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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @11:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @11:25PM (#173321)

    > You can't unrape someone either.

    Irrelevant to the original question.

    No form of punishment is undoable, but executions are final. Please don't pretend that you can't see the difference.

    Whether rape is an acceptable form of punishment is an entirely different question - one of ethics, not utility.

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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday April 21 2015, @01:29PM

    by JNCF (4317) on Tuesday April 21 2015, @01:29PM (#173511) Journal

    No form of punishment is undoable, but executions are final. Please don't pretend that you can't see the difference.

    I really don't see a difference. I think maybe you're assuming that life has some inherent value we both recognise, or something? Death is simply a lack of life, it can happen quickly and painlessly (though it doesn't in the US prison system). I am contending that torture is more horrifying than death. Torture changes the individual beyond current repair, as does death. Death changes us more, but I don't think that makes it inherently worse.

    • (Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:15PM

      by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Tuesday April 21 2015, @06:15PM (#173606)

      I really don't see a difference.

      "You can't unrape someone either." was completely irrelevant to the discussion. When you take into account the possibility of innocents being executed even after all those trials, the fact that the person can't live anything resembling a life after they've been executed (because they're dead, and this doesn't apply to rape), and the fact that the person has already been captured, one can come to the conclusion that they should not be executed. If they want to die so badly, and they're determined, they will probably do so themselves. But lots of people don't kill themselves in prison or when they get out, so obviously not everyone agrees with your logic.

      I am contending that torture is more horrifying than death.

      Well, lots of people don't want to die (even ones in prison), so that's merely your opinion, not a universal fact, and especially if the form of "torture" is being in prison.