In the case of the State Bureau of Investigation, plenty of people will be doing plenty of crying over spilled milk for days, weeks, months and years.
N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper can be as aggressive as he wants now.

He can replace an SBI director, as he’s done. He can name a new SBI lab director, as he’s done. He, or his new SBI director, can suspend a blood analyst at the center of many of the botched cases handled by the agency.

He can establish new policies to ensure that the SBI lab no longer distorts or withholds evidence, as alleged in a series of stories by The News & Observer of Raleigh and in an internal report.

None of those actions will undo the damage to the SBI’s credibility and to Cooper’s political career. It’s too late for any of that.

To Cooper’s credit, back in the spring – well before the News & Observer’s series – he commissioned an audit of the SBI to try to determine the depths of the problems at the crime lab.

But the audit came only after Greg Taylor, imprisoned for 17 years for a murder he didn’t commit, was exonerated when a SBI lab analyst admitted that test results never revealed during his trial showed that a substance in his car wasn’t blood.

Led by former FBI agent Chris Swecker, the audit identified more than 230 criminal cases involving 269 defendant where SBI test results could be called into question.
The immediate result of those findings will be defense lawyers combing through cases and filing court motions.

Judicial reviews will follow to see if questionable blood evidence is enough to toss out convictions.

Plenty of the cases won’t end up with new trials or overturned convictions.

Consider the most well-known case – the conviction of Daniel Green in the slaying of James Jordan, father of basketball star Michael Jordan. Blood evidence was just a fraction of the mountain of evidence against Green, which included a co-defendant’s testimony and videotape of his dancing around flashing Michael Jordan’s NBA championship rings.

Today, Green likes to portray himself as a victim of the criminal justice system. Back in the early ’90s, he and his partner, Larry Demery, were vicious, out-of-control criminals running around Robeson County robbing and shooting people. When they didn’t have guns, they improvised with axes and cinderblocks.

That the SBI’s improper conduct could even lead to the scant possibility of a criminal like Green being released is a travesty.

At least as troubling is how the findings have damaged the SBI’s credibility going forward. For years to come, defense lawyers will challenge SBI testimony as biased and jurors will view that testimony skeptically. Cooper responded to the report by calling the findings “unacceptable then and unacceptable now.”

The problem for him is that he was attorney general during eights years of that “then.”

The “now” will never be the same.

Scott Mooneyham covers state politics for the Capitol Press Association.