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

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.

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'?

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,

Re:shit

[Lunix Nutcase]

Get compensation for their family for wrongful execution.