Latest News

The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else's.

"My work?" Ms. Mitchell said. "No, no, no, not my work."

Earlier, the city medical examiner's office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.

So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner's office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.

The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.

However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. "It couldn't be me because your work gets checked," she said. "You have supervisors."

She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. "I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer," she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner's office so long. "Then it was time to leave."

Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city's poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.

If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.

Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner's office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and "false negatives" might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.

"The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event," said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.

A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.

Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.

Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.

"Up to this point," Mr. Banks said, "they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there's an injustice that's been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases." He added, "If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?"

The medical examiner's office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city's district attorneys' offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.

But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of "trust us."

"Given what's happened," he said, "that's cold comfort."

The agents knocked on Erika Andiola's door shortly after 9 p.m., asking for her mother, Maria Arreola.

Ms. Arreola had been stopped by the police in nearby Mesa last year and detained for driving without a license. Her fingerprints were sent to federal immigration officials as part of a controversial program called Secure Communities, which the Obama administration has been trying to expand nationwide.

That routine check revealed that Ms. Arreola had been returned to Mexico in 1998 after she was caught trying to illegally cross the border into Arizona with Erika and two of her siblings in tow. As a result, she was placed on a priority list for deportation.

After being seized on Thursday, she could have been sent back to Mexico in a matter of hours, but Obama administration officials moved quickly to undo the arrests. Officials had been pressured by the robust response from advocates — through phone calls, e-mails and online petitions, but primarily on Twitter, where they mobilized support for Ms. Andiola, a well-known advocate for young illegal immigrants, under the hashtag #WeAreAndiola.

The reaction offered the Obama administration a taste of what it might expect when it gets into the thick of the debate over an immigration overhaul, which Congress is expected to tackle this year. President Obama has already been under harsh criticism for the number of illegal immigrants deported since he took office — roughly 400,000 each year, a record unmatched since the 1950s.

Ms. Andiola, 25, posted a tearful video on YouTube shortly after her mother and brother were handcuffed and driven away. "I need everybody to stop pretending that nothing is wrong," she said in the video, "stop pretending that we're all just living normal lives, because we're not. This could happen to any of us anytime."

She is the co-founder of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, one of the groups pushing for a reprieve for immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children, as she was. She has been arrested while camped in front of Senator John McCain's office here, protested outside the United States Capitol, and appeared on the cover of Time magazine in June under the headline, "We are Americans — just not legally."

In November, Ms. Andiola got a work permit under a program begun by the Obama administration last year that gives certain young illegal immigrants temporary reprieve from deportation. She graduated from Arizona State University in 2009.

On Friday afternoon, her mother returned home from a detention center in Florence, 70 miles southeast of Phoenix and usually the last stop for certain illegal immigrants before they are deported. Her brother, Heriberto Andiola Arreola, 36, who had been kept in Phoenix, was let go earlier, at 6 a.m.

Their swift releases underline the power of the youth-immigrant movement and their social media activism, which was critical in spreading Ms. Andiola's story overnight.

In a statement, Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said a preliminary review of the case revealed that it contains some of the elements outlined in the agency's "prosecutorial discretion policy" and would "merit an exercise of discretion." Advocates have long argued that the policy has done little to keep families from being broken apart by deportations.

Ms. Andiola said in an interview that she told her mother to go to her room before opening the door Thursday night; she suspected the men standing outside worked for immigration. By the time the men came in, her brother, who was outside talking to a neighbor, was already in handcuffs, she said.

"Where's Maria?" the men asked her, she recalled.

Ms. Arreola walked out of the room and, in Spanish, the men asked her to accompany them outside, where they placed her under arrest.

Though she and her son are free, their future is uncertain, as they could be arrested again while their cases are under review or deported should the eventual ruling go against them, said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups helping the family.

Stories like this, Ms. Hincapié went on, "happen every day, in every state," outside of the media spotlight. What made it different this time is that Ms. Andiola had connections and wasted no time mobilizing them. There are others, she said, whom "you never hear about."

Narwhal tusks, which are made of spiraling ivory and are as long as nine feet, are sold legally in some parts of the world, including Canada, and can fetch prices as high as $30,000. But in the United States, their trade is mostly prohibited by the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The defendants, Jay G. Conrad of Tennessee and Andrew J. Zarauskas of New Jersey, face four kinds of charges in a 29-count indictment filed in federal court here late last year: conspiracy, conspiracy to launder money, smuggling goods into the United States and money laundering. Two Canadians, whose names were redacted in the indictment, were also charged.

According to the indictment, the Canadians obtained the tusks in Canada and hid them in the false bottom of a customized utility trailer. The indictment says they smuggled the tusks across the border through Calais, Me., and used a FedEx in Bangor to send at least 50 shipments of the tusks to buyers like Mr. Conrad and Mr. Zarauskas.

Mr. Conrad and Mr. Zauraskas were arraigned separately, and neither was detained after appearing.

This city's barren federal courtroom seemed an incongruous place to discuss the whimsical-looking toothed whale — a creature whose tusk has, throughout history, captured attention from kings and emperors, who thought they had magical powers, and scientists like Charles Darwin, who was curious about the evolutionary role of the tusks.

Narwhals are about 15 feet long, not including their tusks, and live primarily in the Canadian Arctic, where they are dependent on dense winter ice for protection. They are listed as near-threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "Narwhals are the most vulnerable of the ice-dependent species — vulnerable to climate change," said Peter Ewins, a senior officer at World Wildlife Fund Canada.

The tusk, found mostly on males, is actually a single tooth growing out of the upper lip. Many scientists believe it is a sexual trait, like peacock feathers or antlers on a stag. "It's a sexual thing that males use for developing dominant hierarchies and competing for females," said Kristin Laidre, a research scientist at the Polar Science Center of the University of Washington. She spends a month or two each year in Greenland, studying narwhals in their icy habitat.

"They are among the whales that we know very little about, because of where they live and because of how they behave," said Dr. Laidre, who explained that they can dive more than a mile underwater when feeding. "You can't even really sit and watch them."

Inuit hunters have long harvested narwhals for subsistence, consuming their meat, blubber and skin, which is a source of vitamin C. The governments of Canada and Greenland permit hunters to kill about 400 narwhals in total per year — some of whom still do so traditionally, using harpoons shot from handmade kayaks.

As for the tusks from those hunted animals, "they're mostly used for a display item," said David Boone, an ivory dealer based in Brinnon, Wash., who occasionally sells narwhal tusks that were in the United States before 1972, which is legal.

"The beautiful thing about a narwhal tusk," he said, "is that twisting, they're very unique."

According to his financial affidavit, Mr. Zarauskas, 59, has no income. He walked into court wearing loose green pants and a khaki jacket, holding a printed copy of the indictment against him. "It is obviously a very unusual case, and we'll make sure that Mr. Zarauskas's rights are preserved," said his court-appointed lawyer, Stephen Smith.

Mr. Conrad, 66, wore a gray fleece over a dark dress shirt and answered the judge loudly and clearly, with a slight Southern accent. He is a collector of animal-related items, according to his court-appointed lawyer, Virginia G. Villa.

During Mr. Conrad's arraignment, the federal magistrate judge, Margaret J. Kravchuk, asked if some of those assets could be liquidated to cover his legal costs.

"The market for shrunken heads being what it is, yes," Ms. Villa said.

If convicted, Mr. Zarauskas and Mr. Conrad could each face up to 20 years of imprisonment and a fine no greater than $500,000.

In 2009, David L. Place, an antiques dealer from Nantucket, Mass., who was convicted of illegally importing and trafficking up to $400,000 worth of narwhal tusks and sperm whale teeth, was sentenced to serve 33 months in prison.

The $60 billion industry is facing intense political pressure from an unlikely alliance of critics who say that violent imagery in video games has contributed to a culture of violence. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with industry executives on Friday to discuss the concerns, highlighting the issue's prominence.

No clear link has emerged between the Connecticut rampage and the gunman Adam Lanza's interest in video games. Even so, the industry's detractors want to see a federal study on the impact of violent gaming, as well as cigarette-style warning labels and other measures to curb the games' graphic imagery.

"Connecticut has changed things," Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican and a frequent critic of what he terms the shocking violence of games, said in an interview. "I don't know what we're going to do, but we're going to do something."

Gun laws have been the Obama administration's central focus in considering responses to the shootings. But a violent media culture is being scrutinized, too, alongside mental health laws and policies.

"The stool has three legs, and this is one of them," Mr. Wolf said of violent video games.

Studies on the impact of gaming violence offer conflicting evidence. But science aside, public rhetoric has clearly shifted since the shootings, with politicians and even the National Rifle Association — normally a fan of shooting games — quick to blame video games and Hollywood movies for inuring children to violence.

"I don't let games like Call of Duty in my house," Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said this week on MSNBC. "You cannot tell me that a kid sitting in a basement for hours playing Call of Duty and killing people over and over and over again does not desensitize that child to the real-life effects of violence."

Residents in Southington, Conn., 30 miles northeast of Newtown, went so far as to organize a rally to destroy violent games. (The event was canceled this week.) Mr. Biden, meeting with some of the industry's biggest manufacturers and retailers, withheld judgment on whether graphic games fuel violence. But he added quickly, "You all know the judgment other people have made."

Industry executives are steeling for a political battle, and they have strong support from Congress as well as from the courts.

Industry representatives have already spoken with more than a dozen lawmakers' offices since the shootings, urging them to resist threatened regulations. They say video games are a harmless, legally protected diversion already well regulated by the industry itself through ratings that restricting some games to "mature" audiences.

With game makers on the defensive, they have begun pulling together scientific research, legal opinions and marketing studies to make their case to federal officials.

"This has been litigated all the way to the Supreme Court," Michael Gallagher, chief executive of the industry's main lobbying arm, said in an interview, referring to a 2011 ruling that rejected a California ban on selling violent games to minors on First Amendment grounds.

Twenty years ago, with graphic video games still a nascent technology, manufacturers faced similar threats of a crackdown over violent games. Even Captain Kangaroo — Bob Keeshan — lobbied for stricter oversight. The industry, heading off government action, responded at that time by creating the ratings labels, similar to movie ratings, that are ubiquitous on store shelves today.

This time, with a more formidable presence in Washington, the industry is not so willing to discuss voluntary concessions.

Game makers have spent more than $20 million since 2008 on federal lobbying, and millions more on campaign donations.

Mr. Gallagher's group, the Entertainment Software Association, has five outside lobbying firms to push its interests in Washington. And the industry has enjoyed not only a hands-off approach from Congress, which has rejected past efforts to toughen regulations, but also tax breaks that have spurred sharp growth.

Game makers even have their own bipartisan Congressional caucus, with 39 lawmakers joining to keep the industry competitive.

Hurricanes shuffle the landscape. Developers bulldoze and build, bulldoze and build. Cafes or watering holes swoop in and out, leaving no trace.

So when news spread that Spec's Records and Tapes would close this month after 65 years, a collective sense of melancholy settled over this city of graceful banyan trees and Mediterranean-style homes in Miami-Dade County. After all these years — and despite a long-ago change in ownership — the record store looks frozen in time: the same 1980s red-letter sign and awning hangs out front; the white-and-tan facade has been immune to the decades; even the carpet retains a Me Decade hue.

"I feel emotionally connected to the place; a lot of us feel that way," said Tere Batista Worland, who grew up nearby and trolled the aisles for Elton John and Led Zeppelin, later becoming an executive at Universal Music. "It was a big part of my childhood. It's where we all bought our first records, where we went to see pop artists. It was a huge part of my growing up. It marks the end of an era."

For generations, Spec's was the place where teeny-boppers and musicians, hippies and squares, classical music lovers and punk rockers, blue-haired ladies and purple-haired youths all congregated in the search for vinyl, eight-tracks, reel-to-reel, cassettes and, finally, CDs. Students, many from the University of Miami, which is across the street, camped out for concert tickets. Fans lined the block to get an autograph from Plácido Domingo. The Bee Gees once played an acoustic set among the record bins. Bruce Hornsby shopped there.

Martin Spector, a former talent agent and violinist from Virginia, opened the store in 1948 on U.S. 1, then just a two-lane road. The shop sold records and cameras. Five years later, he moved the store a few blocks north on U.S. 1 to its permanent location and zeroed in almost exclusively on records for a few decades. Classical music was Mr. Spector's specialty, although he sold all genres. He treated customers like members of an exclusive music club, and that kept the people coming back.

By the 1970s, Spec's grew to become a record powerhouse in Miami and the region. It influenced music charts with its ability to move records and promote songs, and it nurtured the local music scene. In 1985, Spec's went public and continued to thrive for more than a decade until the rise of downloadable music. Spec's was recognized by Forbes in 1987 as one of the 200 best small companies in America.

Mr. Spector's work ethic was legendary; he kept an office in the Coral Gables store, its flagship, and always made the rounds. He chose employees wisely. And he stayed a step ahead of tastes and trends, ushering in Latin music when he saw Miami's population shift, building a renowned classical collection, selling concert tickets, hosting artists, and then adding movie rentals when necessary. At its peak, Spec's grew to 80 stores in Florida and Puerto Rico. In 1998, Spec's was sold to Camelot, which was later bought by Trans World Entertainment. Mr. Spector died in 2003 at age 98.

The companies that bought out Spec's considered it wise to keep the Spec's name and the store's same design. And so it remains.

"It was the place to be," said Ann Spector Lieff, Mr. Spector's daughter who took the helm of Spec's in 1980 and is now a consultant. "I think the new owners saw the value in the name. I think they got it, and that was very gratifying to all of us."

Pascale Laurent, 48, who grew up nearby and got word in Africa, where she now lives, that Spec's was closing, felt an immediate pang. She landed a job there in the early '80s, a coup for a high school student. She earned $3.35 an hour and invaluable perks: first dibs on concert tickets, free records and flawless on-the-job music. One afternoon, she ushered around the pop singer and soap actor Rick Springfield as he signed autographs.

"There was something about how cool it felt and looked to be there," said Ms. Laurent, who stayed on four years. "It was a place where people came to find something they loved — music."

Flipping through the last remaining jazz CDs, Morrie Hollander, 78, said he started making pilgrimages to Spec's 30 years ago. "This is my nook-and-cranny," he said, of the jazz section, lamenting the store's passing.

The old building will be leveled, and Chase Bank, with more than 280 branches in the state, will occupy a new structure this year.

"Just what we need," Mr. Hollander said. "Another bank."