March 27 (UPI) -- The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will retest more than 4,000 DNA samples after announcing it used a faulty testing kit for at least eight months.
The sheriff's office announced the error in a news release on Wednesday.
"There are established policies, procedures and quality assurance safeguards in place to ensure reliability and consistency of scientific results," the LASD said in the release. "The Department will re-examine existing protocols, identify potential gaps and implement corrective measures to prevent this from occurring again."
The manufacturer notified the LASD in August that the kits it was using were faulty, and said that it would provide the department with new ones, but the inferior kits were used until last month.
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The sheriff's department said it would stop using the kits, assess exactly how many samples needed to be retested and open an investigation into the use of the faulty kits.
"We take the integrity of our criminal investigations and the reliability of our forensic testing very seriously," Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said in the statement. "We are committed to thoroughly addressing this important issue, ensuring transparency and taking immediate corrective action to protect the accuracy of ongoing and future cases."
The department said officials do not believe using the bad test kits resulted in anyone being falsely convicted of crimes, and added that it would apprise anyone involved in DNA cases, including defendants, defense counsel, victims, prosecutors, law enforcement, the courts and the public, of any developments and what further action needed to be taken, if any, according to District Attorney Nathan Hochman, whose office was also sent bad test kits.
