Sunday, December 23, 2012
Once upon a time, they were the gold standard
If you wanted the best in forensic lab work, you went to the FBI lab. And because of their reputation, they trained many local officials in their methods. Now it is looking like those methods weren't all they were cracked up to be and a lot of convictions have been brought into question.
Thousands of criminal cases at the state and local level may have relied on exaggerated testimony or false forensic evidence to convict defendants of murder, rape and other felonies.The FBI was always 50% PR and without J.Edgar and his files to protect the organization, increased oversight is making that all to clear.
The forensic experts in these cases were trained by the same elite FBI team whose members gave misleading court testimony about hair matches and later taught the local examiners to follow the same suspect practices, according to interviews and documents.
In July, the Justice Department announced a nationwide review of all cases handled by the FBI Laboratory’s hair and fibers unit before 2000 — at least 21,000 cases — to determine whether improper lab reports or testimony might have contributed to wrongful convictions.
But about three dozen FBI agents trained 600 to 1,000 state and local examiners to apply the same standards that have proved problematic.
None of the local cases is included in the federal review. As a result, legal experts say, although the federal inquiry is laudable, the number of flawed cases at the state and local levels could be even higher, and those are going uncorrected.
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