An unprecedented federal review of old criminal cases has uncovered as many as 27 death penalty convictions in which FBI forensic experts may have mistakenly linked defendants to crimes with exaggerated scientific testimony.
At issue is a
once-widespread practice by which some FBI experts exaggerated the significance
of “matches” drawn from microscopic analysis of hair found at crime scenes.
Since at least the 1970s, written FBI Laboratory reports typically stated that
a hair association could not be used as positive identification. However, on
the witness stand, several agents went beyond the science and testified that
their hair analysis was a near-certain match.
It is not known how many of the cases involve errors, how many
led to wrongful convictions or how many mistakes may now jeopardise valid
convictions. Those questions will be explored as the review continues. But it
has already led to an 11th-hour stay of execution in Mississippi in May, after
the Justice Department acknowledged flaws in forensic testimony by the FBI that
helped convict Willie Jerome Manning of the 1992 murders of two university
students. The 44-year-old had been hours away from receiving a lethal
injection. Federal officials have offered to retest the DNA in the case.
The number of other cases under review places the examination
firmly at the heart of the debate about the death penalty. The death row cases
are among the first 120 convictions identified as potentially problematic among
more than 21,700 FBI Laboratory files being examined. The review was announced
last July by the FBI and the Justice Department, in consultation with the
Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
(NACDL).
The unusual collaboration came after it emerged last year that
authorities had known for years that flawed forensic work by FBI hair examiners
may have led to convictions of potentially innocent people, but officials had
not aggressively investigated problems or notified defendants.
The new review listed examples of scientifically invalid testimony,
including claiming to associate a hair with a single person “to the exclusion
of all others”, or to suggest a probability for such a match from past
casework.
Whatever the review’s findings, the initiative is pushing state
and local labs to take similar measures.
Last week, the Texas Forensic Science
Commission directed all labs under its jurisdiction to take the first step to
scrutinise hair cases, in a state that has executed more defendants than any
other since 1982. Separately, FBI officials said their intention is to review
and disclose problems in capital cases even after a defendant has been
executed.
Independent.co.uk
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