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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: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @06:04AM
The FBI and the Myth of the Fingerprint [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [hpub.org]
Add in shoe prints, lip prints, and ear prints while you're at it.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday April 20 2015, @04:52PM
One of these things is not like the other.....
Good clear Shoe Prints, on well worn shoes actually do contain marks that become unique just because the pebbles and glass fragments you've stepped are unlikely to ever be duplicated naturally. Nicks, cuts, etc.
Wear patterns can't be used, because if you are about the same size and wear the same size, and make of shoe, and we both drive bus for a living, chances are the wear patterns will be similar.
Prints are never used to match some random shoe in a database (other than to identify the maker of the sole). Shoe prints can only compared to one specific shoe. New shoes can never be used for this purpose.
The rub is that shoes taken for evidence can always be manipulated to replicate the prints take at the scene of the crime. Shoe print evidence always carries a certain jaundice, and defense attorneys know this.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.