WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison 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, The Washington Post reported.
Twenty-six of the 28 examiners overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95% of the 268 trials reviewed so far, the Post reported Saturday, citing information from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project.
The organizations are assisting the government with the post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence and provided the statistics under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions, the Post reported.
The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death; of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the Post reported in a story posted on its website.
Want to read more? Click here.
This is horrendous. I am stunned.
Me too, hair evidence was relied on quite heavily before DNA.
Mitochondrial DNA evidence is a valid and valuable forensic, but this?