PANAMA CITY — Prosecutors had a lot of work dropped on their plate in the wake of the arrest of a former state crime lab drug analyst accused of stealing prescription drugs submitted as criminal evidence.
The attorney for one man convicted in part by his testimony said they’re making new mistakes and further contaminating evidence.
Chief Assistant State Attorney Greg Wilson said prosecutors in the 14th Judicial Circuit have identified 349 closed cases and another 18 pending cases which the Pensacola-based analyst, Joseph Graves, was involved.
“Obviously, his credibility is an issue for anything,” Wilson said of Graves.
Prosecutors are focusing first on the pending cases to make sure they are still viable, Wilson said. The next priority is closed cases that might have gone to trial, and prosecutors in the 14th circuit already have identified two of those that resulted in convictions, Wilson said.
Prosecutors filed motions in those two cases asking the judge to order the Clerk of Courts, which maintains criminal evidence for a prescribed period of time after a case is closed, to release the evidence to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) for retesting in Orlando.
The results of the retest will determine whether prosecutors actually have the evidence they thought. Even if the pills they believe are prescription-only oxycodones turned out to be over-the-counter aspirins, for example, prosecutors might have other options to prove their cases: the results of field testing that police perform at the time of the seizure, for instance, or photographs of the pills, Wilson said.
“All is not lost as far as prosecution goes, but you see all the hoops we have to jump through,” Wilson said.
Wilson pointed out that prosecutors have a legal duty to disclose any exculpatory or favorable evidence, as well as any evidence that might lead to exculpatory or favorable evidence.
“All that has to be disclosed, and we’re going to disclose anything we find,” Wilson said.
Attorney Walter Smith isn’t ready to take Wilson at his word. Last summer, Smith defended Jeremiah Beazley against drug trafficking and, ironically, evidence tampering charges. Beazley is one of the two cases that went to trial and resulted in conviction based in part on the testimony of Joseph Graves.
“I’m supposed to trust these people?” Smith said. “Do you think they got this order to protect [Beazley’s] rights? … I don’t think so. I think they’re trying to protect their conviction.”
Beazley case
Beazley is in prison until 2028 for a drug conviction based in part on the testimony of the now-discredited lab analyst. He’d been charged with trafficking, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence, but jurors found him guilty of the lesser offense of possession.
Judge James Fensom gave him 15 years, the maximum sentence available on the lesser charges. Beazley appealed to the 1st District Court of Appeal.
Smith said he would have objected to certain aspects of the state’s proposal to retest the evidence, but he was never given the chance.
On Feb. 20 in response to a motion by prosecutors that noted there’s reason to believe the evidence against Beazley has been tampered with, Fensom ordered the clerk’s office to release evidence against Beazley to FDLE for retesting.
But it wasn’t until last week the 1st District Court of Appeal relinquished jurisdiction to the trial court for 90 days — not so prosecutors can retest the evidence, but so Beazley can file a motion for post-conviction relief.
“They have further contaminated the chain of custody by releasing it back to the people that tampered with it in the first place,” Smith said.
Fensom, Smith said, had no legal authority to release the evidence because he didn’t have jurisdiction over the case. Smith never had an opportunity to ask that the evidence be tested by an independent third-party; there was never a hearing.
Fensom did not respond to a request for comment; his assistant said he would not comment on a pending case.
Smith said the order to release the evidence is just another mistake in a “comedy of errors,” but he wasn’t laughing; he said Beazley’s right to due process is being violated.
“This is evidence in a trial; this isn’t some plea,” he said. “We have a right to be there whenever they’re messing with it.”
The Trial
When Beazley went to trial last year, Graves — the FDLE analyst arrested last month on suspicion of stealing and selling drugs submitted as criminal evidence to the Pensacola lab he supervised — testified against him.
During the trial, Smith pointed out that deputies reported submitting 378 pills, but only 288 pills came back from the lab.
“Back in June, everybody knew the 90 pills disappeared,” Smith said. “We established — not them — that this evidence had been tampered with.”
At the time of Beazley’s trial, Smith said, neither Fensom nor anyone from the sheriff’s office, the FDLE or the State Attorney’s Office cared about the missing pills. Beazley was convicted and Fensom gave him the maximum sentence.
The investigator who arrested Beazley testified he submitted 288 pills to FDLE, but on a sworn statement five days after Beazley’s arrest he wrote down that he had submitted 378. He explained he may have miscounted the pills or mistakenly written the wrong number.
Smith hoped the judge, investigator, analyst and prosecutor would’ve been “slapping themselves on the forehead” and seriously considering the possibility that the state’s evidence against Beazley had been tampered with. Instead, he said, everybody looked for an out.
Graves said FDLE weighed pills but didn’t bother to count them. The weight of a controlled substance is what determines whether a defendant will be charged with a trafficking offense that carries a minimum mandatory sentence.
The investigator told the jury he might have miscounted, or he might have written the wrong number down in his report. Smith hammered the investigator on the witness stand about the missing pills.
“It worked to the extent the jury heard it and said, ‘We’re not going to convict this guy of trafficking,’ ” Smith said.
Smith remembers thinking at the time that the problem must have been with the investigator or the evidence custodian at the sheriff’s office, but he was looking in the wrong direction.
“It just never occurred to me that there was junkie working at the crime lab,” Smith said.
Smith Monday filed a motion asking Fensom to set Beazley’s conviction aside because of the probability Graves tampered with it. The fact that the state’s evidence was “unlawfully released” to the FDLE is “another reason that the conviction should be set aside,” he said.
Smith argues the onus is on the state now to prove the pills have not been tampered with.
“The state can’t prove that it wasn’t tampered with,” he said, “and I can prove the evidence was tampered with.”