. Harris County and others with more than 1.7 million people are not required to send a notification, and have the authority to dispose of an exhibit so long as they do not receive a request for items from an attorney before the retention period ends.
The Texas County and District Clerks Association is also working with legislators to create a retention period for capital case exhibits that would allow clerks to eventually dispose of those items.
Jackson said money gained from the sale of valuable items would go a long way toward the maintenance of evidence. It would perhaps allow the clerk’s office to buy plastic storage bins, which would better protect larger items from degradation, and mylar bags, which are stronger than plastic.
It would also help off-set the cost of incinerating non-valuable items. Generally, counties must go to outside vendors to destroy items, and vendors charge according to weight. Harris county currently has hundreds of cardboard boxes waiting incineration, each one tagged with a yellow “to be destroyed” post-it note. There are also larger items with no value that need to be destroyed – degraded wooden fences, car tires, model displays built by an expert witness to recreate the scene for trial.
He is also hoping the new funds can go toward purchasing surveillance cameras for the county’s evidence lockers, so that the office can increase the security of the items and prove that evidence wasn’t damaged while in storage. Currently, the county’s security practices include closing off access to the storage facilities to most county employees – he doesn’t even allow himself unaccompanied access – and vaults with combination locks. While his office has never had a security breach, he’d rather be safe than sorry.
“In order for us to have some of the best practices in government for maintaining exhibits, there are costs involved. Bills like these, we see them as a great win-win for clerks and for crime victims, and in a stronger sense, it can actually be a win for the defendant,” he said, as well as the state. “If you’re a defendant, it would be great to know when you file an appeal that whatever exhibits are being stored are not tampered with or contaminated.”