Fault Lines' “Under the Microscope: the FBI Hair Cases” premieres on Al Jazeera America on Monday, August 17th at 10 p.m. Eastern time/7 p.m. Pacific.
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Friday, August 14, 2015
Bulletin: Al Jazeera America’s “Fault Lines" ” Presents “Under the Microscope: The FBI Hair Cases”; Airing Monday, August 17th at 10pm ET/7pm PT; “This is a virus that escaped from the FBI crime lab and it infected the entire criminal justice system and it's going to take a lot of work to undo it.” – M. Chris Fabricant, The Innocence Project; “It’s not science to visually examine something and say they’re the same – that’s not science. That’s subjectivity.” – David Colapinto, National Whistleblower’s Center;
(Bravo Al Jazeera America: Another brilliant probe of forensic failure in America - and the brutal consequences to wrongly charged and convicted people and to public confidence in the criminal justice system. HL); "This Monday, August 17th at 10pm ET/7p PT, Al Jazeera’s Emmy Award-winning “Fault Lines” investigates how the FBI
used the flawed science of
microscopic hair analysis to help convict thousands of criminal
defendants. Are innocent people still in prison, and will anyone be
held accountable? In this new episode,
"Under the Microscope: The FBI Hair Cases,” Fault Lines correspondent
Josh Rushing and team travel to Savannah, Georgia to meet Joseph Sledge. In 1978, Sledge was
convicted
of murder, partly based on FBI testimony that his hair was
“microscopically alike in all respects” to hairs found at the crime
scene. He was released this January, after serving 37 years in prison,
when DNA testing proved the hairs used at trial were not his. As “Fault Lines” reveals, Sledge is
among at least 74 Americans who
were exonerated after being convicted of a crime involving the forensic
science of microscopic hair analysis. “There was no physical evidence
tying Joseph to the crime, and the microscopic
hair comparison was the closest they could come,” attorney Christine Mumma of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence said of Sledge’s case.
Before the advent of
DNA testing, the FBI used the technique of hair analysis for decades.
Al Jazeera America interviewed former FBI hair examiner Morris Samuel Clark, who said he testified
“hundreds of times” in court about hair evidence, and that
FBI microscopic hair comparisons were based on “16 different
characteristics.” However, with no database with which to compare
hairs, Clark conceded that the FBI could not account for
how hair characteristics are distributed in the general population. “The hairs on your head are quite different depending on where they’re selected,” said Dr. Terry Melton, founder of Mitotyping Technologies, a Pennsylvania-based DNA lab. “Microscopy is
a very subjective science, and DNA is exactly the opposite.”
In 2012, Dr. Melton’s DNA lab helped overturn convictions for two Washington, D.C.-area men:
Kirk Odom, arrested for rape when he was 18 years old, and Santae Tribble, arrested for murder when he was 17. Sandra Levick,
the public defender who represented
both Odom and Tribble in their appeals, said, “We had all 13 of the
hairs that the FBI had examined [in Tribble’s case] sent off [for DNA
testing.]” DNA-testing revealed that one of the hairs used at trial
belonged to a dog. In 2012, these
high-profile exonerations finally compelled the Department of Justice to
conduct a thorough review. In cases reviewed thus far, they have found
that 26 out of 28 FBI examiners made false claims
at trial. “We can now say, based on a statistically sizable sample of
cases they have reviewed, [the FBI] were wrong 95% of the time,” said David Colapinto, an attorney at the National Whistleblower’s Center. As of April 2015,
the Department of Justice says it has reviewed about 1,800 cases – but
in 40% of them, it closed the review due to lack of documentation.
Officials from Justice and FBI declined to speak
on camera for “Fault Lines” but publicly, they say they will notify
defense counsel in cases they have reviewed, while declining to release
the names of the defendants to the public. But with at least 14
defendants in question already executed or deceased
of old age, is justice working too slowly?
