WASHINGTON
— The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that
nearly every examiner in the FBI Laboratory's microscopic hair
comparison 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, The Washington Post reported.
Twenty-six
of the 28 examiners overstated forensic matches in ways that favored
prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far,
the Post reported Saturday, citing information from the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project.
The
organizations are assisting the government with the post-conviction
review of questioned forensic evidence and provided the statistics under
an agreement with the government to release results after the review of
the first 200 convictions, the Post reported.
The
cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death; of those, 14
have been executed or died in prison, the Post reported in a story
posted on its website.
The
FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a
convict's guilt, the Post said. Defendants and federal and state
prosecutors in 46 states and the District of Columbia are being notified
to determine whether there are grounds for appeals, according to the
newspaper. Four defendants were previously exonerated.
In
a statement released to the Post, 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."
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 Post reported. The bureau expects this year to
complete similar standards for testimony and lab reports for 19 forensic
disciplines, the newspaper said.
Federal
authorities launched the investigation in 2012 after the 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, the Post reported. In reality, according to the
newspaper, 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.
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