Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Flawed Forensics: No One Tells Defendants

Flawed Forensics: No One Tells Defendants

The Washington Post is reporting today that hundreds of defendants may be in prison or on parole in cases that merit exoneration, a retrial, or a retesting of evidence, because the DNA and FBI hair and fiber experts could have misidentified them as suspects. However, while officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, prosecutors in many cases failed to tell the defendants or their attorneys about the problem.

The Washington Post reports:

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

Read full article...

Flawed Forensics: No One Tells Defendants
Jenée Desmond-Harris
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:25:19 GMT

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