Huge Scandal at FBI: Dubious Forensic Evidence Used in Convictions of Hundreds, Possibly Thousands of People

As regular Reason readers
know, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been reviewing
thousands of cases where it may have used dubious forensic evidence
to get a conviction. Today’s Washington Post
fills us in on how that’s been going:

Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the
Justice Department as part of a
massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI
lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency,
government officials said.

The findings troubled the bureau, and it stopped the review of
convictions last August. Case reviews resumed this month at the
order of the Justice Department, the officials said.

Oh.

The issue is the use of hair found at a crime scene to prove a
defendant was present. According to the Post, “FBI policy
has stated since at least the 1970s that a hair association cannot
be used as positive identification, like fingerprints,” yet “agents
regularly testified to the near-certainty of matches” in the 1980s
and ’90s. A spokesman for the Justice Department told that paper
that the bureau’s claims regularly “exceeded the limits of
science.”

In many of these cases, of course, there is other evidence of
the defendants’ guilt. But that just means it’s all the more
important to have as speedy a review as is possible. Instead, the
government has dragged its feet. According to the Post,
officials have “had enough information to review all hair unit
cases” since 1999, but it failed to start the process
until recently.

At this point the authorities have made their way through only
about 10 percent of the 2,600 cases under review. It has made more
progress on the subset where the convict faces the death penalty,
but even then around a third of the 45 cases have not been
reexamined.

To read the rest of the Post‘s report, go
here. For more on the problem of death-row errors, go here.