When police seize evidence, it has to go somewhere, and it usually has to stay with the department — sometimes for a long time.
At the Missouri State Highway Patrol, it’s kept in designated evidence rooms under supervision of special workers in part to be available for use in active court cases the evidence is connected to.
Sgt. Kyle Green, a spokesperson with the Missouri State Highway Patrol, said some evidence is also kept indefinitely, usually in cases that are unsolved or have progressed to the appeal stage.
“They're able to go back now and get the evidence and process it for DNA and go that route,” Green said. “And so it's important to have those things to help solve some of these older cases that exist.”
But keeping evidence for long periods of time means that it can eventually start to pile up. Green said that often, law enforcement agencies such as the Highway Patrol can have “evidence that may span several decades.”
At the Highway Patrol, specially designated underground storage areas called “drug bunkers” store overflow evidence that’s considered contraband, including heroin, fentanyl and marijuana.
These bunkers are meant to increase the capacity and allow the agency to keep evidence that might still be needed.
Green said that he’s seen evidence pileups become an issue for smaller departments, but right now, the drug bunkers are only available for Missouri State Highway Patrol use.
Law enforcement is able to dispose of evidence when it truly isn’t needed anymore, such as when a case ends, charges are dropped, a suspect isn’t charged or other circumstances.
But Green said it’s not as simple as just throwing it away. At the Highway Patrol, all drug evidence that’s authorized for disposal is incinerated.
“You don't want somebody who might be able to try to track down or figure out where things are being disposed of,” Green said. “So by basically burning them at a super high temperature, it ensures that they are no longer a danger to the public.”
But in Fayette, drugs in marked Fayette Police Department evidence bags were found in a local dumpster in December, and they had not been incinerated. The department said it was following its policy, but a Sunshine request by KBIA revealed there was no policy in place.
Court orders
The Missouri State Highway Patrol’s policy requires getting a court order before disposing of narcotic evidence.
According to St. Louis University law professor Anders Walker, Missouri law requires all law enforcement agencies to get a court order before disposing of narcotic evidence, including in cases that have been closed for a long time, when charges have been dropped or even when charges were never brought against a suspect.
“Once the evidence is in the custody of law enforcement, they need to keep it unless a judge says you can destroy it,” Walker said. “It's not up to the local police to decide.”
Walker said that a judge is the only person who can determine when evidence is no longer legally relevant. When law enforcement agencies skip that step, it can have implications that go beyond local cases.
But that’s a step Fayette police didn’t appear to take when evidence was put in a dumpster.
"By basically burning them at a super high temperature, it ensures that they are no longer a danger to the public.”Sgt. Kyle Green
An extensive search of publicly available records, as well as multiple records requests by KBIA to the court that serves Fayette, turned up no court orders for disposal or destruction of evidence issued from September through December.
City attorney Nathan Nickolaus said Fayette Police Department didn’t have long-term evidence handling training before the incident, and Green said the Highway Patrol doesn’t offer training to smaller departments.
Nickolaus also said Fayette didn’t have access to an incinerator before the incident and is still struggling to access one.
“Fayette, I can say, has looked into purchasing one of their own (incinerators). We had hoped maybe to get a grant for that. But that didn't work out. So right now, there's still no incinerator,” Nickolaus said.
At the moment, using an incinerator to destroy drug evidence isn’t required by law in Missouri, but Walker said getting a court order is.
In the next installment of the 'Weight of Evidence,' we take a look at Missouri laws around evidence disposal and where the Fayette Police Department may have gone wrong.
Catch The Weight of Evidence Part Three on KBIA 91.3 FM on Wednesday, June 26 at 7:44 a.m. and 5:45 p.m., online at kbia.org, or online and in print in the Columbia Missourian.
