FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html

by protomyth • 11 years ago

338 78 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

dmurray• 11 years ago

How does this not get all FBI testimony thrown out by judges? If there is an organisation who pays its employees to lie in court, and they are known to suffer no ill consequences for lying, all of those employees' testimony should be considered worthless.

themartorana• 11 years ago

I fear that even with this gross miscarriage of justice over decades, people may not be granted a retrial. It's the entire reason the Innocence Project exists.

http://www.innocenceproject.org/free-innocent/improve-the-la...

I've never understood how the possibility of new evidence doesn't immediately reopen a case (in general). I thought we wanted real, actual, blind justice based only on facts and absolutely nothing else. It turns out it is rarely that simple.

Retric• 11 years ago

MCRed5• 11 years ago

All people have an agenda. Their agenda generally favors themselves in some way or another.

We, as the potential victims of injustice want a real, actual, scientific, blind justice system that presumes innocence and requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, checked by a jury that can nullify laws, and the like.

Politicians want to be "tough on crime" so they appoint judges and prosecutors who get convictions. Judges want to be re-elected because they are "tough on crime" (in places where judges are elected) Prosecutors want to have a successful career so they will do anything they can get away with to get a conviction. The police want to have the case be off their hands and to be "closed" so that their stats look good because it's good for their career because the Mayor wants to be "tough on crime" and so the police find the first plausible suspect and try to build a case.

All these organizations are in cahoots, literally, and so no prosecutor is going to indict a judge or cop unless they absolutely have to.

So long as the public can be lead to believe they live in a society with the "rule of law" not the "rule of man" then nothing more needs to be done. And the public is very gullible! (Especially when you control the schools and you raise them to be gullible.)

IT's not that these people are evil. ITs that they are self interested.

The founding fathers attempted to put in checks and balances and they did a damn good job.

But over the past 200 years, they have been systematically eroded.

task_queue• 11 years ago

Conviction rates matter. Also the justice system "congestion" that judges and prosecutors are always pointing to as an excuse for their failure to uphold real justice.

ars• 11 years ago

They didn't lie, they believed that the hair really matched.

The problem was that the method they used, i.e. how they were taught, was incorrect.

So it's not so easy to throw it out as you might suspect - it's the job of jury to decide if the evidence is "good" (they hear lots of evidence, much of it conflicting). True, the jury relied on false information on what counts as good. But because the jury accepted the evidence undoing that is not as simple as you think unless there are specific laws about it.

Riseed• 11 years ago

Perhaps we are lacking in specific laws about reopening such cases (I do not claim to know). However, I think the lack of specific laws (and/or the difficulty in creating them) is one reason there exists a general law about it: clemency.

spacemanmatt2• 11 years ago

Doesn't seem like they lived up to the "beyond a reasonable shadow of doubt" standard in the methodology, whether they believed they were telling the truth or not. The methods could not support the level of certainty they were obligated to obtain.

scotty792• 11 years ago

Too big to fail?

r00fus• 11 years ago

Justice needs a meta-moderation function.

smtucker• 11 years ago

It does have one. But the situation has to be very bad for enough people to be willing invoke it.

ChristianBundy• 11 years ago

Am I missing something, or are you talking about a violent revolution?

smsm425• 11 years ago

That's what voting is for. But so far it's not working very well - most people prefer "tough on crime" to "honest and impartial judicial system".

datashovel2• 11 years ago

This only reinforces my perspective that even highest levels of law enforcement need to be operating in a fully transparent way.

researcher88• 11 years ago

Reminded me of George Carlin's last standup special, where he said "it's part of their [cops'] job to commit perjury whenever it helps the state's case":

https://youtu.be/jgxyCudDiM4

fiatmoney• 11 years ago

The fact that the matching process is not double-blind indicates that it is designed to be corrupt.

polymatter• 11 years ago

Not being double-blind makes it cheaper. Hence takes less budget, lower taxes, everybody cheers.

Anybody proposing to make it double-blind is going to need to find the money, either from other departments or by raising taxes. Without a chorus of public support behind them, this is a very hard sell. And easily reversed after the next election.

mikeash• 11 years ago

I'm constantly amazed at how terrible criminal forensic science seems to be. Everything except DNA matching appears to be no better than voodoo, and even the DNA stuff is tricky. Is there something about this particular field that attracts charlatans and incompetents? Is it purely a motivational problem, wherein the people who pay for these results are more interested in a conviction and don't care if it's right?

fenomas• 11 years ago

Some time ago when I was reading about the accuracy of fingerprint analysis (similarly a horror show), the culprit seemed to be the professional association of analysts. IIRC their official line was that fingerprint analysis was 100% accurate(!), and they forbade members from taking part in research studies on the subject...

revelation• 11 years ago

DNA testing may be theorethically sound, but in practice it's restricted to testing about 13 different loci, which is a miniscule porton of the actual information at hand.

Starting from that weak position, the FBI then ignores basic statistics:

http://freakonomics.com/2008/08/19/are-the-fbis-probabilitie...

MCRed5• 11 years ago

Think about the hypothesis that all fingerprints are unique. That's voodoo. First off you would have to fingerprint everybody to check it. And secondly they don't actually match fingerprints, but match a description of the fingerprint that throws out most of the data (like taking a million books and reducing them all into one byte hashes of their text, and then claiming that Moby Dick is a plagiarized version of Henry V because they produce the same 8-bit hash!)

The problem is, these things were indicators, but they have been manipulated to be used as if they were proof.

If the suspect is a red head male, and the witness describes seeing a red head male, then the jury is inclined to think that's the same guy.

IT's human nature.

Even in New York City.

Where there are at least 84,000 red headed males!

thaumasiotes• 11 years ago

Is there something about this particular field that attracts charlatans and incompetents?

Yes, a strong preexisting demand and no way to fulfill it honestly. (Really, the first is doing most of the work.)

Same reason you get charlatans and incompetents in love spells, medicine, and longevity.

realusername• 11 years ago

I've worked a bit on fingerprint recognition devices (using various vendor SDKs) and people clearly overestimate the accuracy of these kind of devices. The majority can be fooled with a fingerprint made by melting gummy bear with some tape to gather the fingerprint. Creating fake fingerprints is really easy and cheap. I'm also not mentioning the crappy firmware these devices are generally equipped with, everything close to metal seems to have really low quality firmwares, most of the time, you need to compensate on your side for some unfixable problems in the firmware.

The main problem is TV I guess, for the average guy, these kind of technologies are completely infallible and people tend to forget that just like anything else, it's just an indicator that can be fooled / misinterpreted / badly gathered.

gaius• 11 years ago

Yes it's a bit tinfoil-hat but when you look at shows like CSI and 24, you couldn't imagine a better propaganda campaign that "evidence is infallible and torture is OK".

PseudoRandomHN• 11 years ago

[replying with bogus account] I spent a few months myself working with a range of low to moderate cost OEM modules (<$200) from several manufacturers and their SDK's and I concur. Not all were easily tricked with a fake print but every device/SDK had some problem. We decided not to include fingerprint recognition as a primary means of authentication in our products. I've heard rumor of a competitor who did include it that actual field performance hasn't met expectations and they're retreating to use it as a secondary means.

EliRivers• 11 years ago

It's well known that a large body of fire investigation knowledge is basically made up nonsense. On the plus side, the very fact that it is well known to be nonsense is effecting changes. There is a push towards actually having to use scientific methods, which is both gratifying and horrifying.

scotty792• 11 years ago

I think it's because it's a field that demands exact answer from fuzzy data. You can't do that unless you are willing to accept some wishful thinking as true.

hawleyal• 11 years ago

Abusing science for criminal justice. They're not necessarily incompetent. Just trying to apply science in a non-science related field is hard and somewhat futile.

mwsherman• 11 years ago

Legal arguments, like most things in life, reward narrative over truth. “Truth” is an unbelievably high bar to pass – even basic ideas like confidence level are beyond the understanding of the legal system.

“Beyond a reasonable doubt” is actually a decent epistemic standard. The problem is that juries and judges are not exposed to the information that would lead to reasonable doubt in these cases.

So basic epistemology already makes bad outcomes likely. Add the incentives (political, organizational) in cases like these, and terrible things happen.

smsm425• 11 years ago

The problem is the incentives go to one side (winning the case) without a counterbalance incentive (being not punished for misconduct). If police misconduct such as perjury and fraud routinely led to grave consequences for the person doing it, the balance of the incentives would be closer to what it needs to be. But the Blue Wall[1] and general reluctance of the justice system to punish their own, prevents it from happening. Even when the fraud is discovered, the perpetrators frequently are not sanctioned in any way, the worst that happens is that convictions get thrown out, but that does not create counter-incentive. Thus, no balance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_wall_of_silence

brohoolio• 11 years ago

Am I the only one who wonders what this costs each time something like this happens?

datashovel2• 11 years ago

If you mean the cost in terms of trust citizens have in these institutions, then certainly I think the answer is no.

smegel• 11 years ago

I wonder if partial DNA "matching" will one day be the hair strand analysis of our time.

MCRed5• 11 years ago

A few years ago I remember reading reports of the FBI forensic labs doing much worse-- taking evidence from the crime scene and contaminating evidence taken from the accused with it so that it would produce a "match" and the like. It was a big scandal.

In fact over the past 20 years I've heard this story at least a dozen times-- where crime "labs" at different levels of government and in different states (eg: state labs, federal lagbs, etc) were caught doing this.

And when it happens, that isn't enough to get people to be able to appeal unless they have evidence the lab did it in their specific case.

One of the problems of our system is that the criminal system is lacks checks and balances. The judges, prosecutors, police all work for the government. They all have the same interests-- they all report to people who want to look "tough on crime".

Since the police immediately take over crime scenes and collect the evidence and then get the evidence analyzed, they have a lot of power to be corrupt in the interest of more convictions-- and the consequences are negligible for being caught.

Whose going to try a dirty cop? You can shoot a guy in the back on video and never get put on trial for it in this country. (I left Texas when a cop gunned down an unarmed black kid who was on his knees crawling away from him... shooting him multiple times in the back... on my college campus. The cop lost his job and then joined the police force in a suburb. No charges were filed. Apparently a black kid crawling away was "threatening" to the white cop. Alas, I moved to a liberal state and was then myself the victim state corruption- though fortunately, the damage was only $3k to a lawyer.)

This is why I think any evidence submitted in court needs to come from an independant lab, done in a double blind way, and with several audit cases sent to that lab regularly (eg: taking dna from people not involved in crimes and send it in as if it was part of an investigation and see if they are fabricating evidence.)

The idea that the government is independant and objective is to me, now that I'm older and have seen these scandals over the years, laughable.

Every time it happens everyone acts like its' a rare thing.

It's not.

PythonicAlpha5• 11 years ago

I think, the problem is similar to the trouble we have with judges in our country. One judge recently said something that really put a very shady light on many of his colleagues. I regret, that I don't remember it exactly, what he said.

The trouble in my opinion with some judges in my country and with the police in some countries is, that everybody just assumes, that because they work for law enforcement, they have a high level of integrity. But when you look how they are educated, the subject "integrity" is not even touched (I even don't think, that it is taught in law schools).

In my country, when somebody is already a judge, there is nearly no chance at all, that this person will be held accountable for misjudging. I think, not even the highest courts can replace a judge that repeatedly and knowingly is bending the law. At least I don't know of any case at all where a judge was punished or even replaced. And don't think, that all judgments are correct in my country.

In my opinion, when there is one thing to be learned from history, it is that any person can err and even the best meaning persons can change into dictators over time depending on situations.

MCRed5• 11 years ago

Yes, and having travelled extensively and lived in Mexico and Chile, my experience tells me that while the USA has failed to have adequate checks and balances, other countries often have even less. I loved both of those countries, but I wouldn't really feel safe in Mexico, and I didn't feel fully safe in Chile. I think the Carabineros of chile are taught integrity and are mostly above reproach, however, and so I hold Chile out as a good example of doing it right. But even still, none of these countries have enough checks and balances.

I think the problem is there's a magical thing that happens to people when they think about government.

They somehow think it's ok for government to do things that individuals cannot. And once you give a group of people that magical power, it's easy to forget that they are people.

bmelton• 11 years ago

Made all the worse by the federal government's digital data collection, to which the only falsification that needs be done is an insert statement into a record, and not even falsifications need to be done, as they can likely paint a picture of a myriad of suspects who happen to have been at a point a and a point b within x and y interval.

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

Don't worry, it's just a few bad apples...that spoil the whole barrel.

arto• 11 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Laboratory#Controversy

The history of the FBI Lab hasn't been without controversy. Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, who joined the FBI in 1982 and served as a Supervisory Special Agent at the Lab from 1986 to 1998, blew the whistle on scientific misconduct at the Lab. In a subsequent investigation, it was found that evidence had been falsified, altered, or suppressed, or that FBI agents had testified falsely, in as many as 10,000 cases, resulting in many false convictions. More than a decade later, cases were still being overturned because of this massive fraud.

smsm425• 11 years ago

Looks like they are back on track. I foresee in 2025 somebody writing "massive scientific misconduct and fraud has been discovered in FBI labs from 2010 till 2020, but the major reforms implemented since should prevent if from reoccurring in the future".

coldtea• 11 years ago

In fact over the past 20 years I've heard this story at least a dozen times-- where crime "labs" at different levels of government and in different states (eg: state labs, federal lagbs, etc) were caught doing this.

Yes, the problem is that those "crime labs" are not scientists, they are basically scientists-turned-cops.

As you propose, those should be independent labs, perhaps private, that live and die by their reputation for results (and could be hit with a huge lawsuit if they're not careful, unlike a government agency).

And double-bind should be mandatory too.

late2part• 11 years ago

Again we see that our law enforcement branch is overreaching, acting in error, and effectively breaking the law. What penalty is appropriate for this? How do we rebuild our country to stop this? I believe the answer is to hold the perpetrators responsible. Easy to say, but we need financial and jail times far beyond the pain these people cause. We need to root out this corruption, whether it's intentional or negligent.

o0-0o3• 11 years ago

I posit white collar crime should carry more severe penalties than blue collar crime.

ryanlol• 11 years ago

Have you noticed that at least in the US, white collar crime already carries ridiculously high sentences compared to the rest of the world?

AnthonyMouse• 11 years ago

The severity of the penalties is totally irrelevant if there is no enforcement and the existing penalties are quite sufficient if there is.

nitrogen• 11 years ago

This is an interesting perspective with which I am currently inclined to disagree. Could you provide more rationale to justify the idea that nonviolent crimes should be punished more severely than violent crimes?

malandrew• 11 years ago

They really oughta have a "blind" approach to testing forensic evidence where samples are prepared by other forensic professionals to be sufficiently similar but not matches and real matches, neither of which are from a real trial. The forensic examiners should never know when they have evidence from a real trial.

pdkl95• 11 years ago

Just call it a variation of the well-known "line up" that everybody already understands.

augustocallejas• 11 years ago

This is a great short documentary on the history of hair analysis at the FBI:

http://www.retroreport.org/video/how-dna-changed-the-world-o...

endymi0n• 11 years ago

I'm thinking about how much their incentivization might have influenced them. One fundamental difference between German and Anglo-American law is the prosecuter's task, as mandated by law. In the US it is to get as many convictions as possible (guilty or not). In Germany, the law wants a prosecutor to "find out the truth and use all evidence against AND also for a defendant".

Methinks the former case is one of the driving forces behind the "Bazaar" mentality.

asveikau• 11 years ago

The headline is inaccurate. The article says more than 20 years preceding the year 2000. They are not precise about what more than 20 years means, but I read that as late 1970s to 2000. From the headline and HN title it would seem like it starts from the beginning of time.

Edit: I see now that the hn title matches the wapo headline, changing to reflect that. Still a bad headline.

Illniyar• 11 years ago

I did not understand from the article what "overstated" means.

Was it a partial match that they described as 100% accurate? did they hide the statistical probabilities? was the evidence faked?

FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000

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