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.

Comments

shit

[Anonymous Coward]

That sucks

Re:shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in a just world, the people who falsified their testimonies which led to a potentially innocent person to be executed would be put on trial for murder 1. I bet that doesn't happen.

Re:shit

[Lunix Nutcase]

Get compensation for their family for wrongful execution.

I'm shocked, I tell you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody else surprised by this?

Truth, justice... is simply not the American way.

Re:I'm shocked, I tell you!

[Maxo-Texas]

Including the almost complete lack of minorities. And by the odds at least two of the characters were gays in the closet. Probably church goers too. Many of the men-- WW2 vets with PTSD were beating their wives and everyone was driving drunk. Any of the teens who were gay left for New York- and if their parents found out they were cutoff and tossed out. Some of the men-- probably Andy-- were getting some on the side since you couldn't divorce and when the wife stopped putting out (because the men knew very little about how to please women sexually) you found the town slut or snuck something with the secretary or other office girl.

The businessmen portrayed in the show were dumping pollution in the waterways so fast that a decade later, rivers would be catching on fire- necessitating another set of government intrusion.

Things were easier with a much lower population density and less ability to move around. It was a surveillance state by the sheriff and the religious community. As that population grew and became more mobile, more government intrusion was required.

I *love* the andy griffith show. But it was fiction when it was being shown. It was a pleasant ville.

Ironically, the entire show was an intrusion of government preventing tv shows from showing reality. Men and women slept in separate twin beds, never had sex addictions, never were adulterous.

The show portrays a great time to be alive if you were a successful white male in a monochrome homogenous society.

Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[st0nes]

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.

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[SuricouRaven]

That doesn't solve the problem. The FBI can simply fire or transfer elsewhere anyone who doesn't lean towards positive matches. It wouldn't take long for the experts to realise that saying yes a lot is good for their careers, but expressing doubt in court is going to lead to no more court appearances and a demotion to lab tech.

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[blankinthefill]

That issue could be solved by an outside auditing body. They would send in samples that are known to be matches or not matches, and search for a statistically significant deviation in outcomes. Of course, having an auditing body truly unassociated with the FBI/CIA/NSA/Local policing force would solve MOST issues with policing these days, and would ruin some of the nice little fiefdoms people have been spending the last few decades building... which is why it will never happen.

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[binarstu]

Even before that, though, we need high-quality, doubly blinded trials to establish how well any of these comparison-based forensic methods actually work. Evidently, a key problem with hair comparison was that no one actually had any idea how reliable it was for "matching" a sample to a suspect. It is now obvious that the false positive rate is completely unacceptable.

We should have known this long before anyone even thought about using hair comparison evidence at trial, and the sad thing is that the experiments needed to rigorously evaluate this technique aren't even very complicated. For prosecutors, though, it is undoubtedly a lot more fun to impress juries with your scientific-sounding evidence and experts than it is to ask whether the evidence is actually reliable, and you can bet that the hair comparison "experts" were not in any hurry to show that their work was a sham.

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[CrimsonAvenger]

some of the nice little fiefdoms people have been spending the last few decades building

Last few decades???

IN case you were unaware, the FBI handles kidnapping. Why? Because 80-odd years ago, Herbert Hoover decided the FBI needed some good publicity, and could get it with the Lindbergh kidnapping.

IOW, fiefdom building has been going on forever - all it takes is a chance to get a bigger budget if you do something special....

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[Dragon Bait]

You might be able to solve the problem(at the expense of a great deal of additional workload) by larding the caseload with samples specifically constructed to be non-matches; but then blinded and packaged the same as any other sample, to identify people who just lean positive; but that would probably require a lot of additional work to do in enough quantity to counteract the obvious pressure.

Add in that on a random basis you don't have any legitimate suspects in the collection being analyzed. The goal isn't to find best match. The correct answer has to be none of the above on a regular basis as well.

How many other flaws

[MrKaos]

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.

Re:How many other flaws

[dcollins117]

They didn't want to think about the balance of probabilities of all the pieces of circumstantial evidence and decide if someone was guilty or not. They wanted cold hard forensic evidence to do that for them.

Isn't that how it's supposed to work? The defendant is supposed to be given the benefit of every doubt. That's part of being presumed innocent until proven guilty. If you've ever been accused of doing something you didn't do, you'll likely appreciate the value of this system.

Minimum retrial

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That's a...polite...way to put it.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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'?

Re:That's a...polite...way to put it.

[Eunuchswear]

The perjury, if there is any, is in the expert witnesses claims about the strength of the evidence.

From TFA:

The review confirmed that FBI experts systematically testified to the near-certainty of “matches” of crime-scene hairs to defendants, backing their claims by citing incomplete or misleading statistics drawn from their case work.

"misleading" == perjury.

14 already executed....

[Computershack]

And this, people, is why you don't have the death sentence.

American "Justice"

[Required Snark]

Better 100,000 wrongly accused people go to jail rather then one member of law enforcement admit they made a mistake,