NCIP Legal Director Linda Starr interviewed with 1350 KSRO Newstalk of Sonoma County on Tuesday morning to explicate upon the Justice Department and FBI’s recent acknowledgment that for over a two-decade period before 2000, almost all examiners in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony that was used against criminal defendants in trial. According to National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, 26 of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit overstated forensic matches to favor prosecutors in more than 95 percent of 268 trials reviewed thus far. Of those cases, 32 defendants were on death row—and 14 have been executed or died in prison.
Starr said, “It exposes a big flaw in our criminal justice system, having to do with how we monitor forensic science, how we qualify something as a science, and how we qualify somebody as an expert able to testify as an expert in these cases.”
Listen to Starr’s interview with KSRO:
Read more about the FBI’s flawed forensic hair testimony here.