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.(Photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images)
The Justice Department and FBI have acknowledged for the first time that for more than 20 years before 2000, almost every examiner in the FBI's elite microscopic hair comparison unit gave flawed testimony in trials,
The Washington Post reported.
The
newspaper reported that 26 out of 28 examiners with the hair analysis unit exaggerated forensic matches in ways that benefited prosecutors in more than 95% of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project.
The groups are assisting the government with the country's largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence, the newspaper said. The groups agreed with the government to publicly release results after reviewing the first 200 convictions.
Neither of the groups, which advocate on behalf of the wrongly convicted, responded immediately to calls and e-mails from USA TODAY. The criminal defense association said the two groups intend to release a statement Monday. The FBI also did not respond to calls for comment.
In a statement to the
Post, the FBI and Justice Department said they will continue to review all cases and 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 cases the groups reviewed include 32 in which the defendants were sentenced to death, the
Post reported. Of those, 14 defendants were executed or died in prison.
The
Post notes that the FBI errors alone do not mean there was no other evidence to convict defendants. The newspaper said defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and D.C. are being notified of the mistakes in case there are grounds for appeals. So far, four defendants have been exonerated because of the overstated testimony, the newspaper said.
The FBI has not explained why the examiners misidentified matches and will review all the cases first, but it has acknowledged that hair examiners until 2012 did not have written standards for correctly explaining the results in court, the newspaper said.
Federal authorities began the review in 2012 after the
Post reported that flawed forensic hair matches might have led to hundreds of convictions of potentially innocent people going back to the 1970s.
Powered By WizardRSS.com |
Full Text RSS Feed
