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posted by martyb on Monday April 20 2015, @04:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the hair-raising-development dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @08:29AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @08:29AM (#173072)

    According to the US Department of Labor [dol.gov], the Employee Polygraph Protection Act has the following exemptions:

    Federal, state and local governments are excluded. In addition, lie detector tests administered by the Federal Government to employees of Federal contractors engaged in national security intelligence or counterintelligence functions are exempt. The Act also includes limited exemptions where polygraph tests (but no other lie detector tests) may be administered in the private sector, subject to certain restrictions:

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @09:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @09:20AM (#173081)
    'Limited' being the operative word.. If he was laid off from a private company that close to a polygraph test he most likely has a case. If he doesn there is almost certainly a pertinent detail he left out.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @10:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @10:33AM (#173095)

    This pseudoscientific garbage shouldn't be used by anyone, and especially not by the government.

    • (Score: 2) by Leebert on Monday April 20 2015, @02:05PM

      by Leebert (3511) on Monday April 20 2015, @02:05PM (#173126)

      Hey, now, be nice. It worked on Aldrich Ames [wikipedia.org].

      • (Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday April 21 2015, @08:25AM

        by anubi (2828) on Tuesday April 21 2015, @08:25AM (#173446) Journal

        When I followed your link, I just felt more and more like Frank Grimes [wikia.com]

        --
        "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]