2017/02/10
Orlando Sentinel February 9, 2017: More than 2,600 Orlando-area lawyers get letters warning about fingerprint expert
The Orange-Osceola State Attorney’s Office has sent more than 2,600 letters to Orlando-area defense attorneys, warning them that their clients may have been harmed by a fingerprint expert who made mistakes.
The defendants involved include Casey Anthony, acquitted of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, and death-row inmate Bessman Okafor, convicted of murdering a man in 2012 to keep him from testifying at Okafor’s trial.
At issue is whether any suspects were wrongly arrested, convicted, jailed or punished because of the work of Marco Palacio, a 18-year veteran of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.
Last week, the State Attorney’s Office discovered that the Sheriff’s Office was no longer allowing him to analyze prints.
Other print experts at the Sheriff’s Office scrambled to rework all of Palacio’s active cases, according to an email from an assistant state attorney to staff at the prosecutor’s office, and he had been transferred to a different job: handling evidence.
Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Angelo Nieves would not answer questions on Monday about the allegations against Palacio, except to say that he is the subject of an internal investigation that began in October.
Nieves said he knows of no cases in which someone has been falsely convicted because of Palacio’s work.
In its letter to defense attorneys, the State Attorney’s Office described the problem with Palacio as “performance issues. … clerical errors, failure to identify prints of value and the mislabeling of print cards.” more