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FBI Overstated Forensic Hair Matches In Nearly All Trials Before 2000
schwit1 writes 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. The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.
That sucks
Anybody else surprised by this?
Truth, justice... is simply not the American way.
... not even news it's so old now.
The same thing happened some years back with fingerprint evidence. The people who are responsible for the analysis of forensic evidence should be 'blind', i.e. they should not have access to the context of the case. If they are given two fingerprints to match, they should merely be asked whether or not they are a match, and not told where they come from or even which case they pertain to. Then there would be far less bias. Also, they should not testify in trials, merely issue an affidavit of their results.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis
I'm becoming more convinced that Police are often too lazy to do police work and now reviews of the cases shows evidence procedures stacked in favour of the prosecution. If the Court systems do not have mechanisms to self correct evidence procedures how can there be any trust that policing will lead to outcomes that protect society.
Justice is impossible if the system is not Just.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It does not matter if there was other evidence. A retrial should be done at the very least, then guilt/acquit decided on the then existing evidence. There is no way otherwise how much the hair comparison influenced the verdict no matter how small it might have been.
And in addition a prosecution for false witness should be started against lab people, and prosecutor penalized heavily for having used flawed evidence. otherwise there is no way prosecution and involved people will learn. In fact that would teach them to verify first the other shaky forensic stuff which sounds more like witches guess than real science.
Fixing this is simple. Just make misprosecution punishable on parity with the charges being prosecuted.
Willfully hide exculpatory evidence in a capital murder trial? Death penalty.
Lie about evidence in a life imprisonment case? Life in prison.
Etc.
For that matter, this works on false rape charges too, but there you need more filtering. Honest false charges (disagreements, mistakes, etc) should be safe, so much so that no victim should even remotely fear coming forward. And amusingly, the prosecutor thing would guard against abuse of that too...
See that "Preview" button?
Is there any reason, aside from the reflexive deference to allegedly legitimate authority figures, why they use the phrases 'gave flawed testimony' and 'overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors' rather than the more honest 'committed a fuckton of perjury'?
It's better a few innocent man be incarcerated or maybe even executed than one bad guy go free.
the fbi needs a red team.
It's the difference between deliberate lying and passing on a fact that proves to be inaccurate. To the extent that these guys were reflecting the general consensus of their profession, then their comments aren't lying. To the extent that they had their own doubts which they failed to express to juries, they are guilty of perjury. But never underestimate the power of groupthink. The experimental demonstrations of the way in which people succumb to social pressure to say what is not true, when those they are with are actors saying the untruth, are terrifying. http://www.simplypsychology.or...
One of the frustrations we slashdotters often suffer is the ordinary person who disbelieves a scientific finding; climate change and anti-vaccers are the most visible at present. Yet it is stories like this that give people every justification for their scepticism; we need to be willing to hear their attitude and its reasons!
Forensic analysis methods are not scientifically validated in general. AFAIK any forensic evidence is admissible if the the judge decides so. The general standard is that is sounds plausible.
My frustration as a slashdotter is that climate change denialists are hugely overrepresented on Slashdot. And their reasons are certainly not related to biased expert witnesses in murder trials.
of concentrating too much power into the hands of too few corruptible and flawed human beings. This is the core problem of big government. You give more and more power to the government (which gets larger and larger, but is still a small subset of the population) and the result is that eventually they will abuse that power and use it against the population. There ARE no perfect people who can be guaranteed to never surrender to the temptation and abuse their power. SOME might abuse their power for the worst personal reasons. OTHERS might, for what seem to be the best reasons, abuse their power as a means to some "greater good" like stopping crimes, catching terrorists, protecting the environment, helping the sick... but in the end, ANY human can be tempted to abuse the sorts of power that are available in a big government.
This is the lesson of all societies and all of human history, which our nation's founders tried to protect us from and repeatedly warned againts in their writings an speeches. They created a REPUBLIC with a very small and very limited central (Federal) government with three co-equal branches designed to obstruct eachother so the government could not do anything but the bare minimums very easily (i.e. it's not SUPPOSED to succeed at doing huge stuff quickly unless the nation is threatened).
"A republic, madam, if you can keep it." - Ben Franklin, responding to a lady who asked him what sort of government he and our other founders were creating.
We have, sadly, let him down and very nearly lost it. The people themselves, it seems, were also too-easily tempted to abuse power. In exchange for promises of all sorts of government benefits and entitlements, they used their power at the ballot box to elect the very sorts of corrupted political leaders who over the decades grew layer upon layer of government and stuffed it into all aspects of the nation; those politicians, in turn, created agencies run by unnamed and unelected bureaucrats with the power to ruin the life and business of any citizen. Every time somebody in this bloated bureaucracy does something WRONG, the bureaucracy announces that "errors were made". This scheme, which paints all nefarious deeds as inadvertent mistakes, oversights, accidents, etc (while not naming or punishing any specific government employee for the mis-deed) is part of the basic DESIGN of bloated government; ALL THREE BRANCHES of the government benefit from the scam: The executive branch gets to illegally do unpopular things it wants without appearing to want them done, Congress can pretend to be outraged an powerless to stop them, and the courts can avoid tough decisions on many cases (allowing the other two branches to take "shortcuts"), only to get involved when they truly want to.
Since "scientific evidence" is very persuasive to jurors, they'll be granting new trials to the ones they haven't killed yet.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAI crack me up!
Science itself does not have a bias, but scientists have bias' and they have vested interests. Who is going to bite the hand that feeds it? It does not mean it is a conscious bias, but as humans we all have bias as such the "expected" result has to be hidden in some sort of double-blind methodology.... For hair -- give them the prime sample and then 10 or 20 samples that have a mix of similar DNA origins (i.e. if it is asian hair - 20 samples of asian hair mixed in with the suspect sample to match to). For reporters, after they write a story - the story should be vetted by a knowledgeable scientists to make sure that the summation of the work is inline with what the scientific paper is actually indicating (often it is 90 to 180 degrees off of the scientific publication).
Their pobably guilty of something.
And their reasons are certainly not related to biased expert witnesses in murder trials.
Not so sure, they're both cases of motivated reasoning -- we know the guy did it so any "proof" is good proof. We know "CAGW" is a commie plot so the science must be wrong.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
AGW and antivaxxers fly in the face of established science. With hair forensics there was no established science, just an echo chamber of 'experts' under pressures to prove guilt. This is just FBI cases. What about state and other cases based on the same science? What of other "scientific" forensic processes then and now that a jury can't possibly understand. All a jury knows is that a congenial, nicely dressed, "expert" with superior "credentials, certifications, education, and achievements" states that the scumbag in the defense chair must have done it. I do not care if the defendant is a dick of the first order and that they have the right guy a larger percentage of the time. It is unacceptable to let any innocent person rot in prison or be killed falsely.
Silence is a state of mime.
That's the problem we have. Given how much of 'accepted science' gets challenged and reworked, we are always faced with a spectrum from the very secure to the totally crackpot. After all, Einstein successfully torpedoed Newton's laws of motion, which were as widely accepted as you get. Somehow we need to have a process for determining whether a scientific claim is sufficient to justify its use for criminal trials. On a good day the court process will do that; on a bad day a poor quality lawyer will be unwilling to challenge it.
And this, people, is why you don't have the death sentence.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Better 100,000 wrongly accused people go to jail rather then one member of law enforcement admit they made a mistake,
Why is Snark Required?
If you've done nothing wrong you don't have anything to worry about, right?
This is just the latest in a line of bad forensic practice from the FBI, the most obvious recent example was the FBI's fanciful practice of tying ammunition to events by matching rounds to batches or even boxes of ammunition. Anyone who knew anything about ammunition manufacture could have told you that the key theory was unsound (to put it politely, fanciful or junk science would be more accurate), but they were able to use it in court for decades before they were finally called out on it.
As long as there's no repercussions for the FBI, they'll keep doing it to keep their conviction rate up, regardless of who gets hurt in the process.
In 2002, the FBI reported that its own DNA testing found that examiners reported false hair matches more than 11 percent of the time.
As I read the article, the examiners were right 89% of the time and reported a match when there wasn't one 11% of the time. While that is certainly a problem, it's probably at least as accurate as all the other evidence presented at a trial. The best evidence is usually DNA, but people often don't even believe that (e.g. O.J.)
I disagree; knowing that bad evidence was presented (particularly in life imprisonment and death penalty cases where there is no chance to make amends with those falsely convicted) shows more evidence of why the death penalty was never a good idea. Therefore we don't need more death penalty conclusions such as "Willfully hide exculpatory evidence in a capital murder trial? Death penalty.".
Digital Citizen
... climate change denialists are hugely overrepresented on Slashdot.
Apparently we've reached a consensus among this scientifically literate community that AGW isn't proven, then? ;)
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
IX - You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
It's time this politically motivated Bullshit stopped !
Try the 'Expert Witness' Bastards who gave the Testimony as well as their Supervisors.
Execute them if it can be proved that there was malicious intent.
Maybe this: Bind them and throw them in a pond. If they drown there was no malice. If they do not drown they are a wiitch^h^h^h^h^h^h^hguilty and should be remanded to death row.
-- kjh
It is as fucked up over here as truth and justice go. Death penalty aside, of course, which obviously makes a difference in cases like this.
Experts inherently favor the interests of those who pay them. The FBI doesn't get paid to find people innocent. In a world where the FBI can choose to hire this expert or that expert, it will rehire the ones most likely to make a finding helpful to a finding of guilty.
Courts are masters of deciding truth between opposing parties. Where one side possesses more resources than the other (the U.S. Attorney General's Office vs. the local public defender) the criminal court is crippled to find the truth of guilt or innocence.
The same holds true for the experts reporting to the IPCC...
Means that there are two people in the world who match the DNA evidence. If the DNA evidence is the only evidence, then the chances that you've got the right person is 50/50.
DNA evidence alone should never convict, only exonerate.
If this is true, then any case which relied upon this flawed evidence needs to be retried... on the FBI's dime.
They didn't gave 'flawed testimony', they lied through their teeth to favour the prosecution ..
Forensic analysis methods are not scientifically validated in general. AFAIK any forensic evidence is admissible if the the judge decides so. The general standard is that is sounds plausible.
No. The general standard is the Daubert standard (so named because it arose in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579 (1993). The standard is:
Judge is gatekeeper: Under Rule 702, the task of "gatekeeping", or assuring that scientific expert testimony truly proceeds from "scientific knowledge", rests on the trial judge.
Relevance and reliability: This requires the trial judge to ensure that the expert's testimony is "relevant to the task at hand" and that it rests "on a reliable foundation". Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 584-587. Concerns about expert testimony cannot be simply referred to the jury as a question of weight. Furthermore, the admissibility of expert testimony is governed by Rule 104(a), not Rule 104(b); thus, the Judge must find it more likely than not that the expert's methods are reliable and reliably applied to the facts at hand.
Scientific knowledge = scientific method/methodology: A conclusion will qualify as scientific knowledge if the proponent can demonstrate that it is the product of sound "scientific methodology" derived from the scientific method.[3]
Factors relevant: The Court defined "scientific methodology" as the process of formulating hypotheses and then conducting experiments to prove or falsify the hypothesis, and provided a nondispositive, nonexclusive, "flexible" set of "general observations" (i.e. not a "test") [4] that it considered relevant for establishing the "validity" of scientific testimony:
Empirical testing: whether the theory or technique is falsifiable, refutable, and/or testable.
Whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication.
The known or potential error rate.
The existence and maintenance of standards and controls concerning its operation.
The degree to which the theory and technique is generally accepted by a relevant scientific community.
That's a whole lot more stringent than "sounds plausible" (which is fairly close to the Frye "general acceptance" standard that Daubert replaced).
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
The problem, or so it seems to me, is that this technique has very little use in the wider world other than to identify individuals for police forces. So it is not going to be subject to sceptical use and testing by a wider scientific community, it will be largely confined to law enforcement labs. This makes peer review and discovering the potential error rate inherently more difficult. There should be much more stringent standards for the acceptability of techniques that have such a narrow use.
Climate change is one of the ever changing euphemisms for man-caused global warming. It has never been a scientific finding - not even close. The arguments presented in favor of man-caused global warming, even if the premises were correct, would not even result in a conclusion that man-caused global warming is a reality. The same is true of "anti-vaccers." There is a lot of nonsense spewed on both sides of that question. There is no proof for instance, that MMR vaccine causes autism. There is also zero proof that it does not. There is a strong correlation between changes in the MMR and increases in autism. Obviously correlation does not equal causation.
Your attitude that "we need to hear their attitude and its reasons" is laudable but you should check your own beliefs before pretending that you are swayed only by science. It is not that people distrust science. People distrust scientists because, particularly with the global warming fiasco, "scientists" have been corrupt and unscientific. Likewise with the "scientist" proclaiming that vaccinations have been proven safe or that hair matches can be used to prove guilt or innocence in court.
Specifically in this case it amuses me that no one, certainly not the paid liars at the FBI, have pointed out that a 100% hair match is proof of virtually nothing. While a mismatch would exclude a person a 100% match does not mean that the hair belonged to the defendant. It should never be used as evidence of guilt because it proves nothing and is always mischaracterized by the corrupt prosecutors.
My theory is that climate scientists are generally honest and scientific, to the extent that people who deny global warming is occurring have to slander scientists in order to provide any credibility. Then, having accused honest men and women of being liars and cheats, and paid other people to say the same thing, they announce that many people say that the scientists are corrupt.
So far, I haven't seen any contrary evidence. Got some?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes