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Fingerprint Scandal Costs Analyst Her Job
June 7, 2007
Orlando Sentinel
By Rene Stutzman
A longtime analyst at the center of a scandal that has all but shut down fingerprint operations at the Seminole County Sheriff's Office resigned in disgrace Wednesday.
Donna Birks handed in her resignation shortly after Sheriff Don Eslinger told Birks that she was about to get fired, Eslinger said.
The Orlando Sentinel first reported last month that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was called in to re-examine hundreds of cases handled by Birks.
So far, the FDLE has found six instances in which Birks identified suspects even though the prints were inconclusive, according to authorities. In the seventh, she pegged the print to the wrong person.
The Sheriff's Office on Wednesday completed an internal investigation into Birks and every other full-time employee in the agency's fingerprint section and announced its findings. Birks lost her job.
"She has absolutely no credibility as a latent-print examiner," Eslinger said.
In a face-to-face meeting Wednesday morning, Eslinger told Birks that she was about to be fired. A short time later, the 49-year-old Edgewater resident sent the office a letter of resignation.
In it, she wrote, "I sincerely apologize for the havoc caused by this situation. . . ."
Birks could not be reached for comment.
Eslinger also reprimanded Birks' boss and friend, Ann Mallory, who investigators concluded allowed her to cut corners. Mallory will remain a manager but will no longer have anything to do with fingerprints.
Eslinger also demoted Tara Williamson, the print examiner who complained to managers that Birks was biased and unethical. Her memo launched the investigation. Williamson will work as a dispatcher, according to sheriff's Lt. Dennis Lemma.
Williamson was demoted because FDLE print examiners discovered that she, too, made a bad print identification and verified several of Birks' bad calls.
Lemma said there was no evidence that Birks' errors were intentional or that the agency's detectives pressured her to manufacture evidence.
In a statement, Birks told investigators, "I didn't think I made any mistakes, but . . . I guess I did, but I never meant to hurt anybody."
Said Eslinger, "From what we've been able to gather, she just thought she was right."
Eslinger conceded that the scandal damaged his agency's credibility.
It's not clear, though, whether Birks sent any innocent people to prison.
Prosecutors dropped charges against a suspected car burglar in April because Birks' fingerprint match -- one she got wrong, according to the FDLE -- was the best piece of evidence they had.
They also are bracing for a possible retrial in a double murder.
Birks told jurors last year that she found the print of Clemente Javier "Shorty" Aguirre on a bloody chef's knife used to kill a 68-year-old woman and her daughter near Altamonte Springs.
Aguirre, 27, was their neighbor. He is now on death row.
He told jurors that he walked into the victims' home after they were dead, touched them to see whether he could revive them, spotted the knife on a box and picked it up, although he could not explain why.
Birks' resignation ended a 20-year career in the fingerprinting field, the past 13 in Seminole County. Her resume includes a stint with the FBI and with law-enforcement agencies in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Annual job reviews at the Sheriff's Office suggest she was very good, a near-ideal employee.
She kept "excellent" statistics and careful records, took good care of the agency's equipment and had strong time-management skills, according to her 2006 review, written by Mallory.
"Her work ethic and loyalty to this office should be commended," Mallory wrote.
Birks was hired by the Sheriff's Office in 1994. After four years, she got a big promotion -- to latent print examiner. Up to then, she had worked with fingerprints, either cataloging them or taking impressions, but she had never analyzed crime-scene prints -- "latent" prints, in law-enforcement jargon -- for the Sheriff's Office. In 2005, she was promoted again, to senior latent print examiner.
By then, though, she had already misread several crime-scene fingerprints, according to authorities. But no one caught the errors.
The first was in 1998, when Birks said a print on a forged check belonged to a Daytona Beach man. An FDLE analysis now shows the print had no value.
Eslinger said Wednesday that he would work to see that those errors never happen again.
Eslinger reorganized his crime lab, and he announced Wednesday that he hired two FDLE analysts with a combined 58 years of experience.
Deborah Fisher, with the FDLE's Orlando crime lab, will run his fingerprint lab, Eslinger said. Among the changes: He will rehire Jheri Cabral, a fingerprinting veteran who was fired in September after Birks complained she wasn't making enough matches on hard-to-read prints.
"The idea here is to restore our credibility," Eslinger said.
It may never be clear how many prints Birks got wrong. She handled an estimated 1,500 cases. FDLE is reworking 300.
Those are just the urgent ones, those that prosecutors and the Sheriff's Office concluded needed an immediate review because so much is at stake.
They include her highest-profile cases, including six murders and those in which her analysis was crucial to a conviction.
Rene Stutzman can be reached at rstutzman@orlandosentinel.com or 407-324-7294.
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