DOJ may have abused evidence in over 2,000 criminal cases, including death penalty cases [View all]

[davidn3600]

I've mentioned in the past how my eyes were opened as to how the Justice Department prosecutes various criminal cases after seeing a powerful documentary called Better This World, which detailed (in part) the prosecution against two teens for supposedly planning to plant some bombs at a political convention. While the two teens are hardly innocent, the ridiculous tactics pulled by the US Attorneys' office and the FBI in pressuring them into a plea bargain made it clear that for the DOJ, it's never about justice, but about winning. And that can be a bit dangerous when you're the guys with the most guns and you get to make up many of the rules as you go along.

So while this following bit of news is horrifying, it's not that surprising: late last week, it was revealed that the DOJ/FBI have more or less admitted that they may have abused microscopic hair analysis in over 2,000 cases, leading to many convictions and a few people already put to death. Apparently over 120 convictions, including 27 death penalty convictions are now seen as suspect due to the questionable analysis -- with more likely on the way.

The main issue was that the DOJ more or less lied about what hair analysis meant, and how accurate it is (it's not that accurate). Also, when the DOJ realized this rather serious issue likely led to many false convictions, it started telling prosecutors only, but not defense attorneys.

The FBI began reviewing a few hundred cases, but notified only prosecutors of flaws, with the Department of Justice claiming they were not required to inform defendants or their lawyers. In more than half of the 250 cases in which errors were initially identified, prosecutors never contacted defendants to inform them of the potentially exonerating evidence. The DOJ since expanded its review to involve thousands of older cases from the 1980s and 1990s.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130723/00563923895/dojfbi-admit-they-may-have-abused-hair-analysis-to-convict-hundreds-to-thousands-innocent-people.shtml