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The Washington Post has a story about flawed FBI science, and its effects on hundreds of cases prior to the year 2000.
The FBI has admitted that virtually all of their elite examiners have given tainted testimony overstating forensic hair matches.
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country's largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
Hair match wasn't the ONLY evidence in these cases. But in many cases it may have been the only evidence that placed defendants at the scene. However, 32 of these cases were death penalty cases, and 14 of those defendants have been executed.
All of these cases are now going to be reviewed.
This is the second major use of junk science the FBI has been forced to admit. There was the whole Bullet Lead Analysis used for decades to claim that the lead in bullets used in a crime matched batches of bullets the defendant had access to.
Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, commended the FBI and department for the collaboration but said, "The FBI's three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SacredSalt on Monday April 20 2015, @04:59AM
If the hair doesn't have enough material to get a DNA match out of it, then the best thing to use comparisons for is as a tool of exclusion. I don't really believe you get a much better match that. Although you can find combinations of chemical traces on the hair which do match up fairly well if you have the person in custody almost immediately after; the value of these markers diminishes greatly as time passes by.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @06:23AM
- Mitch..., hey Mitch, com'ere...
- What is it?
- This strand of hair from the guy you for sure suspect did it, doesn't match the guy you just brought in for questioning
- Discard that information, I just found a guy on whom I can stick this charge... pretend you never saw it! I really need this conviction to get my promotion.
I still have to live the day where this conversation is not had...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Monday April 20 2015, @08:10AM
Since DNA matching is done on a sampling of lengths of DNA segments rather than being a base by base comparison, it too is only properly used as exclusionary evidence. Alas, it's almost always misused.