A state judge has refused to suppress evidence analyzed at Nassau County’s now-closed crime lab, saying any questionable results are best determined by a jury, not an issue to be settled during a pretrial motion. The ruling is the first since Acting Supreme Court Justice James P. McCormack was appointed earlier this month to handle all new felony drug cases involving evidence from the Nassau County Police Department’s troubled lab (NYLJ, March 22).
In People v. Kappen, 1885N-2010, Justice McCormack, who sits in Nassau County Court, said he had “no authority” to suppress the evidence or schedule a hearing, adding that questions of the evidence’s reliability “are properly decided by the ‘trier of fact’ and go to the ‘weight of the evidence’ and not to its ‘admissibility’ as a matter of law.”
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