Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Some facts about the U.S. justice system:
* The Reid technique is widely used for interrogations, a technique notorious for its effectiveness in enticing false confessions.
* Only 5 % of convicted felons had their case tried in court; the rest make a plea bargain (typically under threats of excessively long prison sentences and/or the death penalty).
* Judges are elected, subjecting them to the whims of public opinion and making them more politicians than impartial legal officials.
* At least 4 % of people sentenced to death in the U.S. are innocent.
* The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, not just relative to the population size, but in absolute numbers.
* U.S. private prisons sees $3+ billion in annual revenue... Not that that has anything to do with the above issues, I'm sure.
The U.S. justice system is broken in so many ways, I'm certainly forgetting some things.
The article is very misleading on several points. It gives the impression that there was a problem "in almost all trials"; that's not what happened.
Of the ~21000 requests for an analysis, the lab reported a match about ~2500 times. Of those, the evidence was used in something like 268 trials, and a retrospective analysis of the DNA revealed that the hair did indeed match almost 90% of the time.
The bigger problem (which is where the "almost all") part came from is that when the evidence was actually presented at a trial, the expert witness overstated the reliability of the hair match; if they had stated that the analysis was only 90% accurate there wouldn't have been a problem.
A retrial in the 27 or 28 cases in which DNA revealed a mismatch is certainly in order. Otherwise there is no problem with the conviction; a retrial would simply replace the hair match with a DNA match anyway.