The use of questionable forensic evidence to be reviewed by the DOJ & the FBI affects thousands of cases.

Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department official who investigated the FBI Laboratory in the mid-1990s as inspector general and, more recently, the city of Houston’s crime lab, said the review is important as the nation’s crime labs come under scrutiny.

“These recent developments remind us of the profound questions about the validity of many forensic techniques that have been used over the course of many decades and underscore the need for continuing attention at every level to ensuring the scientific validity and accuracy of the forensic science that is used every day in our criminal justice system,” Bromwich said.

The Post reported in April that hair and fiber analysis was subjective and lacked grounding in solid research and that the FBI lab lacked protocols to ensure that agent testimony was scientifically accurate. But bureau managers kept their reviews limited to one agent, even as they learned that many examiners’ “matches” were often wrong and that numerous examiners overstated the significance of matches, using bogus statistics or exaggerated claims.

Details of how the new FBI review will be conducted remain unclear. The exact number of cases that will be reviewed is unknown. The FBI is starting with more than 10,000 cases referred to all hair and fiber examiners. From those, the focus will be on a smaller number of hair examinations that resulted in positive findings and a conviction.

It also is unclear whether the review will focus only on exaggerated testimony by FBI examiners or also on scientifically unfounded statements made by others trained by the FBI, or made by prosecutors. Also unclear is at what point government officials will notify defense attorneys or the Innocence Project.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/justice-dept-fbi-to-review-use-of-forensic-evidence-in-thousands-of-cases/2012/07/10/gJQAT6DlbW_story_1.html

How accurate is forensic analysis?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/local/forensic-analysis-methods/?tab=6

Weak DNA evidence could undermine justice, experts say.

When Cook County prosecutors brought Cleveland Barrett to trial earlier this year for the predatory criminal sexual assault of a 9-year-old girl, they presented the jury hearing the case testimony from the alleged victim plus the kind of evidence that long has won convictions with its scientific certainty: DNA.

Indeed, Assistant State's Attorneys Krista Peterson and Jane Sack told jurors in closing arguments that the DNA obtained from the victim after the alleged incident in July 2010 was a match to Barrett's genetic profile and evidence that corroborated the victim's trial testimony.

"Who is the major profile in the DNA that's found?" Sack asked the jury, according to a transcript from the trial. "The defendant."

But this DNA was different. It was not from semen, as is often the case in rapes; instead it came from male cells found on the girl's lips. What's more, the uniqueness of the genetic link between the DNA and Barrett was not of the 1-in-several-billion sort that crime lab analysts often testify to in trials with DNA evidence. Instead, when Illinois State Police crime lab analyst Lisa Fallara explained the statistical probabilities, she testified the genetic profile from the cells matched 1 in 4 African-American males, 1 in 8 Hispanic males and 1 in 9 Caucasian males.

Fact is, the DNA profile from the cells on the victim's lips could have matched hundreds of thousands of men in the Chicago region.

The advent of forensic DNA analysis offered a precision that older and cruder — and, now, mostly discarded — forensic disciplines did not. But experts say cases such as Barrett's, which are emerging in Cook County and in some other jurisdictions across the nation, mark a troubling return to a kind of forensic science that allows imprecision to cloud the evidence as well as a judge's or a jury's ability to weigh it properly.

The broad and almost meaningless statistical probabilities offered at Barrett's mid-April trial were just the kind of probabilities offered for years when crime lab analysts testified about serology, the more crude forensic discipline that gave way to the more scientifically exacting DNA.

Observers of the justice system worry that this use of DNA, which holds a powerful allure for jurors, will lead to wrongful convictions.

"Juries are conditioned to think DNA is incredibly powerful and dispositive. But these cases are very different," said William Thompson, a professor in the Department of Criminology and the School of Law at the University of California at Irvine and an expert on DNA. "Juries can give this kind of evidence too much weight."

Edward Blake, one of the nation's leading DNA scientists who has worked on cases for both prosecutors and defense lawyers, was more blunt. He said that it is "preposterous" to use DNA evidence when it cannot be more precise and that judges should not allow it into courtrooms.
"It has almost no value at all as evidence," Blake said.

In the end, after spending more than a year in jail, Barrett was acquitted and set free. But other cases with similar DNA evidence are working their way through the courts, and attorneys at the Cook County public defender's office fear they will not be handled with skepticism.

Barrett's case, in fact, involved considerable back-and-forth testimony over the meaning of the DNA. At one point, Fallara testified that she could not determine whether the cells on the victim's lips came from saliva or skin or even a hair. She did acknowledge, though, that Barrett's DNA matched the DNA recovered from the victim's lips at only one of 11 locations on a chromosome – meaning she could not get enough information at the other 10 locations, a distinction that was drawn out by Assistant Public Defender Scott Kozicki in cross-examination.

Fallara even acknowledged in testimony that under a different reading of the data, Barrett could have been excluded as the source of the DNA recovered on the victim's lips.

"It's new. It's highly unusual. And it's very concerning," said Gregory O'Reilly, chief of the forensic science division for the Cook County public defender's office. "There's a terrific power in the phrase 'DNA match.' And there's a great risk that the jury will put great significance on this when it's not significant at all."

Crime lab officials and Cook County prosecutors say this kind of DNA evidence is being used more frequently in court as science and technology advance and police become more sophisticated and skilled in their efforts to find and recover DNA in smaller quantities, as well as in places that they were not able to in the past. One byproduct of those advances is that the genetic profiles they obtain are incomplete. That leads to statistical probabilities that are incredibly common, like those in the Barrett case, which critics say are misleading.
 http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-05/news/ct-met-dna-questions-20120705_1_forensic-dna-analysis-dna-profile-dna-scientists