FBI to review thousands of old cases for contaminated evidence

[struggle4progress]

Source: MSNBC

By Isolde Raftery, msnbc.com
Updated at 9:51 p.m. ET:

Months after the Washington Post revealed that lab technicians at the FBI mishandled evidence, resulting in at least three wrongful convictions, the Department of Justice has announced it will review of thousands of old cases ...

A reporter at the Post had been working on a story about Donald Gates, a D.C. man released after DNA evidence proved his innocence, when he learned about Frederic Whitehurst, an FBI lab chemist who blew the whistle on the FBI Laboratory in the mid-1990s. Whitehurst said he watched colleagues contaminate evidence and, in court, overstate the significance of their matches ...

When Whitehurst, a chemist with a doctoral degree from Duke, arrived at the FBI crime lab in 1986, the first thing he noticed was that the place was, as he called it, a pigsty. The equipment was outdated and there was a film of black soot coating the counters – a dust from the vents that the agents called “black rain” ...

But other problems arose, Whitehurst told msnbc.com. He learned that an agent had, for the previous nine years, rewritten his scientific reports to support the prosecution. When he complained, he said he was told the agent hadn’t done anything wrong ...

Read more: http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/12/12708918-fbi-to-review-thousands-of-old-cases-for-contaminated-evidence?lite

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[MADem]

2. Wow, I wonder if that putzy tech who contaminated the OWS chain and the CD player from the

Fox murder got his or her training at that FBI lab!

There's no excuse for labs to be pigsties. They should aim for labs that look better than the ones on the crime dramas!

[struggle4progress]

3. This is a very old whistle-blower story from the mid-1990s, that just hasn't

played out completely yet: FIFTEEN YEARS after we first learned the FBI was FAKING evidence for the prosecution, we've FINALLY decided to REVIEW some convictions, because it finally DAWNED on us that the convictions might NOT be FAIR

[MADem]

4. It's certainly unfortunate at a minimum...but don't we always hear how the freaking FBI has the

forensic "gold standard" happening?

I am glad they're reviewing all of it; crying shame it took so damn long.