There's a good reason why N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper commissioned former FBI agent Chris Swecker and another agent to audit the State Bureau of Investigation's crime lab work: Evidence was mounting that incomplete and misleading lab reports were helping send the wrong people to prison - and letting the real criminals go free to commit other crimes.

And there's good reason the audit by Swecker and former FBI manager Michael Wolf sent ripples throughout North Carolina's criminal justice system: It showed that the crime lab's failures to conduct tests or inform court officials of blood test results that might help the defendant may have involved as many as 229 cases.

This is much more than a theoretical matter. Greg Taylor, exonerated by a three-judge court earlier this year, had served 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He was convicted in part because the crime lab did not report test results favorable to Taylor's defense. Earlier this month murder and assault charges were dropped against Derrick Allen, who served 12 years in prison because of misleading crime lab reports that, a judge said, deprived him of his rights.

One key finding of Swecker and Wolf's audit, revealed recently when a copy was obtained by the News & Observer of Raleigh, was that most other crime labs surveyed were much more forthcoming about the results of critical crime lab tests. All but one of eight labs surveyed, including the FBI lab, wrote test results that included all tests results. The SBI's reports often did not include negative test results that showed no blood was found on critical evidence.

"Based on our limited survey, the other laboratories had a policy favoring disclosure," Swecker said. "That only makes sense. It's right legally, and for fundamental fairness it's the right thing to do."

Cooper deserves credit for ordering the audit. His new SBI director, Greg McLeod, notes that the SBI lab's current practice is to report the results of all tests.

That's as it should be. Condoning a system that withholds key evidence hearkens to an era of frontier justice that was more focused on convictions than on finding the truth - including determining who committed the worst kinds of crimes.

It's good that these practices have been changed, but it's outrageous they went on so long before the courts started putting a stop to them. Derrick Allen's conviction was based in part on a presumptive blood text that "indicated" a stain was blood. Two other tests, both of which were negative, were not included in the lab report. In other words, Allen spent 12 years in prison based on the interpretation of a misleading test that "indicated" the presence of blood - but which other tests contradicted.

There has to be a higher standard. We suggest it start with the truth - preferably the whole truth.