In a shocking admission of scandalous proportions, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently acknowledged that over a two-decade period spanning from the 1980s through the 1990s, an elite group of federal forensic examiners overstated the evidentiary value of microscopic hair analysis. Given that many of these so-called experts trained local state examiners, a special investigative integrity unit should be established in our state to review every single case or trial in which such testimony was offered.
Here are some of the results of the ongoing federal investigation so far: Twenty-six of 28 forensic examiners in the FBI laboratory microscopic hair comparison unit overstated forensic matches favoring the prosecution case. This occurred in more than 95 percent of the 228 trials reviewed to date. Thirty-two of the defendants were sentenced to death and 14 have been executed or died in prison.
