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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @03:23PM
Here's the story of how criminal 'profiling' was invented out of bogus results. [newyorker.com]
The problem with DNA matches [latimes.com] (bad application of statistics) leading example being a black man and a white man who came up as the 'same' person:
Then there is the use of drug-dogs that don't detect drugs, they detect subconscious (and sometimes conscious) cues from their handlers. [reason.com]
Also, the latest bogus fad - micro-expressions as a form of lie detection. The TSA has spent a billion+ dollars [cnn.com] on it with zero useful results.
Seems to me that the constant push to mechanize judgment is commendable but misguided. Far too often people in authority are willing to use these results as cover for their own biases - they have a gut feeling that someone is guilty, but since that's obviously not scientific they seek a way to mask their bias in pseudoscience.