"I'm scared to death, because the system is a lot less than what I thought before all this began," said Sonia Cacy, sitting in an interview room at the Gatesville Prison.  "Juries in this country, when they hear a D.A. talk, they believe it.  They hear an expert witness on the stand, they believe it.  They don't even consider them being corrupt.  I didn't, and I was right in the middle of it.  I didn't think they were corrupt until it was proved to me.  Juries aren't educated to listen to all that complicated testimony." 

It is not only the state's judicial system that failed Sonia Cacy, convicted of an arson murder she almost certainly did not commit.  Nothing has worked for her.  Not the courts, although Austin lawyer Gerry Morris is now working pro bono on her appeal.  Not the press, although The Wall Street Journal and ABC News have examined her conviction, each concluding that she did not get anything resembling a fair trial in Fort Stockton five years ago.  Not even a volunteer team of six scientists who analyzed the evidence that convicted her, has been able to move Sonia Cacy any closer to freedom.  It is this physical evidence -- and more importantly, the competence and honesty of the scientists and technicians to analyze it -- that lies at the heart of Sonia Cacy's nightmare with the criminal justice system. 

Larry Ytuarte knows how evidence is handled in forensic labs in Texas.  In a very real sense he was a victim of the same system that put Sonia Cacy behind bars in Gatesville.  Ytuarte left New York and a position as a chemistry professor for San Antonio and work in forensic science -- the detailed analysis of fingerprints, ballistics, paint samples, body fluids, tissue, and DNA upon which many criminal prosecutions are built.  Within a year of his arrival at the Bexar County Forensic Science Center in 1990 (where he was responsible for the analysis of fluids drained from autopsied cadavers), Ytuarte noticed that some of his colleagues weren't exactly detail-oriented.  Too often, standard scientific procedures weren't followed, and the uncertain results produced by the slipshod procedures were not being challenged in court.  And it was not only sloppy procedure that worried Ytuarte.  In some cases, names of lab employees were falsely entered on test documents, or tests wee said to have been completed that weren't.  In one case, Ytuarte reported a negative drug analysis on a blood sample, and the exact opposite was reported in court.  "I told my supervisors about what was going on," he says.  "I thought they'd want to correct the errors." 

They didn't.  The chief toxicologist reviewed Ytuarte's complaints and concluded that the problems were the result of a heavy workload and small staff.  So Ytuarte wrote to the commissioners court, the district attorney, and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.  "It was extremely frustrating," he says.  "By the time I went to the D.A.'s office, I realized they'd do nothing about it.  These guys had been using results from the lab to put people away for years." 

In the fall of 1994, after four years with a spotless record, Ytuarte was relieved of his duties and escorted from the premises.  His supervisors claimed he had "knowingly issued incorrect toxicology reports" -- exactly the sort of conduct he was trying to expose.  Ytuarte documented all his claims and filed a civil suit.  His case never made it to court; in the spring of 1997, Bexar County accepted Ytuarte's initial settlement offer of $350,000 and the case was closed.  Not only did he win a cash settlement, but Ytuarte was reinstated in his job -- from which he resigned the same day.  He also successfully fought a gag order that would have prevented him from speaking about the case. 

There had been other problems at the Bexar County Forensic Science Center.  As reported in the San Antonio Express-News, the county has had to pay more than $1.1 million to settle three separate lawsuits involving the medical examiner's office. 

The lawsuits raise serious questions about quality control at the Bexar County lab -- and the forensic science lab's cozy relationship with law enforcement agencies.  They also call into question convictions that rely heavily on Bexar County Forensic Science Center's findings.  Sonia Cacy's conviction on arson-homicide charges is one such case.  The 1993 prosecution of Cacy in Fort Stockton did not use the finding of the Bexar County lab simply to support or corroborate other evidence -- because there was none.  As the Wall Street Journal reported a year ago, the forty-nine year old Fort Stockton woman was sentenced to 99 years in a state prison in Gatesville based on the finding of the Bexar County lab -- and nothing else. 

There were no eyewitnesses other than Cacy on November 10, 1991, when she awoke to smoke and flames in the Fort Stockton home she shared with her seventy-six year old uncle, Bill Richardson.  According to Cacy, she tried to wake her uncle, who was asleep in an adjoining room, but the flames were so intense she was forced out of the house.  Firefighters arrived and found Cacy frantically trying to reenter the house through a broken window.  She was taken to the hospital and treated for smoke inhalation.  Several hours later, rescue workers retrieved the charred body of Bill Richardson from the smoldering wreckage.  While Cacy herself was still in the hospital, police officers arrived with a warrant, and left with scrapings of Cacy's fingernails and several vials of her blood. 

Richardson's body, upon recommendation from the Pecos County District Attorney, was sent to the Bexar County Forensic Science Center for examination.  The autopsy was performed by Medical Examiner Robert Bux.  According to the autopsy report, Richardson's lungs were not filled with smoke or soot, nor was there excessive carbon monoxide in his blood (his carbon monoxide levels were about 11 percent, consistent with heavy smoking, while two dogs who died in the fire had carbon monoxide levels of about 40 percent and 60 percent.)  What Bux did find in his autopsy of Bill Richardson was evidence of stenosis and arteriosclerosis, with up to 80 percent blockage of the left descending artery -- symptoms of a heart attack.  Nowhere in the autopsy report is there any mention of soot in the trachea or larynx, and it appeared that Richardson was dead before the fire started.  There was nothing in the autopsy report that suggested that Sonia Cacy had killed her uncle.  In fact, much of the testimony at Cacy's trial would suggest that Richardson himself was the most likely person to have set his house on fire. 

"They only mentioned three fires in the trial," Cacy said in an interview at the prison.  "But if you're talking about my Uncle Bill you could mention fifty.  He torched his own lease house about three years prior to that -- burnt it to the ground."  Richardson was a careless chain smoker who smoked several packs a day.  Testimony described multiple cigarette burns on Richardson's furniture.  Frank Salvato, now the city manager of Llano, was then the Fort Stockton fire marshal and one of the first to arrive at the fire.  He testified that he had been to the Richardson house three times in the month before the fatal fire, to investigate smaller fires.  On one occasion, Salvato said in court, he saw Richardson light his furnace with a blowtorch. 

If the autopsy report provided no evidence that Bill Richardson had been the victim of foul play, and he was portrayed in court as a heavy smoker who was very careless with fire, what convicted Sonia Cacy?  The case against her was based on tests performed on the clothing fragments removed from Richardson's body during the autopsy.  Using a process called GC-MS (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry), Bexar County's Chief Toxicologist Joe Castorena concluded that there was evidence of gasoline on Richardson's clothing remnants.  Based on Castorena's findings, Pecos County District Attorney Valadez convinced a jury that Sonia Cacy had doused her uncle with gasoline while he slept, then set him on fire and crawled out the window.  But nothing else -- no motive, no witness, no history, not even the autopsy -- suggested that Cacy had killed her uncle.  On the basis of Castorena's unconfirmed interpretation of a single scientific test, Cacy was sent to prison. 

To establish that there is gasoline residue on any given material, a forensic scientist reads a chart that looks like an EKG printout.  From the chart produced by the analysis of the remains of Bill Richardson's clothing, Castorena determined the results were positive.  Not every forensic scientist would agree.  "I've shown those charts to hundreds of students around the country as part of a training exercise," fire debris expert Richard Henderson said in an interview.  "No one, including those at the FBI academy, has ever found gasoline in that sample."  Henderson, a South Carolina chemist with 25 years of experience, is one of four fire debris experts reviewing the evidence used to convict Cacy. 

But Cacy didn't have the advantage of Henderson's testimony when she was tried in Fort Stockton.  Nor did she have access to the pooled knowledge of more than 20 lawyers and scientists who have since volunteered their time over the past three years to work on her case.  According to retired chemist Gerald Hurst, "Cacy was convicted by a combination of unrebutted junk science and suppressed exculpatory evidence . . . Even a moderate amount of technical help would have blown away the most damaging allegation of the presence of gasoline." 

Yet this technical information arrived too late.  Had it been used to rebut and impeach the evidence and testimony provided by the Bexar County forensic lab, during the 1993 trial, Cacy might be free today.  But Cacy's court appointed lawyer, Tony Chavez, did little to challenge the testimony of the prosecution's forensic experts.  Ignoring obvious inconsistencies, Chavez never called one expert for the defense.  He could have.  A Supreme Court ruling holds that suspects in criminal prosecutions are entitled to state funds for expert witnesses, although the trial judge determines how much can be spent.  Chavez never did, although Cacy said she asked him to request an expert witness.  "When I wanted an expert, he [Chavez] said, 'No, we can't afford one.'"  For his work, Chavez billed the county $15,000, but was awarded only $6,900, plus $2,900 for an investigator who apparently did very little. 

After a five day trial, the jury returned with a guilty verdict after deliberating for only two hours, and Sonia Cacy was sent to prison for 99 years.  "One of Cacy's biggest handicaps was not being able to bring experts to her defense," said a juror who preferred to remain anonymous.  "The state presented more people who could explain what happened -- their expert witnesses were very persuasive, particularly in interpreting the forensic evidence." 

"The state's case was based on sophisticated expert testimony that was erroneous," says Cacy's appeals attorney Gerry Morris, who has an office in Austin.  "Because [Chavez] failed to secure the assistance of experts the jury was led to believe that this innocent woman committed murder."  Chavez, it seems, had problems of his own.  Last month he pled guilty to drug trafficking charges, after being named in a 42 count indictment in which he, his assistant, and 22 others were charged in federal court with the operation of a sophisticated, multi-ton marijuana smuggling and distribution enterprise.  (Chavez did not have to rely on a court appointed attorney; he hired Gerald Goldstien of San Antonio, one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the state.)  Chavez will be sentenced November 2, in Lucius Bunton's Pecos courtroom.  Chavez's performance in the Cacy trial was one of the issues raised by her first appeals attorney, Robert Garcia, Jr.  According to Garcia, Chavez failed to provide expert witnesses to challenge the prosecutor's forensic evidence, and his cross-examination of the government's experts "was bumbling and made no sense." 

While it is fair to criticize Chavez for his failure to challenge the forensic evidence and his erratic behavior in court, the court appointed Odess attorney who now faces 20 years in a federal prison had no way of knowing that one of those government witnesses also withheld evidence about mistakes in processing the one piece of evidence that was critical to the conviction of Sonia Cacy.  The Bexar County Forensic Science Lab in northwest San Antonio was responsible for the autopsy and chemical analysis of the Cacy trial evidence.  The lab currently houses two offices -- the medical examiner's office and the criminal investigations laboratory -- and the functions of the two offices are now clearly defined.  But prior to a 1994 reorganization, certain critical duties now done only by crime lab personnel were performed by toxicologists in the medical examiner's office.  For instance, arson analysis had been done for years by toxicologists, but is now conducted in the CIL, or the state arson lab in Austin.  CIL manager Timothy Fallon said the changes are a result of "a constant process of ratcheting up our standards, trying to fill in holes that defense lawyers come up with." 

Not all those holes had been filled when the lab was working the evidence that convicted Sonia Cacy.  No state law mandates in-house chain of custody documentation, and the medical examiner's office is not as concerned with process as is the CIL.  According to Dr. Vincent Di Maio, Bexar County's chief medical examiner, "Inside the medical examiner's office, we're talking about a distance of literally 25 feet, between the autopsy room and the toxicology lab.  We don't need to use chain of custody once it's inside the lab.  It's common sense." 

In contrast, Fallon describes a much more exacting evidence documentation process in the crime lab.  "Take for instance, a hair sample or fingernail scraping.  Just to look at that piece of evidence in a particular examination room," he explains, "you have to sign your name, date, the case number, the defendant's name, etc. -- all so we can show in court exactly how each test was performed, by whom, and when exactly is occurred." 

During the Richardson autopsy, Dr. Bux removed the clothing remnants from Richardson and put them in an evidence container for analysis by toxicologists.  The evidence was presented in a mason jar (according to Bux, normal procedure for the "purge and trap" tests as they were performed in 1991), which had to be documented.  According to Bux, "A typical sample will have the case number and date, as well as my signature."  But the mason jar supposedly sent from Box to Castorena is missing several important pieces of information.  On the jar introduced in court in Fort Stockton, there is no date, no signature of the medical examiner, and incomplete case numbers -- in other words, no documentation in the court record to show where the clothing evidence originated.  According to trial transcripts, the earliest paperwork documenting the transfer of evidence from Bux to Castorena was, by Castorena's own 1996 testimony, first typed by him 14 months after the fire. 

Not only are the documents pertaining to the mason jar of clothing suspicious, but yet another container of Richardson's clothing remnants, this time a gallon sized evidence can, was analyzed weeks later at a Dallas arson lab.  No evidence of gasoline was found.  In an interview conducted earlier this year, Dr. Bux explained that the material sent to the Dallas lab was meant to be the "icing on the cake" for the prosecution, but no gasoline was found by the Dallas lab because there was none left after the Bexar County tests were completed.  But Bux's account is contradicted by Fallon, who in a 1996 interview with the San Antonio Express-News claimed that the can was the original container.  According to Fallon, the can had not been previously analyzed and stripped of gasoline, as the prosecution maintained in 1993. 

One document, never introduced in court, sheds some light on the history of the can.  Joe Castorena wrote a memo to a Dallas arson lab, AID, in December 1991, and produced it only when ABC News asked him about chain of possession documents for the clothing remnants.  When questioned, he reached into his personal file and handed over a handwritten memo:  the chain of custody document for Bill Richardson's clothing remnants. 

During a sentencing trial in 1996, Castorena was questioned about the can of evidence that was analyzed in Dallas and found to be free of accelerants.  Under questioning from the defense attorney, he denied any specific knowledge of the evidence can or its contents. 

Q:  So what did go to AID to be analyzed? 
C:  I have no idea what the other samples were. 
Q:  What went to AID December 30, 1991?  You don't know? 
C:  No.  I don't have any documentation to read or find out what was sent to AID. 

In the memo he showed to ABC, however, Castorena makes specific reference to the can and its contents.  to the director of the Dallas arson lab, he wrote:  "As per our conversation of today's date (12/4/91), I am sending you the remaining undergarments on case ME1578-91 (Bill Richardson) as requested by officer Jerry Joplin, Fort Stockton.  If you have any questions regarding the samples, please contact Dr. Robert Bux."  Not only did Castorena know about the can of clothing sent to Dallas, he knew it contained clothing remnants belonging to Bill Richardson.  Yet under oath, he testified that he had no knowledge or documentation of such evidence. 

Why would the conclusions of Castorena (who was not a fire debris expert) be used in court, when the prosecutor and forensics team were aware of conflicting tests conducted by competent scientists in an arson lab?  Why would the chief toxicologist say under oath that he had no recall of critical evidence, and later show that evidence to a reporter?  When asked to comment, Castorena said, "I'm not giving any interviews.  I have my reasons.  I've had my chance, and it never comes out right -- can't win for losing."  A forensic lab is only as good as its documented evidence.  After more money and personnel were provided after 1994, perhaps standards in San Antonio did improve.  But what about the lab's standards in 1991, when Ytuarte was documenting dozens of irregularities and Bill Richardson's clothing was being tested for accelerants? 

These are questions officials at the Bexar County Forensic Science Lab are not going to answer.  "There's a bunch of bullshit going around about the Cacy trial," says Chief Medical Examiner DiMaio.  "You have people going around shooting their mouths off about details of the case who have no experience in forensic work.  And they know more than scientists with 25 years experience in the field of forensics?" 

But the volunteer forensic scientists disagree, and consider the chief pathologist's faulty recall and the unexplained evidence transfers more than sufficient grounds to challenge the Fort Stockton jury's decision.  "I've known cases where a fire chief will leave a piece of evidence unattended on the back of his truck while he gets a cup of coffee, and he's told that sample is inadmissible in court," said fire debris expert Richard Henderson.  Yet the whereabouts of the single most critical piece of evidence that sent Sonia Cacy to jail for 99 years was unknown for some 14 months. 

Why, then, is Sonia Cacy in prison?  It appears to have been a combination of prosecutorial zeal, poor lawyering, and a D.A.'s imperative to defend at all costs the machinery used to support criminal prosecutions.  Eric Rabbanian, one of the lawyers now working pro bono on Cacy's defense, said that the prosecution "can easily be justified in the Machiavellian minds of some, if they want to believe they are dealing with a criminal."  And when faced with a civil suit that would, in a sense, put the prosecution on trial, Bexar County took the most direct route out of the courtroom, offering Larry Ytuarte a substantial monetary settlement.  "Public entities such as Bexar County are very hesitant to take [whistleblower] cases to trial," said Travis County District Court Judge Scott McCown, who presided over the Ytuarte case.  "Plaintiffs have had such good luck in the past . . . A settlement wraps it up and puts it to rest with a minimum of bad publicity."  Along with the bad publicity is the risk that a court ruling could be used to impeach evidence used in countless convictions based on the work of the Bexar County lab.  What's really at risk is what no one wants to discuss: a court ruling that the forensic evidence from the Bexar County lab was not properly handled.  According to Austin criminal defense lawyer Bennett Sandlin, "If an official such as a district judge were to rule that evidence from the Bexar County lab was faulty, it would mean every conviction that used that lab's evidence would have to be retried."  It appears that Sonia Cacy is being sacrificed for what authorities consider a larger principle.  A court ruling that throws out the Bexar County lab's evidence could bring down a whole house of forensic cards, and with it, all the prosecutions secured by evidence that might be questionable. 

All the while, Cacy's own chances of ever leaving Gatesville are dwindling.  Her appeals are exhausted and her defense team is working on a last chance: a writ of habeas corpus that petitions the court for a new trial, based on the newly documented scientific evidence of mistakes in Cacy's prosecution. 

"Some days I deal with real well," says Cacy in an interview at Gatesville.  "I have to keep thinking, I have to, to survive, to keep thinking there's a purpose for everything.  I feel so wasted.  My kids are out there, my grandbabies.  I've been a good mother all my life . . . It's kinda torn my whole family apart.  Cause we never had a lot of money.  And through all this we've spent all that we had.  It's been hard on everybody.  Maybe there's a purpose to all this."