Nov 15, 2000 - 09:40 PM

Background checks less reliable than thought By Ron Brown The News & Advance

A possible glitch in federal criminal background checks may have allowed a convicted sex offender to obtain a custodian job at a Lynchburg elementary school. But law enforcement officials say improvements in crime reporting and fingerprint technology are helping computers zero in on convicted criminals.

Lt. Tom Turner, assistant director of the State Police's criminal justice information services, said electronic fingerprints will prompt quicker detection of people with criminal backgrounds.

A recent test run on a state computer chock full of 10 million fingerprints produced a suspect within 17 minutes.

The same process several years ago would have taken months or maybe years.

"It doesn't miss much," Turner said.

But it does miss sometimes.

"It's not the total answer, no," Turner said.

The FBI criminal computers are no exception.

The results of a search can be skewed by incomplete data or messy fingerprints that are difficult for a computer to read.

New technology has law enforcement agencies beginning to chuck their ink pads in favor of computerized scanners, which provide digital images of a convicted criminal's fingerprints.

Human error is always a possibility. Sometimes information is not forwarded to the FBI.

The story of Henry Harold Edmondson may well be a case in point.

Earlier this month, Edmondson, 41, was convicted of the aggravated sexual battery of a 10-year-old boy in a T.C. Miller Elementary School restroom.

Last spring, Edmondson was working as a custodian at the school.

Following his arrest, city police did a computer background check.

They found Edmondson had been convicted of another sex crime involving a child while in the Army in 1983.

That conviction had gone undetected when the FBI conducted a computer check of Edmondson's criminal history prior to his employment with the school system.

"We don't have a record on this man," said Steve Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI in Clarksburg, W.Va.

The FBI currently has 41 million criminal histories in its computers. All are linked to fingerprint records.

Despite the FBI's extensive computer records, Fischer said state law enforcement agencies and other federal agencies are not required to report criminal convictions to the FBI for processing.

"Our interpretation is that it is a purely voluntary system," he said.

Fischer said apparently the Army did not report Edmundson's conviction to the FBI.

"We suppose that the military did not forward it to us," he said.

The lapses in the system are news to Lynchburg School Superintendent James McCormick.

"We'd never heard it was voluntary," he said.

McCormick said city school officials were led to believe that the FBI computer checks had fewer loopholes than they actually do.

McCormick said city school officials have received three different interpretations about how the system works.

"I'm more curious about the system now," McCormick said. "We've got to figure out who in the FBI can give us the most accurate information."

McCormick said even with its imperfections, the FBI checks may be the best system available.

"I wish it was better than it is," he said. "We still have to throw out the broadest net we can to get information."

Localities pay the FBI and the state $40 to run the background checks.

Forty-six states, including Virginia, have agreed to voluntarily forward information about criminal conviction to the FBI for processing.

The National Child Protection Act of 1993 requires police to report child abuse crimes to the FBI.

According to the act, a child abuse crime is any violation that "involves the physical or mental injury, sexual abuse or exploitation, negligent treatment or maltreatment of a child."

Sometimes, computers, or the people who feed them data, simply drop the ball.

"It is not unusual for a particular conviction not to show up on the computer," said Campbell County Sheriff Robert E. Maxey Jr.

Maxey, who has been sheriff for 17 years, said he's always been led to believe that reporting criminal convictions is mandatory.

In his 27 years with the sheriff's office, serious criminal convictions have been reported either to the State Police or directly to the FBI.

"I know we've been doing it since I've been here," he said.

Frank Albright, a criminal investigator for the U.S. Department of Defense's Inspector General's Office in Arlington, said department policy has long required criminal information be forwarded to the FBI for processing.

Albright said the reporting requirement was further strengthened just over two years ago, when it was formally accepted as an instruction for all military entities.

Many local school systems, including Lynchburg, depend on the background checks to authenticate job applicants.

Now, McCormick and other school superintendents must worry about how many other Edmondsons there are on school payrolls.

"If I had that information, I would not have hired him," McCormick said.

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), November 16, 2000