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

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!

[Anonymous Coward]

Truth & justice & the American Way = 0.

As a limey, I always thought they were a list of options. After all, if "the American way" incorporated truth and justice, you would be able to say merely "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.

Re:I'm shocked, I tell you!

[Archtech]

Lord Acton hit the nail on the head. 128 years ago he wrote that, ""Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". Unfortunately, no one has ever devised a way of running societies without giving power to certain individuals. With a very small number of honourable exceptions (which prove the rule), that power has corrupted them. We see it around us almost every day, and the people who rise to control entire nation states display the corruption due to power in singularly pure and concentrated form.

The technicians working in the FBI labs had a very limited form of power, but within that particular domain their sway was almost unchallenged. What expert would dispute the word of the mighty FBI, what lawyer would challenge it, what judge or jury would not be impressed by it? And the technicians' bosses had more power, which was assuredly focused on the important task of getting convictions. I rather doubt that any lab technician at the FBI ever got much career advancement out of frequently discrediting prosecution evidence. Every bureaucratic organization measures itself according to a limited set of drastically oversimplified metrics, and conviction rate is an important metric for any law-enforcement organization. The higher up the tree you go, the greater the desire for more convictions, and the less the concern for whether they are justified or not.

"One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters".
- Aldous Huxley

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

[Anonymous Coward]

simple solution. you mix in a control group, and you don't tell the people who determine the match which one is the 'real one'. That way, they can't have a bias, unless the people preparing the material secretly mark it or something, but nothing's perfect.

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

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

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

[AmiMoJo]

The only acceptable solution (if you care about justice) is to stop putting so much weight on fingerprint evidence. It's basically worthless. The weight applied to DNA evidence needs to be scaled right back too.

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

[blippo]

I think that that's actually how it works here in Sweden.

I seem to remember that it's also not always good. Since they only answer questions, more open ended searches are seldom performed.
In one case where an elk killed a woman (unique case, apparently) the police got hung up on her husbands lawn mower (!) which happened to have traces
of blood on the blades (which in fact could have been rust combined with other biological material ) and spent a year or so trying to convict him for murder,
until someone actually saw a YouTube clip of an elk-attack and asked the lab if it could have in fact been an elk. Answer: Yes. Most likely.

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[CrimsonAvenger]

For the Americans reading the above, replace the word "elk" with "moose". European elk is NOT the same as American elk (wapiti)....

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[Dragon Bait]

The only acceptable solution (if you care about justice) is to stop putting so much weight on fingerprint evidence. It's basically worthless. The weight applied to DNA evidence needs to be scaled right back too.

I'm not questioning that you're correct, but since eye witness testimony is even worse evidence than either fingerprint or DNA, what sort of evidence do you think should be accepted?

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.

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[davester666]

this assumes the FBI and/or Prosecutors actually want accurate results.

they don't anymore, if they ever did.

time spent on fingerprint analysis, dna testing, whatever with the result of "this is not the person you want" = 100% waste of time for everyone involved.
If the result is "this is the person you want" = 100% useful time for everyone involved.

And if an investigation into a crime takes an extended amount of time, but it is focused on a specific individual, the pressure to ONLY find that the evidence makes the person more guilty gets greater and greater [as finding something that says "this person is innocent" means more and more time and money has been wasted and the only head sticking up is the guy in the department pushing for innocence].

For the 'prosecution' side of the equation, you ONLY get advancement for finding people guilty.

And the rationale that this is all OK is that the defense lawyer should have been able to poke holes in the evidence if the person truly was innocent.

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[localman]

It's happened with arson experts too. I remember reading a horrible story of a guy convicted of burning his family to death because all the experts described these "pour patterns" in the burnt floor, signifying liquid accelerant. After he was put to death, they figured out it was just carpet glue patterns.

Between the way police feel free to shoot fleeing non-dangerous subjects these days, planting evidence in full view of other officers, lying on the stand to get convictions, and the labs and experts from every field falsifying results, I'd say our legal system is a disaster.

Re:Forensic evidence should not be subjective

[AK Marc]

Conviction is more important than truth. The adversarial system is the problem. The poor person in the equation doesn't get fair treatment. Someone accused of something is presumed guilty until proven otherwise. This wasn't the intention, but it is the reality. If you are on trial, the jury assumes you are guilty, or they wouldn't be wasting everyone's time with a trial. Go on, ask people what they think about people who say they weren't speeding, and the only "proof" of their "crime" is a cop saying they did it. Everyone assumes the person is guilty. "why would the cop lie" "The guy did it, and is lying to try to get out of it"

The criminal DUI trial I was a juror for went pretty much like that.

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

[RuffMasterD]

It's not just the police and courts, it's the jury too. I was a juror a few years ago on a case based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Most of the jurors simply couldn't accept that a real world case doesn't always rely on 3D slow motion video of bullets piercing internal organs and perfect DNA matches. 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. If someone presented DNA evidence then the jury would have decided guilt without deliberation.

Re:How many other flaws

[tommeke100]

This is already the case in many smaller and traffic offences (In Belgium these are handled in Police Court, I'm sure there's a type of court like this in the US as well). It's basically your word against theirs and there is no way the judge will take yours. Same with slander or resisting arrest. Often the judge won't even hear your defence if you don't have a lawyer. You start talking and they just go: "listen, this is the offence, that's the fine. next!". They basically don't have time to treat proper attention to all cases. It's only when there's been a murder or something more serious that the actual court system with proper defence and serious proceedings will take place.

Re:How many other flaws

[Kiwikwi]

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.

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.

Re:How many other flaws

[Ol Olsoc]

What if justice and truth don't actually benefit society?

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

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.

Re:Minimum retrial

[tomhath]

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.

Easy to fix

[Orgasmatron]

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...

Re:Easy to fix

[tomhath]

First, this doesn't appear to be perjury (which is a felony).

Second, some penal codes (e.g. California) do consider perjury at a capital trial to be a capital offense.

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.

Perjury is more deliberate

[Bruce66423]

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...

Re:The wider social context - people distrust scie

[jeti]

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.

Re:shit

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

But when does it become 'accepted science'?

[Bruce66423]

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.

14 already executed....

[Computershack]

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

Re:14 already executed....

[jcr]

I'm in favor of the death penalty in principle, but I really can't trust the government to only kill people who have it coming. That being the case, I would reserve it for politicians only.

-jcr

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,

Breath Easy!

[AndyKron]

If you've done nothing wrong you don't have anything to worry about, right?

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.

Re:The wider social context - people distrust scie

[david_thornley]

People distrust scientists because, particularly with the global warming fiasco, "scientists" have been corrupt and unscientific.

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?