The headline below is practically a crime itself. The issue is not "flaws in hair analysis," but flaws (exaggerations and lies) in FBI crime lab testimony about hair analysis for many, many years, overstating conclusions and certainty rates in a huge number of cases..
We all expect, from decades of Law & Order and CSI, that those white-lab-coated experts from the crime lab are providing as close to objective truth as possible when they get up on the stand. Except … they aren't. And the "errors" and bogus info they provide almost always supports the prosecution.
'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.
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, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.
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.
And this isn't just the FBI, of course. State and county and city crime labs are just as bad, if not worse. They are usually funded by the police departments they are investigating for; in some cases, their funding comes from the number of convictions they help land. Because that's not going to incent certain behavior, right?
'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. In reality, 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.'
Worse, this isn't new news. Criticisms about this sort of thing are over a decade old, but law enforcement, including the FBI, and the courts have been extremely slow in addressing it, either denying there was a problem, or that the problem was widespread, or creating new processes to keep it from recurring.
Human systems are only as good as the humans in them. Assuming they are the good guys because we want them to be is cruising for disappointment — if not conviction from fraudulent testimony. Remember this the next time someone says …
– "Well, the crime lab said it, so it must be true."
– "Capital punishment is fine because only the guilty get executed."
– "The FBI can certainly be entrusted with backdoor access to our data because they will never, ever, use it in an unjust or untrustworthy fashion."
More on this story in an article from last year: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/04/fbi_s_flawed_forensics_expert_testimony_hair_analysis_bite_marks_fingerprints.html
FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades
Forensic hair matches were overstated in many cases heard before 2000, including those of 32 defendants sentenced to death, the FBI and the Justice Department acknowledged after a review.
Gee, it's almost like crime dramas are just propaganda to convince you that cops and prosecutors are good people and not actually liars and cheats or something.
+Stan Pedzick Which is why one of my favorite crime dramas was Perry Mason. (Gardner was a pioneer in one of the earliest Innocence Projects, "The Court of Last Resort".)
I actually do think most cops and prosecutors are good people. I think most people are good people. But not all are, and even being good does not mean being a paragon and beyond making practical or ethical missteps. "Trust, but verify," as St Ronald said.