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The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath: āThe 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.ā
What went wrong? The Post continues: āOf 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratoryās 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.ā The shameful, horrifying errors were uncovered in a massive, three-year review by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project. Following revelations published in recent years, the two groups are helping the government with the countryās largest ever post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
Chillingly, as the Post continues, āthe cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.ā Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison.
The massive review raises questions about the veracity of not just expert hair testimony, but also the bite-mark and other forensic testimony offered as objective, scientific evidence to jurors who, not unreasonably, believed that scientists in white coats knew what they were talking about. As Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, put it, āThe FBIās three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.ā
This study was launched after the Post reported that flawed forensic hair matches might have led to possibly hundreds of wrongful convictions for rape, murder, and other violent crimes, dating back at least to the 1970s. In 90 percent of the cases reviewed so far, forensic examiners evidently made statements beyond the bounds of proper science. There were no scientifically accepted standards for forensic testing, yet FBI experts routinely and almost unvaryingly testified, according to the Post, āto the near-certainty of āmatchesā of crime-scene hairs to defendants, backing their claims by citing incomplete or misleading statistics drawn from their case work.ā
NACDL executive director Norman Reimer said in an interview with Associations Now that the flaws in the system had been known for years now. āWhat we were finding was that the examiners ā¦ wouldnāt just simply say that there was a microscopic similarity [between the two hairs], but they would go beyond that and say it was a 100 percent match, essentially misleading the jury into concluding that the evidence had a certain value that it didnāt actually have,ā Reimer said.
