More proof that innocent people have been
executed. Or condemned to rot in prisons as rapists, child molesters,
arsonists, murderers:
Prosecution forensic “experts” have bee shown
to be biased, negligent, and / or incompetent, resulting in false opinions to
support prosecution theories of guilt. See the Texas Arson expert scandal, the
many case reversals after DNA review, the many other reports about false
fingerprint and blood evidence, as well as all the revelations about police and
prosecutors withholding contrary evidence from defense and court.
As reported in the WASHINGTON POST, APRIL 18,
2015,
Byline: Stephen Hsu
FBI OVERSTATED FORENSIC HAIR MATCHES IN NEARLY
ALL TRIALS BEFORE 2000
2,500 =
cases FBI Lab reported a match
342 = cases reviewed so far. (1,200 remain,
including 700 in which police / prosecutors have not responded to requests for
transcripts, etc.)
268 = trials in which hair evidence was used by
prosecution.
257 = cases in which FBI examiners gave
“flawed” testimony (more than 95% of the cases)
200 = death penalty cases reviewed so far
32 = death penalty cases with flawed forensic
testimony.
14 = died by execution or on death row.
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.
The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not
other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state
prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine
whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously
exonerated.
The admissions mark a watershed in one of the
country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s
courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal
analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the
courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected
problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like
hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions
in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.
In a statement, the FBI and Justice Department
vowed to continue to devote resources to address all cases and said they “are
committed to ensuring that affected defendants are notified of past errors and
that justice is done in every instance. The Department and the FBI are also
committed to ensuring the accuracy of future hair analysis, as well as the
application of all disciplines of forensic science.”
Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence
Project, commended the FBI and department for the collaboration but said, “The
FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants
was a complete disaster.”
“We need an exhaustive investigation that looks
at how the FBI, state governments that relied on examiners trained by the FBI
and the courts allowed this to happen and why it wasn’t stopped much sooner,”
Neufeld said.
Norman L. Reimer, the NACDL’s executive
director, said, “Hopefully, this project establishes a precedent so that in
future situations it will not take years to remediate the injustice.”
While unnamed federal officials previously
acknowledged widespread problems, the FBI until now has withheld
comment because findings might not be representative.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former
prosecutor, called on the FBI and Justice Department to notify defendants in
all 2,500 targeted cases involving an FBI hair match about the problem even if
their case has not been completed, and to redouble efforts in the
three-year-old review to retrieve information on each case.
“These findings are appalling and chilling in
their indictment of our criminal justice system, not only for potentially
innocent defendants who have been wrongly imprisoned and even executed, but for
prosecutors who have relied on fabricated and false evidence despite their
intentions to faithfully enforce the law,” Blumenthal said.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E.
Grassley (R-Iowa) and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.),
urged the bureau to conduct “a root-cause analysis” to prevent future
breakdowns.
“It is critical that the Bureau identify and
address the systemic factors that allowed this far-reaching problem to occur
and continue for more than a decade,” the lawmakers wrote FBI Director James B.
Comey on March 27, as findings were being finalized.
The FBI is waiting to complete all reviews to
assess causes but has acknowledged that hair examiners until 2012 lacked
written standards defining scientifically appropriate and erroneous ways to
explain results in court. The bureau expects this year to complete similar
standards for testimony and lab reports for 19 forensic disciplines.
Federal authorities launched the
investigation in 2012 after The Washington Post reported that
flawed forensic hair matches might have led to the convictions of
hundreds of potentially innocent people
since at
least the 1970s, typically for murder, rape and other violent crimes nationwide.
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.
In reality, there is no accepted research on
how often hair from different people may appear the same. Since 2000, the lab
has used visual hair comparison to rule out someone as a possible source of
hair or in combination with more accurate DNA testing.
Warnings about the problem have been mounting.
In 2002, the FBI reported that its own DNA testing found that examiners
reported false hair matches more than 11 percent of the time. In the District,
the only jurisdiction where defenders and prosecutors have re-investigated all
FBI hair convictions, three of
seven defendants whose
trials included flawed FBI testimony have been exonerated through DNA testing
since 2009, and courts have exonerated two
more men.
All five served 20 to 30 years in prison for rape or murder.
University of Virginia law professor Brandon L.
Garrett said the results reveal a “mass disaster” inside the criminal justice
system, one that it has been unable to self-correct because courts rely on
outdated precedents admitting scientifically invalid testimony at trial and,
under the legal doctrine of finality, make it difficult for convicts to
challenge old evidence.
“The tools don’t exist to handle systematic
errors in our criminal justice system,” Garrett said. “The FBI deserves every
recognition for doing something really remarkable here. The problem is there
may be few judges, prosecutors or defense lawyers who are able or willing to do
anything about it.”
Federal authorities are offering new DNA
testing in cases with errors, if sought by a judge or prosecutor, and agreeing
to drop procedural objections to appeals in federal cases.
However, biological evidence in the cases often
is lost or unavailable. Among states, only California and Texas specifically
allow appeals when experts recant or scientific advances undermine forensic
evidence at trial.
Defense attorneys say scientifically invalid
forensic testimony should be considered as violations of due process, as courts
have held with false or misleading testimony.
The FBI searched more than 21,000 federal and
state requests to its hair comparison unit from 1972 through 1999, identifying
for review roughly 2,500 cases where examiners declared hair matches.
Reviews of 342 defendants’ convictions were
completed as of early March, the NACDL and Innocence Project reported. In
addition to the 268 trials in which FBI hair evidence was used against
defendants, the review found cases in which defendants pleaded guilty, FBI
examiners did not testify, did not assert a match or gave exculpatory
testimony.
When such cases are included, by the FBI’s
count examiners made statements exceeding the limits of science in about 90
percent of testimonies, including 34 death-penalty cases.
The findings likely scratch the surface. The
FBI said as of mid-April that reviews of about 350 trial testimonies and 900
lab reports are nearly complete, with about 1,200 cases remaining.
The bureau said it is difficult to check cases
before 1985, when files were computerized. It has been unable to review 700
cases because police or prosecutors did not respond to requests for
information.
Also, the same FBI examiners whose work is
under review taught 500 to 1,000 state and local crime lab analysts to testify
in the same ways.
Texas, New York and North Carolina authorities
are reviewing their hair examiner cases, with ad hoc efforts underway in about
15 other states.
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