Mandy Locke
Raleigh News & Observer


Joseph Neff
Raleigh News & Observer

Citation
In their four-part series, "Agents' Secrets," Mandy Locke and Joseph Neff exposed widespread misconduct at the State Bureau of Investigation in North Carolina. Agents fabricated stories or cut corners to prove prosecutors' theories. Lab examiners flouted accepted scientific techniques and withheld evidence to help build cases for prosecutors. As a result of the series, top officials at the bureau have been fired or replaced and the SBI is rewriting its policies and procedures. The series was an example of the News & Observer's exemplary criminal-justice reporting over the past several years - reporting that helped free a death row inmate and trigger the establishment of the nation's first Innocence Inquiry Commission.

Excerpt
SBI ignores years of warnings on a confession called 'fiction'
August 8, 2010

On July 16, 1993, SBI Agent Mark Isley hauled Floyd Brown to jail. The charge: beating a retired schoolteacher to death.

The proof: a six-page confession that Isley said Brown uttered word for word in a single telling, one elaborate detail stacked on another.

Then and now, Brown can't get past the letter K when reciting the alphabet. He is a 46-year-old man with the mind of a 7-year-old boy, his IQ hovering at about half that of a person with average intelligence.

"The confession is a work of fiction," said Mike Klinkosum, a Raleigh attorney who represented Brown until his release in 2007. "It's that simple."

Doctors employed by the state were skeptical about Brown.s confession as early as 1993, and they sounded alarms in court in 2005. In court documents and arguments, those warnings became more convincing as years passed, reaching Attorney General Roy Cooper's most trusted advisers. The Charlotte Observer and national media pressed Cooper for answers in 2007. But for four years, SBI leadership and the Attorney General's Office failed to investigate Isley's work.

Cooper, a Democrat, didn't act until 2009, in the face of a lawsuit that will likely cost taxpayers and their insurers millions of dollars. He ordered a special review of the Brown case, but the agency has refused to provide any conclusions or results.

The Brown case stands out, but it is hardly the State Bureau of Investigation's only troublesome work. SBI agents have cut corners, bullied the vulnerable and twisted reports and court testimony when the truth threatened to undermine their cases, a News & Observer investigation of the SBI's work, policies and practices reveals.

The SBI sends agents to help local law enforcement agencies solve their most complicated cases. But agents sometimes lock on to the wrong suspect and stick to their story for years, as they did with Alan Gell, a Bertie County man who collected $3.9 million after an SBI agent ignored evidence that pointed to his innocence in a 1995 murder.

At the bureau's crime lab, agents charged with using science to solve crimes have hidden test results or withheld notes that suggested the opposite of findings presented to the courts, as they did in the case of Greg Taylor. Taylor was exonerated of a 1991 murder in February. Firearms and blood analysts have stretched the boundaries of science and aligned themselves so fully with police and prosecutors that the examiners manipulated evidence to fit their theories.

Many agents don't cheat. But even those following the rules work within policies, practices and state laws that bias the agency and its scientists toward the side of prosecutors and away from basic fairness.

"The documented policies and practices of our state lab support the long-held concern that North Carolina's lab is the prosecution's lab, not the justice system's lab," said Christine Mumma, executive director of the N.C. Center on Actual Innocence, which works to free wrongly convicted prisoners such as Taylor. "Public confidence, judicial confidence and the lives of innocent citizens have been destroyed. It is past time for change".




Biography
Mandy Locke

Mandy Locke, 32, was born and reared in Shelbyville, Tenn., where she started her journalism career as a high school student covering the Tennessee Walking Horse industry. After graduating from the University of Virginia, she worked at the Vineyard Gazette in Edgartown, Mass. before joining the News & Observer in 2004 to report on the criminal justice system. She has also won numerous North Carolina Press Association awards for breaking news and investigations.

Joseph Neff

Joseph Neff, 51, is an investigative reporter at The News & Observer of Raleigh. His stories have led to the exoneration of an innocent man on death row; disciplinary proceedings against cheating prosecutors; the convictions of former Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps and seven of her colleagues; and the disciplining of bad doctors. His work has been recognized by Society of Professional Journalists, among other organizations. A native of Cleveland, Joseph was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, where he taught beekeeping.