PHOENIX — Phoenix homicide detectives had a “customary practice” of leaving evidence unsecured for days and sometimes weeks at a time, according to internal documents obtained by ABC15.
The unsecured evidence was often left on their desks, under them, or hanging over their cubicles.
“It is common… leaving evidence unsecured is a customary practice in the Homicide Unit,” a 2020 internal investigation found.
The revelation was included in 14,000 pages of internal affairs files recently released to defense attorneys about detective Jennifer DiPonzio, whose own evidentiary mistakes are the focus of a growing scandal now impacting at least three dozen court cases.
The newly-released files also show police officials refused to fully investigate earlier concerns about DiPonzio.
“I think the (Department of Justice) has to come and look at this,” said Timothy T. Williams, a retired Los Angeles police homicide detective and supervisor.
Since Phoenix is already under a DOJ pattern or practice investigation, Williams believes the federal government’s probe will need to expand.
“This almost falls into a consent decree problem,” he said.
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For more than a year, police officials kept information about DiPonzio’s evidentiary problems in-house and secret from defense attorneys and the court in dozens of murder cases, records show.
But defense teams have slowly forced the release of more information about her mistakes.
It began early this year when officials finally disclosed that DiPonzio didn’t properly impound or document more than 50 audio-recorded interviews in recent years.
That first disclosure was just a 24-page fact-finding document.
But after a defense attorney got DiPonzio’s supervisor to admit there had been previous issues, police and prosecutors were forced to release thousands of pages of additional files that document complaints and concerns throughout her career.
The additional files not only document Diponzio’s problems but those of other detectives tied up in tangential investigations for similar issues with handling evidence.
In 2020, DiPonzio was sustained for leaving evidence unsecured at her desk. But internal investigators hit a roadblock inside their own department when trying to see how far the problem with her evidence went.
According to their final report, “Investigators contacted (the Property Management Bureau) and learned Detective DiPonzio had checked out 51 items of evidence from October of 2019 through December of 2019… Investigators were told it was not practical for PMB personnel to research 51 items of evidence and try to locate where they were from the time they were checked out to when they were re-impounded…Such a request would take months for (Property Management Bureau) personnel to complete and thousands of impound logs would have to be researched.”
Williams said that’s unacceptable.
“From the time you lay eyes on that evidence to the time it’s booked, you should be able to track it without a minute being lost,” he said.
DiPonzio officially retired earlier this year under an accidental disability claim. Since mid-2021, she had been on medical leave for a confidential issue, which is why officials said she can’t testify about what happened.
DiPonzio’s also married to Assistant Chief Nick DiPonzio.
Earlier this year, ABC15 uncovered that MCAO has put DiPonzio on a more secretive version of the so-called “Brady” list, which documents officers with histories of integrity concerns.
Williams believes that power and politics appear to be factoring into how everything has been handled.
“Hell yeah. It’s got politics all over it,” he said. “So yes, who her husband was, had a direct impact… They’re going to keep it on the down low so to speak.”
Contact ABC15 Chief Investigator Dave Biscobing at Dave@ABC15.com.
