The FBI and the DOJ, working with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is formally acknowledging that nearly all of the hair match evidence testimony its experts provided from the middle 1970s through the year 2000 was flawed and significantly overstated the likelihood of a match.
From the Post …
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 …
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.
It is important to note that these convictions did not rest entirely on hair match evidence. But if it weren’t an important part of the case, prosecutors would not have presented it. The upshot is that at least as practiced at the time, this was junk science.
