FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000: Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, commended the FBI and department for the collaboration but said, “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.”
FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000 Saturday April 18 th , 2015 at 6:47 PM 1 Share FBI headquarters in Washington. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post) The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence . The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have