Thousands of Convictions Are Now in Doubt Because the FBI Sucks at Forensics

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's "state-of-the-art" facility in rural Virginia. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Despite its usefulness as fodder for television crime dramas, forensic science has glaring flaws. Any law enforcement effort or investigation is invariably going to suffer from human error, but forensic evidence has the outward appearance of cold neutrality. In other words, it’s cloaked in the legitimacy of hard science. This has drawbacks for the cause of justice, and it’s worsened by outright negligence, which adds to the woes of America’s already overburdened criminal justice system.

From bite mark analysis to arson investigation, mischief among so-called experts investigating crimes runs the gamut. There are coroners who engage in evidence tampering and frauds who believe they can read the telltale signs of a fire started with an accelerant beyond a reasonable doubt. In this field, one person can make a hell of a difference for the worse if she decides not to do her job. Last fall, a Massachusetts chemist was sentenced to a relatively minor three to five years in prison after pleading guilty to 27 charges of falsifying drug lab tests.

Joining the party is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is not to be trusted on matters of forensic evidence. Starting in 2012, a Washington Post investigation showed that FBI crime labs were doing subpar work with hair and fiber analysis back when DNA testing was unavailable or not as widespread.

The Post investigation also pointed out that the Department of Justice (DOJ) knew their crime lab was not doing legit work as far back as the 1990s, but defendants were generally not informed—even as prosecutors frequently were. A review of these cases is going forward again after a seemingly endless series of snags, but the gist is that the FBI and the DOJ have spent a decade and a half pointing fingers at each other and downplaying the widespread nature of the problem.

Forty-five of the 2600 convictions under review involve death row inmates. Several individuals whose convictions are now under a shadow have already been executed. Thousands of other cases that involved work with the FBI lab are now being freshly examined.

According to the Post, FBI policy for the past 40 years has been that hair matching is not a substantial enough way to identify a suspect (it has never been a definite science), but agents have testified to the contrary when placed on the stand. It seems that arson investigation or bite mark analysis are also dodgy at best. Field tests for illegal narcotics have likewise been critiqued for wild inaccuracy.

None of this is to suggest that science isn’t science, only to be careful before trusting seemingly damning evidence. As technology improves, we slowly discover what the old experts didn’t know. And in criminal justice, lack of knowledge tends to leave a long line of casualties.

Now for the rest of this week’s bad cops:

-New Yorker Richard Gonzalez suffers from diabetes so severe that he wears an insulin pump. However, according to a lawsuit recently filed by his family, when the 14-year-old was falsely arrested by the NYPD in April for attempted murder, police took away the insulin pump in order to pressure him into confessing to the crime. This endangered Gonzalez’s health. The district attorney later threw out of the charges when it became clear they were based entirely on Gonzalez being Facebook friends with the victim, and having a name that could be plausibly shortened to Richie. That was all the evidence they had, which would be bad enough even without the denial of life-saving medicine part. It’s not like young people in particular are in danger of being brow-beaten into false confessions by police or anything.

-Last October, according to a lawsuit recently filed by Michelle Meeker of Carbondale, Colorado, she was terrified by a police officer in SWAT gear when he—along with her employer at an assisted living center—failed to mention that she was part of an active shooter drill. Meeker is suing her employer, the Carbondale chief of police, and the entire department over the emotional and mental distress she suffered during the fictional hostage-taking. The lesson here? Um, tell people they are going to be grabbed by what appears to be a masked gunman, people! Make sure everyone agrees to the fun game before you start playing.

-After a Houston man was pulled over for a traffic stop violation on July 13, and his friend was found with prescription meds that weren’t his, both men were taken into police custody. Then, according to the man’s wife, Josie Garcia, the arresting officer left the family’s blind, 13-year-old chihuahua by the side of the road, and wouldn’t let her husband call anyone to pick him up or even take him to an animal shelter. The dog, unsurprisingly, was later hit by a car and died from its injuries. Houston Mayor Annise Parker has apologized to the family—she even called the arresting officer an “airhead”—and an internal investigation is taking place. The charges against Garcia’s husband were dropped, making the dog’s murder even more painfully unnecessary.

-The chokehold-induced arrest and subsequent death of Eric Garner at the hands of the NYPD provoked scads of outrages and media attention. On Friday, the medical examiner who autopsied Garner officially ruled his July 17 demise a homicide. So the chokehold, a maneuver which has been against NYPD policy since 1993, caused the death of 43-year-old Garner after all (so did being pressed facedown on the sidewalk, which isn’t surprising if you watch the video, or listen to Garner’s muffled cries that he is unable to breathe.) Officer Daniel Pantaleo has his gun and badge taken soon after the incident. Whether the local DA is willing to bring charges against him remains to be seen.

-On Wednesday, former Oakland, California Police Officer Robert Roche got his job back after being fired last August over an incident with Occupy Oakland protests way back in October, 2011. Roche will also receive back pay, an arbitrator ruled. Why was Roche fired? He (probably) wasn’t the still-unnamed officer who hit protester/veteran Scott Olsen with a beanbag to much media outrage and attention three years. Roche, however, was the officer captured on film throwing a teargas grenade into the small crowd who rushed to Olsen’s aid. Olsen needed the help. He received a $4.5 million payout from the city of Oakland, but has never recovered from his traumatic brain injury. In the video, Roche doesn’t appear to be very far from the crowd, and if he had been looking at the pavement, he could have seen Olsen lying there. Still, the arbitrator ruled that Roche didn’t necessarily know Olsen was injured, and, well, the teargas grenade didn’t hurt any of the people he pitched it towards. Rampant negligence is fine, as long as it wasn’t intentional, apparently.

-Continuing their long history of a complete lack of accountability, last week it was announced that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has “reprimanded” or given a “"memorandum of caution" to  four agents involved in their controversial Operation Fearless. As exhaustively detailed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, this process involved buying guns and drugs, instituting stings, losing a machine gun, leading landlords with thousand of dollars in damages, and exploiting mentally challenged individuals around the neighborhoods. So yeah, a finger wagging and a scolding seems like an apt punishment here.

-On July 23, Kennebunk, Maine Police Officer Officer Matthew Harrington pulled the excellently-named Gavin Falconer over for speeding, and prepared to write him a warning. When Harrington returned to 84-year-old Falconer’s vehicle, the man’s wife yelled that he was having a heart attack. Harrington performed CPR, but then was forced to use the defibrillator he kept in his cruiser, which brought Falconer back. Not all cops who stop speeders are so heroic, but Harrington gets to be our Good Cop of the Week for acting fast and saving this guy’s life.

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