2nd murder suspect challenges forensic evidence from troubled Tempe police unit. Here's why

A second murder defendant has asked a judge to throw out evidence in his case by citing years of dysfunction at the Tempe Police Department’s forensics unit.

He argued that team's sloppy police work renders some of the evidence against him unreliable. The judge in the case twice rejected that reasoning, but the claim reemphasizes that Tempe's forensic unit's problems are becoming a courtroom topic.

Police arrested 34-year-old Kody Jebediah Parker in 2019 and accused him of shooting a man in the neck during a botched robbery. He's facing five separate charges, including first-degree murder and unlawful possession of a firearm.

The shooting happened at a shopping center in northwest Tempe, where police said Parker and his co-defendant Armando Junior Crews Jr. planned to rob a man who wanted to buy pills from them. Parker got into the back seat of the victim's car, pressed a handgun against his neck and shot him when he fought back, police records say. The victim died the next day.

Police lifted a palm print off the car. The city’s crime scene evidence team, the Forensic Services Unit, matched it to Parker’s.

In mid-2023, Parker's defense team argued the court should throw out the palm print evidence, but the judge was unconvinced. On Thursday, the same judge denied the request for a second time despite new details about the forensic unit's systemic shortcomings.

Prosecutors can point to other evidence against Parker. Police said in court records they found in Palmer's home a shirt with what they say looked like bloodstains on it. They also said they have texts that show Cruz and Parker were planning the robbery. Parker's cellphone location shows it was at the scene. There's also surveillance footage that shows the shooter fleeing in a car similar to Parker's.

Why is Tempe's forensic evidence being questioned now?

Parker is the second murder defendant in Tempe to cite the forensic unit’s issues in his defense. Throughout 2023, Sterling Evans filed notices to the court disclosing inconsistencies within the unit. He's facing second-degree murder charges in the shooting death of his ex-girlfriend’s brother, Anthony Bulerin, in March 2021.

The twin legal challenges come after growing scrutiny into the professionalism of the forensic unit and the reliability of its work.

In November The Arizona Republic reported that since at least 2015 the unit was a toxic workplace, led incompetently, with staff who were ill-equipped and inadequately trained, according to police records. Those showed crime scene technicians had mishandled evidence and lacked standard procedures.

Those conditions prompted an internal review in January 2023, culminating in July with new Tempe Police Chief Ken McCoy ordering the unit to halt processing major crimes, including murders. Tempe contracted with Mesa to handle evidence from new crimes until Tempe's technicians could be trained to higher standards.

Meanwhile, McCoy ordered a second look at three years' worth of old cases, totaling around 400. Of those, 80 went to Mesa for a deeper review. Technicians there reviewed 30 so far and found fingerprint analysis errors in eight.

The Maricopa County Attorney's Office is reviewing its Tempe cases to determine if any were undermined by the how technicians collected, analyzed or stored forensic evidence. McCoy and city spokespeople have held that they've found no criminal cases that were compromised.

City officials said the problems with its forensic unit predate the current city and police leadership and the city is working to correct them.

Internal affairs investigations into the forensic team leader, and a lieutenant who was her manager, show Tempe Police Department leaders knew about the problems for years but didn't address them until a year ago.

How Tempe's problems play out in second murder trial

Seizing on these revelations, Parker's defense attorney Dave Erlichman argued his client's prints were similarly misread and asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sam Myers to declare the prints unfit for trial evidence.

“The manner in which the palm print was lifted and the comparison and evaluation of the prints … were so unreliable as to warrant preclusion,” Erlichman argued in a pretrial motion “As the Tempe Police has demonstrated by its actions, its standards were not sufficiently high enough to meet the best practices in the industry.”

Erlichman pointed out in court filings discrepancies in the signatures and initials used to sign off on an evidence sheet in Parker's police investigation.

He cited an interview in which a Tempe detective stated that a forensic tech's initials on two fingerprint forms "look different." The forensic technician who completed the form couldn't explain what happened, Erlichman wrote in pretrial motions.

Erlichman argued that if he could prove the evidence sheet was forged, the judge should dismiss the charges against Parker because a "felony has been conducted by law enforcement officers on his case."

But last week, Myers was unmoved by the latest revelations.

Myers ruled Erlichman cited no legal authority to support his argument. He ruled that the court has no factual or legal basis to reconsider throwing out the palm print evidence.

Erlichman argued that his expert witness would testify that the Forensic Unit's analysis of the print was "insufficient" to match it to Parker and that the team's lab work didn't meet industry best practices.

The Maricopa County Attorney's Office countered that the technicians were qualified to testify and that Erlichman's expert failed to independently analyze and compare the prints.

Myers sided with prosecutors in June hearing, ruling the expert did not provide "sufficient evidence" to warrant keeping the prints away from a jury.

The County Attorney's Office went further in September. It asked Myers to prevent Erlichman or any witnesses he called from commenting on Tempe's procedures and from questioning the reliability of the palm print analysis. They reasoned it was irrelevant since they already chose to rely on Mesa's work instead.

Erlichman cited the Republic's reporting on Tempe's internal investigation of the forensic unit, which culminated in a damning report in 2021, as grounds to reconsider.

That investigation focused on the unit's former supervisor, Laura Somershoe, who ran the team while evidence in both the Parker and Sterling cases was being collected and processed. She resigned in 2021 after the probe deemed her “incompetent” and determined that she had lied to investigators.

The report found that the unit used expired chemicals to process DNA, relied on broken cameras to take pictures of crime scenes, and let evidence in a murder sit in a temporary evidence locker unprocessed for nearly two years. The team had "no standards regarding processing evidentiary items," the report concluded.

Tempe Homicide Sgt. Alan Akey, who worked closely with the forensic unit, told internal investigators that he worried "for homicide cases when and if a criminal trial were to occur, due to lack of knowledge from (the unit) and lack of standards.”

In September, prosecutors filed a motion to seal their request to block the impeachment of Somershoe "due to the sensitive information (it) contained," without elaborating. Myers granted the motion in December.

Inconsistencies in Tempe's handling of Parker's prints

When Mesa's crime lab reviewed Tempe's fingerprint work, none of the errors involved Tempe’s forensic techs matching a fingerprint to the wrong suspect. The issues had to do with the unit incorrectly deciding that some usable prints weren’t clear enough to be useful in court. They disregarded good evidence.

Parker’s prints weren’t among the eight flagged. Erlichman argued they should have been because the forensic techs inconsistently judged the quality of prints.

Tempe’s forensics team recovered latent prints from the crime scene and compared them with prints on file for Parker and co-defendant Crews.

Tempe's techs decided the latent prints were “inconclusive” for Crews and couldn't clearly match the prints he gave upon arrest. But they decided the latent print was a solid enough match to link Parker.

Mesa's findings so far: 8 Tempe criminal cases flagged for discrepancies in fingerprint work and reassigned

Phoenix-based attorney Rhonda Elaine Neff previously told The Republic such discrepancies can matter. Neff is the president of the Arizona Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a nonprofit that works to protect defendant's rights.

“It can affect the reliability of the scientific results — or the jury's willingness to accept the results,” Neff said. “It can affect whether the state is able to pass the evidentiary standards for admission of the evidence in a case pretrial or at trial."

But forensics are only one piece of the picture given to juries.

"Cases don’t rest on one single piece of evidence, and so the impact of it, I don’t know yet," Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell said about Tempe's situation at a news conference in January.

In Parker's case, prosecutors can still rely on texts between him and Cruz about the robbery, location data putting his cellphone at the scene, eyewitnesses, and surveillance footage. And the bloody shirt.

Conflicting reports and initials that 'look different'

Erlichman wants the court to dismiss the entire case against Parker if he can prove that someone in the police department forged a technician's signature on Parker’s fingerprint form, however.

In Tempe, two technicians sign off on the "worksheet" used to record information about latent prints and evaluate them.

In Parker’s case, there were two nearly identical print worksheets completed on the same date. One said the latent print was unusable against Parker, but the other deemed it a match.

During a recorded interview last year, Tempe Detective Gregory Duarte asked James Cynowa, the technician who completed the worksheet, why there were two contradictory reports. Cynowa responded, "To be perfectly honest, I can't tell you."

Duarte also pointed out that the initials of another technician who signed off on the worksheets “look different” on the two forms.

John P. Black, a certified latent print examiner whom Erlichman hired to testify about Tempe's evidence, reported in court documents that Cynowa "had difficulty explaining fabrication (or) forgery attempts." Black concluded the forensic technicians' work was insufficient and unreliable.

The defense attorney said he planned to hire a handwriting expert to weigh in.

He wrote in a pretrial motion, “Such a forgery of a public document is a felony in the State of Arizona,” adding that, if proven, should invalidate the entire case.

Myers ruled that the defense still could cross-examine those who analyzed the evidence and have its own experts testify to its reliability.

Parker's case was scheduled to go to trial April 29.

Reporter Sam Kmack covers Tempe, Scottsdale and Chandler. Follow him on X @KmackSam or reach him at sam.kmack@arizonarepublic.com.

Elena Santa Cruz is a criminal justice reporter for The Republic. Reach her at elena.santacruz@gannett.com or 480-466-2265. Follow her on X at @ecsantacruz3.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Tempe police forensic evidence questioned in 2nd murder case