Over the weekend, the Washington Post ran a story that begins as follows: 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. In a nutshell, analysts “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,” while “[i]n reality, there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same.” The story emphasizes that there may be other evidence of guilt in many of the cases, and that the cases that have been reviewed so far are only a small fraction of the cases that have been identified as candidates for review. I couldn’t find online the FBI/USDOJ formal acknowledgement referenced in the article. This FBI web page notes the existence of the review and states that “microscopic hair comparison analysis is a valid scientific technique still conducted by the FBI Laboratory” and that “[t]he science of [...]
Faculty Coordinators
