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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.
Anybody else surprised by this?
Truth, justice... is simply not the American way.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Oh, if you are a criminal defense lawyer, this is a gift from Heaven. I see a flood of requests for appeals and retrials on the horizon.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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?
Appeals, sure. But remember this is a country where prosecutors will fight tooth and nail against anything that might overturn a conviction, even DNA evidence that actually proves innocence and doesn't merely introduce doubt.
They'll try to deny this based on time, to many appeals, or other lame bullshit just do they don't lose because that's more important than anything else.
Corporations are no different from governments,except they are not even remotely tied to the wishes of the country as a whole.
Sure, the US government is indistinguishable from any other corporation with a monopoly of force over 350 million people. But let's consider your statement in detail.
First, the usual use of the term, corporation is with respect to a legal creation of a limited liability organization. The vast majority of those have no relevance. They were created as a legal means for a single person to organize their business efforts or a shell company that enables some business or tax avoidance task. Another significant group aren't intended for business, but are rather to organize a charity or similar organization. The remaining include a fair number of labor unions and co ops.
Moving on, we still have vastly more small business corporations than the big private and public corporations which have you worked up in a lather. It is worth noting here that that the US has more governments than it does have publicly traded corporations. I see that there are at least 20,000 townships, counties, and higher levels of government, while there are something like 5000 publicly traded corporations.
So sure, if we treat them as just organizations with a budget, there isn't that much different between businesses with a fair number of employees and governments of similar scale.
But scale and power are the final stumbling block here, it's worth stating the obvious, that the FBI is not run by a business corporation, but by the US government which is several times larger than the largest of corporations (Saudi Aramco, a Saudi Arabia-owned corporation) in terms of revenue and which has legal advantages and power that no business corporation can touch. That makes the FBI case very different than if say, Walmart tried the same thing.
If you've done nothing wrong you don't have anything to worry about, right?
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.
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.
Get compensation for their family for wrongful execution.
If the client is dead, and you're only appealing the criminal portion, exactly what do you intend to do?
Doesn't it usually happen that after an innocent person is released from custody the state gives them a big fat check and a "We're sorry. Don't sue us." agreement? The person's heirs could still get the check if its proved that good old Dad really didn't commit that crime.
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...
Somewhat disturbingly, no. As a general rule, you can only sue the government if it lets you do so. If you get railroaded by a prosecutor, your only recourse in most instances is to convince the legislature to grant you a sum of money. The state doesn't even have to give you a cab ride into town from the prison.
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.
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!
This does not prevent/deter the problem. The "government" pays the penalties - read tax payers, not the people who committed the perjury (police, prosecutors, judges, expert witnesses, etc.).
Unless there is a real and expected negative consequence to the direct actors, there is no incentive to stop.
(But if I were one of the victims' families, I'd sure want a few million dollars for the government's screw up.)
Of all the governments in the world, the US government is the one that is farthest away and least capable of having a monopoly on force.
I don't consider the Second Amendment to be even remotely as powerful in this regard. Where's the US citizen's right to own and operate a nuclear weapon, for example? That's a important example of the monopoly right there. And it is illegal for a US citizen to wage war on another country without express legislative approval from US Congress.
The original statement was monopoly on "force", not monopoly on a specific type of weapon.
You are wasting my time.
The history of asymmetric warfare has shown us that one does not need the biggest and fanciest weapons to contest the government's ability to establish a monopoly on force.
And the history of asymmetric warfare shows that the weaker side usually loses.
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
think of the suffering of the children when they were lied to about their mum or dad's killing someone !! it makes a HUGE difference to the familie !
the power of men in charge of words over men in charge of machines surpasses all wondering S WEIL
Which doesn't change the fact that government had competition in the arena of force, meaning it didn't have a monopoly. And if your government is really that bad, it's not going to be over by putting down one rebellion. You'll constantly be competing for that monopoly on force instead of owning one.
It doesn't have competition in the US for the things I mentioned such as ownership and use of nuclear weapons or the legal right to wage war. The monopoly on force exists even if you choose not to recognize it.