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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @06:01PM
So, basically you ended up losing your job because they refused to train you on the equipment you were required to use. Horray for private contractors cutting corners to pocket higher profits!
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:21AM
Good word of warning for any other of you considering a gig with the military-industrial complex.
If you are not one of the highly paid suit-guys running the thing, you are highly expendable, needed only for one contract, and there are no protections as they hold the "security" trump card. You will know you are planned for dismissal if you see them placing you in "compartmentalized" projects. It is their way of keeping you ignorant so you won't learn enough to become valuable.
They are exempt from damn near every employment law.
Main trouble is that they are about the only game in town for the STEM graduate, as most of the other stuff is either offshored or taken by H1-B.
My advice to the young'uns is to learn skills other people, not industry, needs. Welding, construction, dentistry, auto repair, refrigeration ( that's what's keeping me going ), electrician, whatever.... and find a good trade union if you have to deal with business.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]