cb1000rider wrote:I'm not sure what this actually means. They "overstated" the forensic match.
Does that mean that they said there was an 85% of a match rather than an 80% chance of a match?
Or does it mean that they indicated a match where there was absolutely no credible scientific evidence of a match?
There are two extremes with very different impacts. Of course, the article doesn't tell us...
'....nearly every examiner in the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials where they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than 20-year period before 2000."
So either every single person that has worked there is a conspiring liar and no one in 20 years blew the whistle, or it's a little less intentional than that.
One thing does speak to me though:
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.
You guy who continue to be pro-death penalty need to understand that this cost is going to be executing innocent people from time to time... I'll support it when: 1) It costs less than life. 2) It's factually infallible.
Mmmm....we have a government that routinely lies. It has done things like conduct medical experiments on Black men for DECADES without it being revealed. Remember who the FBI accused of being involved in the Madrid train bombing? This is hardly the first time the FBI has been caught lying, SYSTEMICALLY:
The FBI described the fingerprint match as "100% verified". According to the court documents in judge Ann Aiken's decision, this information was largely "fabricated and concocted by the FBI and DOJ". When the FBI finally sent Mayfield's fingerprints to the Spanish authorities, they contested the matching of the fingerprints from Brandon Mayfield to the ones associated with the Madrid bombing. Further, the Spanish authorities informed the FBI they had other suspects in the case, Moroccan immigrants not linked to anyone in the USA. The FBI completely disregarded all of the information from the Spanish authorities, and proceeded to spy on Mayfield and his family further.
Before his arrest, Spanish authorities informed the FBI in a letter from April 13, that they reviewed the fingerprint on the bag as a negative match of Mayfield's fingerprint,[4] though this letter was not communicated to Mayfield's attorneys. On May 19 the Spanish authorities announced that the fingerprints actually belonged to an Algerian national, Ouhnane Daoud; Brandon Mayfield was released from prison when the international press broke the story the next day — May 20, 2004.[3] A gag order remained in force for the next few days. By May 25, the case was dismissed by the judge, who ordered the return of seized evidence and unsealing of documents pertaining to his arrest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield
How about the Atlanta Olympics bombing?
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997 ... ning-video
FBI Director Louis Freeh launched an internal investigation in October into allegations that Jewell -- initially hailed as a hero for discovering the knapsack bomb minutes before it exploded July 27 -- was tricked into talking to agents who said they wanted his help in making a training video.
How about the infamous Whitey Bulger case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger
The FBI helped cover up his crimes, including murder, for almost 20 years.
Throughout the 1980s, Bulger, Flemmi and Weeks ran shakedowns throughout eastern Massachusetts, e.g., extortion, loansharking, bookmaking, truck hijackings and arms trafficking. State and federal agencies were repeatedly stymied in their attempts to build cases against Bulger and his inner circle. This was caused by several factors. Among them was the trio's paranoid fear of wiretaps, South Boston's code of silence, and also corruption within the Boston Police Department, the Massachusetts State Police, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation
.
I could go on with this, there's plenty more, but consider another article on the OP:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/cri ... story.html
In August, Harold Deadman, a senior hair analyst with the D.C. police who spent 15 years with the FBI lab, forwarded the evidence to the private lab and reported that the 13 hairs he found included head and limb hairs. One exhibited Caucasian characteristics, Deadman added. Tribble is black.
But the private lab’s DNA tests irrefutably showed that the 13 hairs came from three human sources, each of African origin, except for one — which came from a dog.
“Such is the true state of hair microscopy,” Levick wrote. “Two FBI-trained analysts, James Hilverda and Harold Deadman, could not even distinguish human hairs from canine hairs.”
Yet:
Key evidence at each of their trials came from separate FBI experts — not Malone — who swore that their scientific analysis proved with near certainty that Tribble’s and Odom’s hair was at the respective crime scenes.
You can't reconcile these facts and dismiss FBI testimony as an error or mistake. It was perjury. Furthermore:
In the discipline of hair and fiber analysis, only the work of FBI Special Agent Michael P. Malone was questioned. Even though Justice Department and FBI officials knew that the discipline had weaknesses and that the lab lacked protocols — and learned that examiners’ “matches” were often wrong — they kept their reviews limited to Malone.
That's a conspiracy to obstruct justice. It wasn't a mistake or an error, it was deliberate with foreknowledge:
In 1974, researchers acknowledged that visual comparisons are so subjective that different analysts can reach different conclusions about the same hair. The FBI acknowledged in 1984 that such analysis cannot positively determine that a hair found at a crime scene belongs to one particular person.
Yet they continued this kind of nonsense testimony until 1999.
