Found evidence in Houston too late for 21 dead men

Investigators have found missing evidence from 28 death penalty cases in boxes from the Houston crime lab that were mislabeled and stored. The boxes including missing evidence from about 8,000 Houston cases, total.

Twenty of the men have already been executed, one died on death row of natural causes. The new evidence could affect the cases of up to seven men still on Texas death row. The discovery raises the disturbing possibility that Texas may have executed one or more of these men without defendants' appellate counsel having an opportunity to perform DNA testing or other possibly exonerating scientific work.

Via CrimProf. For more, see ACLU's recommendations on how to fix the crime lab problem, plus Grits coverage of a Senate Criminal Justice Committee meeting on crime labs in Houston this month, and a recent discussion of why accuracy is sometimes optional in forensic science.