In a series of posts, I am going to intro­duce the reader to the exis­tence of ISO 17025 and its impor­tance.  I am going to intro­duce it in bite-sized bits for easy diges­tion.  Just like all mat­ters of learn­ing, knowl­edge is incre­men­tal over time and builds upon pre­vi­ous exposure.

In our first post we answered the ques­tion:  What is ISO 17025?

The next post we answered the ques­tion:  Why do we need stan­dards? Why ISO 17025 and pol­icy, pro­ce­dures and instruc­tions matter.

Then we answered the ques­tion:  Why is ISO 17025 so impor­tant to us in foren­sic science?

Just two days ago, we asked and answered:  Why should the crim­i­nal defense com­mu­nity care about ISO 17025?

A lit­tle while ago we exam­ined how ISO 17025 pro­vides a sim­ple method to develop themes to cross-examine experts.

In our last post we learned how ISO 17025 can be used by the crim­i­nal law prac­ti­tioner to help get his dis­cov­ery.

Today, we see how ISO 17025 can answer the ques­tion over who is the actual analyst.

Another impor­tant aspect of ISO 17025 for the crim­i­nal prac­ti­tioner is the idea of sub­con­tract­ing.  Believe it or not, there is a lot of sub­con­tract­ing going on in most foren­sic sci­ence labs. Sub­con­tract­ing is allowed per ISO 17025 and specif­i­cally Sec­tion 4.5. In the past, as has been exposed by mem­bers of NACDL and the NCDD, false cer­tifi­cates and affi­davits of cal­i­bra­tion and actual test­ing that sup­pos­edly attest that func­tions were per­formed were in fact revealed to be inac­cu­rate or instances of “dry lab­bing”. Thus, the real ques­tion of who is the actual ana­lyst becomes para­mount.  It is impor­tant to know that even within some lab­o­ra­to­ries there is an assem­bly line method wherein one per­son or sev­eral peo­ple per­form the sam­ple prepa­ra­tion and another does the push­ing of the but­ton to make it go.  In fact, some lab­o­ra­to­ries only per­form the sam­ple prepa­ra­tion and stor­age and later sub­con­tract the actual ana­lyt­i­cal device use to another laboratory.

There is a major dis­tinc­tion that is drawn by ISO 17025 and the accred­it­ing agen­cies between their ver­sion of sub­con­tract­ing and per­haps our idea of subcontracting.

Per ISO 17025, as most recently pre­sented to the author by an ASCLD/LAB rep­re­sen­ta­tive, a lab­o­ra­tory can “only be guilty of sub­con­tract­ing if the lab­o­ra­tory is first guilty of con­tract­ing from the laboratory’s cus­tomer.” What this phrase means is that the sim­ple act of send­ing out the laboratory’s ana­lyt­i­cal bal­ances for cal­i­bra­tion, for exam­ple, is not an act of sub­con­tract­ing unless the lab­o­ra­tory is employed in cal­i­brat­ing such devices for “the customer.”

Instead if the “cus­tomer” con­tracts as the ulti­mate result the mass mea­sure­ment of an unknown, then send­ing an ana­lyt­i­cal bal­ance out for cal­i­bra­tion is not an act of sub­con­tract­ing per ISO 17025 in their inter­pre­ta­tion of the stan­dard. The impor­tance of this dis­tinc­tion is that if an ISO 17025 com­pli­ant lab­o­ra­tory sub­con­tracts the actual evi­dence test­ing of this unknown spec­i­men, ISO 17025 requires the orig­i­nat­ing lab­o­ra­tory to work with either another ISO 17025 com­pli­ant lab­o­ra­tory or there must be evi­dence, held at the orig­i­nat­ing lab­o­ra­tory, that the sub­con­tract­ing lab­o­ra­tory has been demon­strated to be “com­pe­tent”[i]. This is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion for the crim­i­nal prac­ti­tioner to be on the look­out for in that, although the orig­i­nat­ing lab­o­ra­tory may be ISO 17025 com­pli­ant, it does not nec­es­sar­ily fol­low that the sub­con­tract­ing lab­o­ra­tory is.

[i] See Sec­tion 4.5.1 for fur­ther details.