A Marine Corps gunnery sergeant and Afghanistan war hero had his drug conviction overturned this fall by the Navy and Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals.

Gunnery Sgt. Rory R. Hirst’s conviction was based on a urine sample that tested positive for an illegal drug.

But during the appeals process, the case against Hirst revealed troubling deficiencies in the way at least one urinalysis lab handled samples from military personnel submitted for drug testing.

A positive drug test result is career-killing for military personnel and can lead to a federal conviction, detention, and dishonorable discharge.

Given the stakes, precision is essential in such settings, and Hirst’s court filings raise questions about how at least one of these labs is run.

“Sailors and Marines who face the devastating consequences of a criminal conviction while enjoying diminished constitutional protections should expect, and this Court will demand, substantial compliance with the Department of the Navy’s urinalysis program “wrote the appeal judge, Navy Captain Brian Mizer. the decision overturning Hirst’s conviction.

“That didn’t happen here.”

The gunny pleaded not guilty at trial in April 2022 and was initially found guilty, reduced to the rank of sergeant and sentenced to 90 days in jail.

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This conviction was based on an alleged positive test for the illegal drug MDMA taken after the July 4, 2021 holiday.

A laboratory doctor testified that the level of drug found in Hirst’s urine “was so low that he may not have felt the effects of the drug”, and given this low level, the doctor did not was unable to say whether Hirst’s alleged use of the drug was illicit. , according to the decision of the court of appeal.

When the appeals court overturned the conviction in September, Mizer recounted the recurring, widespread and shoddy practices at the Navy’s urinalysis laboratory in Great Lakes, Ill., which processed Hirst’s sample.

The Marine staff sergeant who oversaw the processing of the urine samples at the time was listed in court records only as “SSgt. DW,” admitted during his trial testimony that the discrepancies in the paperwork were “sloppy” and a function of “my laziness that day.”

“It’s very frustrating from our point of view when a customer says I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t do that, and then we start pulling the string and we see there are problems with the drug program,” said Hirst’s civil attorney, Bethany Payton. -O’Brien, told Military Times.

Evidence presented in court showed a pattern of negligence on the part of drug enforcement officer SSgt. DW, responsible for taking Hirst’s urine sample to the testing laboratory, as well as to the Navy Drug Testing Laboratory in Great Lakes, Illinois, which processed the sample.

Discrepancies noted during SSgt. DW was responsible and during the time Hirst’s sample was processed, “it totaled more than 31 pages,” Judge Mizer wrote.

“Some of the boxes sent to the (Great Lakes Drug Testing Lab) did not contain the urine samples listed on SSgt DW’s paperwork, some contained the wrong unit ID code, some had tamper evident seals that were broken, other samples had two seals, signatures and dates were missing, some documents were missing completely, boxes were poorly packaged, some Marines’ initials did not match those on the sample, samples were insufficient, there “There were discrepancies in the initials of the purported observers, and there were discrepancies with the DoD identification numbers on the labels of some of the samples,” the judge wrote.

In Hirst’s case, his urine sample was sent to the lab on Aug. 3, 2021, 28 days late by standards in the Marine Corps Urinalysis Program Coordinator’s Manual. The manual asks those handling urine to respect a 48-hour time limit between collection and shipment of the sample.

The laboratory’s conduct has also been called into question.

One of the lab technicians handling urine samples was suspended for three days in July 2021, shortly before Hirst’s sample arrived, for “improperly pouring samples” containing MDA, resulting in leads to false negative test results.

The drug at the heart of the lab technician’s suspension was MDA. MDA is a relative of the drug MDMA, which Hirst was initially convicted of using.

Other employees at the Navy Drug Screening Laboratory Great Lakes were found to be careless with sensitive materials in the years leading up to Hirst’s wrongful conviction.

A total of 18 Great Lakes laboratory technicians were decertified between April 2017 and August 2023, according to documents provided to Military Times by Payton-O’Brien.

Technicians have been decertified for a multitude of reasons related to inappropriate conduct, including:

– report false positive results.

-incorrect labeling of steroid batches.

-failure to carry out appropriate quality control.

-make critical errors when examining samples.

-non-compliance with examination criteria.

-misunderstanding of the examination protocol.

-signing the names of other employees on important documents.

-voluntary destruction of important documents.

-demonstrate patterns of negligent work.

-poor handling of samples.

Several technicians were decertified more than once, but appear to have continued working at the lab after their initial decertification, according to a list of decertified technicians provided by Payton-O’Brien.

“A lot of military members aren’t aware of it,” Payton-O’Brien said. “They don’t know that the pharmaceutical company is having these problems. They are not aware of these decertifications.

It remains unclear how widespread these failures of urine testing programs are, or whether anyone at the Great Lakes lab was held responsible for these errors.

During Hirst’s appeal hearing, eight fellow Marines spoke of his great personality – he saved a Marine from heat exhaustion while dodging Taliban gunfire – and described him as a “superman” and a Marine Corps rock star.

Several also testified that they were with Hirst on July 4, 2021. weekend before the urine sample was collected, and did not see him taking drugs and did not appear to be taking drugs.

A Marine lieutenant colonel described Hirst’s courage under enemy fire during the 30-day battle for Marjah, Afghanistan, in 2010, which earned the gunny a Navy and Corps Commendation Medal Marines with a “V” device for valor.