FBI, DOJ admits flawed hair analysis testimony against trial defendants

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice have acknowledge that expert testimony dealing with forensics evidence against defendants over a two-decade period were flawed.

According to the Washington Post, the examiners in question were part of the hair analysis unit for the FBI laboratory and 26 examiners out of 28 were said to have given testimony that favored the prosecution 95 percent of the time for 268 trials.

The review is in conjunction with the review by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project, who are looking at the evidence being questioned to ensure defendants were tried fairly.

So far in the review, 32 of the defendants received the death sentence and 14 are now deceased. However, it is reported that even though testimony was flawed, it does not mean the defendant wasn’t guilty of the crime they were tried four.

A statement from both the FBI and DOJ said, that they “are committed to ensuring that affected defendants are notified of past errors and that justice is done in every instance. The Department and FBI are also committed to ensuring the accuracy of future hair analysis testimony, as well as the application of all disciplines of forensic science.”

The co-founder of the Innocence Project, Peter Neufeld, praised the units for their work, but did say that the errors in using “microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.”

The Associated Press reported that the FBI are currently waiting for all of the cases to finish being reviewed before they analyze the causes for the errors. They did acknowledge that there weren’t proper written standards before 2012 that allowed forensic hair examiners to back up their testimony with scientific reasoning.

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