PUBLISHER"S NOTE: Bravo to ProPublica and Science Correspondent Ryan Gabrielson, for their powerful exposee of flawed FBI image analysis, and the wrongful convictions that may result. The article is far too long to publish in its entirety. I have therefore included two brief excerpts on this post and I encourage our readers to plow through the entire piece. It will be truly worth the time.
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Judge Jed Rakoff of the United States District Court in Manhattan, a former member of the National Commission on Forensic Science, said the weakest pattern analysis fields rely more on examiner intuition than science. Their conclusions are, basically, “my hunch is that X is a match for Y,” he said. “Only they don’t say hunch.” Rakoff said that image analysis hadn’t come before him in court and wasn’t taken up by the commission but said that investigators, prosecutors and judges should make sure evidence is reliable before using it. Scandals involving other areas of forensic science have shown the danger of waiting for injustices to become public to compel reform, Rakoff said. “How many cases of innocent people being wrongly convicted have to occur before people realize that there’s a very broad spectrum of forensic science?” Rakoff asked. “Some of it is very good, like DNA. Some of it is pretty good, like fingerprinting. And some of it is not good at all.”
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "The work of image examiners is a type of pattern analysis, a category of forensic science that has repeatedly led to misidentifications at the FBI and other crime laboratories. Before the discovery of DNA identification methods in the 1980s, most of the bureau’s lab worked in pattern matching, which involves comparing features from items of evidence to the suspect’s body and belongings. Examiners had long testified in court that they could determine what fingertip left a print, what gun fired a bullet, which scalp grew a hair “to the exclusion of all others.” Research and exonerations by DNA analysis have repeatedly disproved these claims, and the U.S. Department of Justice no longer allows technicians and scientists from the FBI and other agencies to make such unequivocal statements, according to new testimony guidelines released last year. Though image examiners rely on similarly flawed methods, they have continued to testify to and defend their exactitude, according to a review of court records and examiners’ written reports and published articles."
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STORY: "The FBI Says Its Photo Analysis Is Scientific Evidence. Scientists disagree," by reporter Ryan Gabrielson, published by ProPublica on January 17, 2019. (Ryan Gabrielson is a reporter for ProPublica covering the U.S. justice system. In 2013, his stories for the Center for Investigative Reporting on violent crimes at California’s board-and-care institutions for the developmentally disabled were a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.)
SUB-HEADING: "The bureau’s image unit has linked defendants to crime photographs for decades using unproven techniques and baseless statistics. Studies have begun to raise doubts about the unit’s methods."
GIST: "At
the FBI Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, a team of about a half-dozen
technicians analyzes pictures down to their pixels, trying to determine
if the faces, hands, clothes or cars of suspects match images collected
by investigators from cameras at crime scenes. The
unit specializes in visual evidence and facial identification, and its
examiners can aid investigations by making images sharper, revealing key
details in a crime or ruling out potential suspects. But
the work of image examiners has never had a strong scientific
foundation, and the FBI’s endorsement of the unit’s findings as trial
evidence troubles many experts and raises anew questions about the role
of the FBI Laboratory as a standard-setter in forensic science. FBI
examiners have tied defendants to crime pictures in thousands of cases
over the past half-century using unproven techniques, at times giving
jurors baseless statistics to say the risk of error was vanishingly
small. Much of the legal foundation for the unit’s work is rooted in a
22-year-old comparison of bluejeans. Studies on several photo comparison
techniques, conducted over the last decade by the FBI and outside
scientists, have found they are not reliable. Since
those studies were published, there’s no indication that lab officials
have checked past casework for errors or inaccurate testimony. Image
examiners continue to use disputed methods in an array of cases to
bolster prosecutions against people accused of robberies, murder, sex
crimes and terrorism. The
work of image examiners is a type of pattern analysis, a category of
forensic science that has repeatedly led to misidentifications at the
FBI and other crime laboratories. Before the discovery of DNA
identification methods in the 1980s, most of the bureau’s lab worked in
pattern matching, which involves comparing features from items of
evidence to the suspect’s body and belongings. Examiners
had long testified in court that they could determine what fingertip
left a print, what gun fired a bullet, which scalp grew a hair “to the
exclusion of all others.” Research and exonerations by DNA analysis have
repeatedly disproved these claims, and the U.S. Department of Justice
no longer allows technicians and scientists from the FBI and other
agencies to make such unequivocal statements, according to new testimony guidelines released last year. Though
image examiners rely on similarly flawed methods, they have continued
to testify to and defend their exactitude, according to a review of
court records and examiners’ written reports and published articles. ProPublica
asked leading statisticians and forensic science experts to review
methods image examiners have detailed in court transcripts, published
articles and presentations. The experts identified numerous instances of
examiners overstating the techniques’ scientific precision and said
some of their assertions defy logic. The
FBI declined repeated requests for interviews with members of the image
group, which is formally known as the Forensic Audio, Video and Image
Analysis Unit. ProPublica
provided the bureau written questions in September and followed up in
November with a summary of our reporting on the bureau’s photo
comparison practices. The FBI provided a brief prepared response last
month that said the image unit’s techniques differ from those
discredited in recent studies. It said image examiners have never relied
on those methods “because they have been demonstrated to be
unreliable.” But the unit’s articles and presentations on photo comparison show its practices mirror those used in the studies. The bureau did not address examiners’ inaccurate testimony and other questionable practices. Judge
Jed Rakoff of the United States District Court in Manhattan, a former
member of the National Commission on Forensic Science, said the weakest
pattern analysis fields rely more on examiner intuition than science.
Their conclusions are, basically, “my hunch is that X is a match for Y,”
he said. “Only they don’t say hunch.” Rakoff
said that image analysis hadn’t come before him in court and wasn’t
taken up by the commission but said that investigators, prosecutors and
judges should make sure evidence is reliable before using it. Scandals
involving other areas of forensic science have shown the danger of
waiting for injustices to become public to compel reform, Rakoff said. “How
many cases of innocent people being wrongly convicted have to occur
before people realize that there’s a very broad spectrum of forensic
science?” Rakoff asked. “Some of it is very good, like DNA. Some of it
is pretty good, like fingerprinting. And some of it is not good at all.” .......................
For the Nation’s Crime Lab, a Reckoning: The FBI opened the laboratory in 1932, and for the next 60 years its forensic science was more revered than scrutinized. Then, in August 1995,
lawyers for a defendant on trial in the bombing of the World Trade
Center called Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist on the bureau’s explosives
unit, to testify. Whitehurst told the court his lab colleagues had
produced inaccurate reports in the case. He had complained
within the lab for years about unqualified explosives examiners and
shoddy scientific practices. The FBI mostly dismissed the concerns and,
Whitehurst said, reassigned him to a different unit as retaliation. So
he went public — on the stand and to the press. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General was already investigating Whitehurst’s allegations. Its final report,
released in 1997, confirmed the explosives unit had “significant
instances of testimonial errors, substandard analytical work, and
deficient practices” in several cases, including the World Trade Center
and Oklahoma City bombings. Officials at the bureau
had overlooked the explosives unit’s bad practices and didn’t move
urgently to fix them, Bill Esposito, then FBI deputy director, said at the time.
“While the issues raised by the Inspector General concern only a small
part of the total volume of work done annually in the lab, we recognize
that even one problem is too many.” The lab already knew about a second problem. As the explosives unit
became a scandal, the Justice Department began reviewing the top FBI
hair and fiber examiner’s work on hundreds of cases. The in-house review
looked at examiner Michael P. Malone’s lab work and sworn statements in
more than 250 cases. It found Malone routinely misrepresented his
results as valid and his error rate as less than 1 percent. Justice
Department officials did not make the finding public, nor did it notify
lawyers for the defendants in those cases, or scrutinize the rest of the
hair unit, reporting by The Washington Post revealed in 2012. Advances in DNA
analysis technology were rattling many forensic science fields,
revealing wrongful convictions won with other crime-lab evidence.
Microscopic hair comparisons were particularly vulnerable to debunking
because follicles contain genetic material. For decades, examiners told
jurors that crime scene hairs came from defendants. DNA analysis later
proved the hairs did not in dozens of cases. (The FBI replaced
microscopic hair comparisons with DNA in 1999.) Prompted by the Post’s investigation, the Justice Department finished an expansive review
of hair comparison testimony. Hair examiners matched defendants to
follicles in 268 trials; all but 11 contained scientific error. They
were more conservative in their written lab reports, about half of which
included a misstatement. Like other forensic science reckonings, the
public disclosure came years after the FBI stopped relying on the
method. Another unit at the FBI Lab had for decades matched bullets by their chemical compositions. FBI chemists asserted
the mix of elements in a round could determine whether its lead matched
ammunition seized from defendant’s cars and homes. In court, they said
crime scene rounds were “indistinguishable” from the suspects’ bullets,
even suggesting they came from the same box. The bureau had no science
to back its claims. Facing court
challenges, the FBI in 2002 asked the National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering and Medicine to study the methods and value of bullet lead
analysis. The report by researchers
in 2004 said the examiners’ testimony went further than the chemical
analysis allowed. “The available data do not support any statement that a
crime bullet came from a particular box of ammunition,” the academies’ report said. Further, one bullet
could match anywhere from 12,000 to 35 million other bullets. FBI
officials discontinued lead analysis a year later. Also in 2004, fingerprint examiners wrongly matched
a print from a train bombing in Spain to a lawyer and Muslim convert in
Portland, Oregon. Agents arrested and detained the lawyer for more than
two weeks, without criminal charges, before Spanish law enforcement
disproved the FBI’s conclusion. Following each
scandal, the bureau moved to shutter the discredited unit or correct the
disputed method. It did not comprehensively search past casework for
convictions based on the lab’s inaccurate evidence, nor did it evaluate
whether other units had the same bad practices — unproven techniques,
fabricated error rates, misleading testimony. “The FBI Lab is a
fixer,” Whitehurst said in an interview last year. Examiners have many
incentives to find evidence that helps a conviction, he said."
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The entire story can be read at:
https://www.propublica.org/article/with-photo-analysis-fbi-lab-continues-shaky-forensic-science-practicesPUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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/
