The CBI has failed to comply with the law requiring external oversight of crime labs, watchdogs claim

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation failed to use a state-mandated oversight process to investigate misconduct in forensic testing, even though one of the agency's top scientists manipulated DNA test data for years, two Colorado regulators alleged in a letter to the CBI on Tuesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and the Korey Wise Innocence Project jointly criticized the CBI in a five-page letter for failing to follow this mandated procedure and ultimately commissioning a limited external investigation into the scientist's misconduct.

The criticism follows revelations that longtime CBI forensic scientist Yvonne “Missy” Woods routinely deleted and manipulated DNA tests throughout her nearly 30-year career, producing unreliable results in hundreds of cases and sending shockwaves through Colorado’s criminal justice system.

Her misconduct went unaddressed for years, despite colleagues raising concerns about the quality of her work in 2014 and 2018. The CBI has so far found problems in 809 of Woods' cases between 1994 and 2023, and state lawmakers allocated $7.5 million to remedy the misconduct.

The regulators' complaint focuses on certain grants the CBI receives annually from the U.S. Department of Justice. The agency has received more than $2 million in federal funding since 2016, according to The Denver Post.

As a condition of receiving those grants, the CBI was required to have an independent body to conduct investigations into “allegations of serious negligence or misconduct that materially affect the integrity of employees' forensic findings,” federal law states.

The CBI named the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office as that independent agency in its grant applications – but there was no indication that the role was anything other than nominal, the letter said. The sheriff's office said it has never investigated any allegation of serious negligence or misconduct at the CBI and said it will only do so at the CBI's request, the letter said.

Sheriff's Office officials “may not have known” that the agency was listed as an independent watchdog of the CBI until the ACLU and the Korey Wise Innocence Project at the University of Colorado School of Law began asking questions this year. the letter says.

Emma McLean-Riggs, an attorney at the ACLU of Colorado, said the federal law was created in response to “a pattern of unaddressed, pervasive misconduct in laboratories.”

“The hope was that if agencies received federal funding, they would conduct more rigorous audits and investigations when misconduct occurred,” she said.

The fact that the CBI did not appear to have used this procedure was problematic, she said.

“Given that we have at least two reports internally from employees about Ms. Woods’ misconduct, it would appear that there would be an entity that is widely known as the go-to source for reporting misconduct and that conducts thorough and responsive investigations that were discovered earlier ” she said.