POST: "Botched: The FBI convicted this man using hair analysis. It was dog's hair," by reporter Daniel Rivero, published Fusion on April 21, 2015.
GIST: "For a while now, thanks in part to the reporting of the Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu, it’s been known that something was not quite right with the FBI’s hair forensics unit in the past. But only but only recently has the FBI admitted that failings within the unit led to hundreds, maybe thousands of questionable convictions before 2000. In one particularly shocking case from 1978, two FBI-trained hair analysts who helped in the prosecution of a murder case couldn’t even tell the difference between human hair and dog hair. The case involved a murder in Washington D.C. that year. The victim, a cab driver, was robbed and killed in front of his home. Before long, police centered upon Santae Tribble, then a 17-year-old local from the neighborhood, as a suspect. Tribble maintained his innocence. But no matter what he said and how much his friends vouched, two FBI forensics experts claimed that a single strand of hair recovered near the scene of the crime matched Tribble’s DNA. Thanks to that evidence, which was groundbreaking at the time, Tribble was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison after 40 minutes of jury deliberation, reported the Washington Post. He would go on to serve 28 years until the truth came out: an independent analysis found that the FBI testimony was flawed. Not a single hair that was found on the scene matched his DNA. After attorneys brought the evidence to the courts, Tribble was exonerated of the crime, though he’d already been released from prison. “The Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that he did not commit the crimes he was convicted of at trial,” a judge wrote in the certificate of innocence released at the time, in 2012. It gets worse. Not only did none of the hairs presented as evidence in trial belonged to Tribble, the private lab found that one of the hairs actually came from a dog. “Such is the true state of hair microscopy,” Sandra K. Levick, Tribble’s lawyer, wrote at the time, in 2012. “Two FBI-trained analysts… could not even distinguish human hairs from canine hairs.” Tribble’s case in not unique. In a Washington Post story released over the weekend, officials from the FBI and the Justice Department acknowledged the extent of their flawed use of hair forensics prosecutions prior to 2000.The numbers are staggering. ........Specifically, the “flaws” mean that FBI experts gave “statements exceeding the limits of science,” and many instances where the shaky scientific ground that the statements were dependent on were not shared with defense attorneys. To put it simply, the testimony was presented as fact, when it was not."
The entire story can be found at:
http://fusion.net/story/123382/fbi-forensics-once-brought-dog-hair-to-a-mans-murder-trial-to-use-against-him/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-charles-smith-award-presented-to_28.html
I look forward to hearing from readers at:
hlevy15@gmail.com.
Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
