Yvonne “Missy” Woods appeared in court on Thursday for charges ranging from forgery to cybercrime, all connected to her work as a DNA Analyst for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
Woods worked for CBI beginning in 2008 until retiring in 2023, where she was often called as a “star witness” to testify in DNA-centric trials.
Yet, according to AP News, she was known for rushing through her work and not always being “thorough.” The fate of over 500 cases are up in the air, and the tally is rising, with some news reports alleging 650 and higher. According to police affidavits, cases ranging from homicide to robbery fell prey to her tampering.
Her work had been called into question over a decade ago for data tampering, but she was allowed to continue working. The costs of her misconduct hover around $11 million.
It’s a testament to the fact that the system measures and incentivizes the wrong things. People are applauded for closing cases quickly rather than following truth and doing things methodically.
When people wonder what’s wrong with the criminal justice system: this is it.
Though the AP News states there are no wrongful convictions resulting from her misconduct, I think it’s too soon to say. When you have someone deleting data and skipping calibration testing, she likely cut other corners, too.
It begs the question: how many other labs in how many other states have this same issue? When you consider documentaries like Netflix’s The Innocence Files and How to Fix a Drug Scandal, and multiple stories from all over the world, Yvonne Woods is not the first to do this. There is so much about the system that is broken, leading me, and I’m sure many others, to wonder how much of it is accurate at all.
The one piece of comfort I take out of this: an intern caught this woman’s misconduct; a testament to the fact that fresh eyes really do save lives.
Read the full AP News article here.
