Yikes: Two decades' worth of FBI testimony using microscopic hair samples was flawed

Has the Washington Post gone anti-science? Actually, the Post has done an excellent and troubling report about a decades-long pattern by the FBI of misusing - and putting way too much faith in - forensics using microscopic hair samples as evidence in cases.

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Hundreds of criminal trials are under review and may have been compromised. Some convicted defendants have already been exonerated - but for others it's too late, because they've already been executed. This is a mess, and a bipartisan one, and it's all because presumptions about science were either wrong or manipulated to serve an agenda:

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 been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions. The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated. The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989.

You know this is funny, because I could have sworn the left said science is practically akin to God. To question it is to hate knowledge and facts. How could something based on the sacrosanct wonder that is science have gone so very wrong? Of course, that's a load of crap. Science is only as good as the people doing the work, and science has always been about testing theories with evidence and then challenging the findings. Scientists - whether of the forensic or of the climate variety - aren't telling you incontrovertible facts so much as they're presenting theories along with data to support the theories. It's possible to challenge the data. It's possible for the theories based on the data to be proven wrong. In a criminal trial, expert witnesses are generally trusted by juries who have no technical understanding of the science being presented, but more or less assume that a) the witness does understand it; and b) the witness is presenting the data and the conclusions based on the data accurately. In this case - or rather in these hundreds of cases - none of that was true. The problem in many of these cases, of course, is that a defendant might have been guilty irrespective of the FBI's flawed testimony. In that case, perhaps a new trial will still bring a conviction. But as much as we may not like the possibility of setting people free who really did commit these crimes, the integrity of the criminal justice system demands that you can't let a conviction stand if it was based even in part on flawed testimony like this. And for goodness sakes, can we finally dispatch with the silly diefication of science? It's just a process, and a very useful one, but it can and should be questioned and criticized. People who doubt conventional wisdom in science are not "deniers". They're an important part of the process, and often their skepticism is vindicated. The people convicted in these cases deserve to have that skepticism honored. So does a U.S. economy that liberals would put in peril over a "scientific consensus" that they are terrified to have anyone question.