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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: 5, Interesting) by anubi on Monday April 20 2015, @07:52AM
I guess I do know a lot about the machines themselves, as one of my first childhood curiosities was the "Metrigraph Psychogalvanometer" featured on the TV Cop show "Highway Patrol" which I watched as a kid. Oh yes... I remember that thing. I thought the machine could read someone's mind. I made it a point to find out how it worked.
To my dismay, I found out it was just a whetstone bridge. Yeh, it had a vacuum tube in it, just like my RCA Vacuum Tube Voltmeter (VTVM). It was very sensitive to resistance changes, and all those knobs on the instrument were just to balance out the bridge and set the gain, and the meter lets the proctor see the immediate changes in skin resistance while he manually re-adjusted the baseline for his next question.
Later, in College, I saw the thing again, but this time it had a new skin. Scientologists had an array of 'em set up offering free "stress tests", and trying to invite us to a scientology center where we could pay for more "treatments" to get "cleared" of some - uh - boogeymen. I knew what that thing was just the way they were using it. It could not have been much more than four transistors in the thing.
By that time, I knew exactly what that thing was and knew good and well that it was just an instrument used to scare the bejeebies out of anyone that did not know what it was. I saw it mostly a tool of intimidation. Yes, it would measure skin resistance, but that had nothing to do with the truth - no that had everything to do with how scared you had that bloke you hooked it up to.
Then, at work, they wanted us to report to some little industrial building across town where somebody had set up a interview room in it, and there - again - was another re-incarnation of that same machine... except this time I was having the electrodes put onto me, and my future with that company hinged on whatever that suit-guy behind the controls thought of me.
Now, here's my problem: I have developed a high distrust of people wearing suits. They do not seem to think at all like I think, and by and large, many seem to be about the greediest self-centered assholes on this planet - always trying to game the system to their advantage at the expense of others. Some people fear the man wearing a bandit mask. Well the guy wearing the bandit mask may deprive me of a week's wages. The guy wearing the suit has the power to deprive me of my career!
As much as I tried to hold my fear of losing my employment over this, it made my readings unusable to him. I knew how to swing the needle, but it was pegged. I was in a cold sweat and there was nothing I could do about it. I could not have had much more than 500 ohms across me. Nothing I could do about it.
I know the business suit is a power symbol, and people will wear them to garner respect. I am also quite aware that many business executives consider a handshake with a suit-guy a helluva lot more important than , say, stability of a phaselock loop in a communications system.
Incidentally, I never did get the art of lying down very well - its one of the reasons I went into engineering - no lying was tolerated. I show my work and how I arrived at my conclusion. If I could lie worth a damm, I would have went into sales or politics.
It seemed to me like lying was part of "people skills", and how to get others to carry out my will by giving them incomplete information, then covering my own ass with legal paper.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]