Investigator's Mistakes Could Cost Dozens of Cases

The District Attorney’s Office has recently released information that an HPD criminal investigator was found to have made errors in over 60 cases. The event has caused both the DA and defense attorneys involved to halt cases the investigator worked on until the evidence has been overlooked. Tyler Flood, the managing attorney at Tyler Flood & Associates, Inc., released a statement regarding how the District Attorney has handled the situation. “We appreciate the prompt notice. We need to know as fast as possible because there are cases happening in court every day and we just want to make sure none of those are handled improperly.” Many of these cases were violent including 26 homicides. The most recent of these happened sometime in March last year. Officers had responded to a 911 call about a shooting at 200 block of South 70^th. When they arrived, they found Johnathan Sanchez with a pistol and approached him. Sanchez then opened fire at the officers according to police reports. Sanchez was charged with aggravated assault of a public servant, but he was later charged with murder because police accused him of fatally shooting a woman the same day. Some of the evidence involved in the case was taken by Justin McGee. McGee made errors with several pieces of evidence associated with Sanchez's case. One of these was a spent cartridge in which he left at the scene saying it “appeared to be unrelated.” This could have a big effect in Sanchez’s case since his attorney plans to factor this mishandled evidence into their defense strategy.