WaPo Headline reads: "FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000" with this lead:
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.
snip
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.
It took quite a bit of time to acknowledge this, since a simple experiment of taking a few hundred hair samples and then having "experts" match them would have provided the evidence of what has taken a decade and a half to disclose.
Crime happens, and the public demands that their law enforcement apparatus finds those who did it. There is a reality that is not up for discussion, which is that most criminal evidence is as shaky as hair samples. I took on "fingerprinting" in Wikipedia a decade ago, knowing that the FBI at that time claimed that when they made an identification it was certain, 100%. I made some corrections by myself, but the "professional experts" fought back and removed them. I finally found one who was actually doing graduate work in the field, and got him to participate.
If you go on the site you wouldn't recognize what it had been, and I'm sure this would have been corrected, but I may have done it a bit earlier, since I realized that a juror could be checking out Wikipedia. But, we still have the illusion that when a witness swears that the accused was who she saw, that it is true. And she/he believes it is. There has been a slew of studies on the variables in eye witness testimony that defies a simple percentage of error, but I have my own experience.
This was 64 years ago, yes, May 1951, And I was playing outside our apartment when three men ran down the middle of the street and we got their license plate. You can still read the article in the Washington Post! They had robbed grocery store at gunpoint, and I was one of the two who the police spoke to, got the license number, and they arrested the three guys. I remember the lineup, and actually, what I recognized was the khaki jackets and couldn't be sure of the faces, but I said it was them.
There was no cross examination at the trial, and the men were convicted and served time. But, was I sure? There were other witness, including the owners and their child, so my identification wasn't the key; but I remember that it was the jacket, not their face that I had connected with them.
Perhaps it had been too easy for the so called experts to get away with their certainty of identification all those years. They compared the strands of hair, or swirls of the prints under microscopes and quantified the unique characteristics - and they were certified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. These experts weren't scientists, and had never taken a statistics course -- nor had the jurors or judge, for that matter. Yet, many scientists possessed such skills during this time. Where were they, as professionals, when these perversions of justice were taking place?
Another tool of forensic science has just fallen -- too late for those who are beyond any compensation for this systematic perversion of justice.