FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes [Hundreds Convicted Using Faulty FBI Tool]

[rodeodance]

Source: washpost.


FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes

By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 18, 2007; Page A01

Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.

The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup.


In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading." Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence."

A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis.

But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau's managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show.


Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/17/AR2007111701681.html?hpid=topnews

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this was the headline on the front page-but the more neutral sounding one is on the click!

Hundreds Convicted Using Faulty FBI Tool

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. which is worse,

false positives, or false negatives?

with a false positive, innocents sit in jail.
with the other, guilty folks are still at it.

[iamjoy]

2. False Positives

when an innocent person sits in jail a guilty one goes free

Tell that to the next RWer who says it's better to jail a few innocents than to let some guilty ones go free

[kickysnana]

3. In order to be free we need proof of guilt otherwise we will all be in jail. n/t

[ret5hd]

6. Are you serious??? (nt)

[ChairmanAgnostic]

7. only partially.

a false positive is twice as bad, though, because they quit searching for the real culprit.

False negatives - the price we pay for democracy and a bill of rights

[ret5hd]

8. Explain then what part you ARE serious about.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

9. I am serious about my need for more tea.

False negatives have a bunch of problems, too.
It allows the guilty to pass (sometimes)
it allows defense attorneys to use bad results to create questions about reasonable doubt.
it causes those doing investigations to become worried whether they are wrong, or whether the prosecution or the lab is really worth working with. (Check out houston's criminal prosecution history if you want a primer on that problem)

There is a larger societal cost, too. If one guilty person appears from testing to be innocent, others are naturally placed under the microscope, to their dismay, cost, damage, and more.

as for false positives, here in Illinois we released 17 people from death row. In some cases, confessions were beaten out of hem, in others, the prosecution hid exculpatory evidence. In yet others, no testing or bad testing was done. I suspect they may have an opinion on bad convictions worth listening to.

[Trillo]

15. edit, self deleted

[JTFrog]

16. You picked an interesting screen name. n/t

[varkam]

19. It is better to let ten guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person. eom

[sam sarrha]

4. sooo.. how many innocent prisoners were executed by those fools

[Joe Chi Minh]

5. "'By stonewalling and delaying the release, Justice has ensured that

wrongfully convicted citizens are deprived of their right to appeal or seek post-conviction relief because the statute of limitations in many states has expired,'" said David Colapinto, the lawyer for the group."

Whoever is responsible for that should himself/herself be imprisoned, hard time.

[John Q. Citizen]

10. Yep, criminal negligence,

[Joe Chi Minh]

12. You really think it was negligence, not deliberate?

[John Q. Citizen]

13. It might be hard to prove intent, but criminal negligence should be a slam dunk.

And it carries criminal consequences like prison time.

What I think isn't really relevant, what can be proved is relevant.

Yes, I think they probably did it on purpose.

[Joe Chi Minh]

21. Thanks for the explanation.

[flashl]

14. If its been known since 1997 is it deliberate?

1997 Congressional Hearings - Intelligence and Security

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
Mr. Chairman and Other Distinguished Members of the United States House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime:

Thank you for affording me this opportunity to speak on behalf of my client, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), a non-profit, non-partisan, professional bar association with 9,000 direct members, and 78 state and local affiliates with another 25,000 members, including private criminal defense lawyers, public defenders, judges and law professors committed to preserving fairness within America's criminal justice system.

We commend you, Mr. Chairman, for convening these important oversight hearings into the recent revelations by the report of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) into the liberty-threatening misconduct and mishaps of the forensic laboratory of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI Laboratory: An Investigation into Laboratory Practices and Alleged Misconduct in Explosives-Related and Other Cases (DOJ April 1997) ("Lab Report"). We speak from a non-governmental perspective about the importance of restoring integrity to, and citizen confidence in the FBI lab.

...

Paul Craig Roberts, "Whatever Happened to Justice?," Washington Times, May 7, 1997, at A13, wherein he observes: "Getting convictions has become more important than getting the right person. A recent 517-page report by the inspector general of the Justice Department shows what has happened. * * * he report concludes that the FBI's explosives expert and key witness in the World Trade Center trial 'worked backward.' Instead of objectively examining the evidence, the agent 'first determined the result he wanted and then tailored his testimony to reach that result.' The inspector general is 'deeply troubled that his testimony on direct examination may have misled the court.'" In the Oklahoma City case, the report concludes that the FBI 'repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without a scientific basis.' When the FBI ceases to give suspects the benefit of the doubt and, instead, tailors evidence to obtain their conviction, justice is dead."

[Joe Chi Minh]

22. Why not. Powerful people make their own rules in the US with impunity, and

in some areas, have done so for a long time.

I seem to remember Joe Bageant recently quoting someone to the effect that nations are only turfs marked out by gangsters as their own, and history chronicles it quite voluminously, doesn't it?

[randr]

11. One of the priciples of human justice

is that it is better for many guilty people to go free than for 1 person to be imprisoned wrongfully.
Somewhere in my way back mind, in history class I believe, during a discussion of the Magna Carta, this issue came up.

[Trillo]

18. When was that ever practically realized?

[Trillo]

17. consider insiders versus outsiders.

For the "inners", it appears there's a dearth of false negatives over time.
For the "outers", it appears there's a dearth of false positives over time.

Therefore, it seems we can conclude these aren't errors, but are part of a deliberate design; that the system and its controllers knows the differences: that the system implements both false negatives and positives with malicious intent.

[Trillo]

20. I misued the word "dearth, I should have used its antonym.

my post should have read:

For the "inners", it appears there's a dearth abundance of false negatives over time.
For the "outers", it appears there's a dearth abundance of false positives over time.

Therefore, it seems we can conclude these aren't errors, but are part of a deliberate design; that the system and its controllers knows the differences: that the system implements both false negatives and positives with malicious intent.