PASSAGE OF THE DAY: (Radley Balko): "And the FBI is considered probably the kind of gold standard of crime labs, but it has had a lot of problems. There were the anthrax cases that got two wrong suspects, and ruined two lives over their investigation there. And then there’s the hair fiber analysis that I mentioned earlier, where you’ve got tens of thousands of cases that may have been corrupted. For a long time, the FBI was claiming that every box of bullets of ammunition had a unique chemical signature, and so if you found a bullet at the crime scene, and you took this signature and it matched a box of bullets at a suspect’s house that that bullet could have only come from that box. Turns out, it was complete crap. There was never any science behind that. So when Rod Rosenstein gets out in front of the prosecutors, as he’s given various versions of this talk, but he’s basically saying, ‘Just trust us, we’re handling this internally, you know, we’ve got our best people on this. We take science very seriously.’ We shouldn’t trust them. I mean, that’s an enormous amount of power, the ability to kind of use these different methods of analysis to put people in prison or even sentence people to death, that needs outside supervision, it needs to be treated with skepticism, and the FBI’s own record, I think, really hammers that point home."
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TRANSCRIPT: "Justice in America Episode 27: Junk Forensic Science," published by The Appeal on April 8 2020.
SUB-HEADING: "Everyone who has ever watched a crime procedural believes that forensic science is the most reliable way to tell whether someone is guilty or not. But is that true? The reality is that a lot of forensic science is not exactly science at all. On this episode of Justice in America, Josie Duffy Rice and her guest co-host, Zak Cheney Rice, look at faulty forensic science. Radley Balko, opinion journalist at the Washington Post and author of The Cadaver and the Country Dentist, joins."
GIST: "Josie: So it seemed for a brief moment, it seemed like there might be some addressing this junk science thing when this PCAST report came out a couple years ago, and there was some energy, I mean, I guess it’s not the number one issue for most people, but there was some sort of energy towards maybe highlighting how unreliable a lot of this evidence was. And then both under Obama’s Justice Department and Trump’s there’s been some reticence to address this. That’s another thing you’ve written about. Why do you think that is and why do you think that people are so uninterested in kind of highlighting just how bad this evidence is?
Radley Balko: Yeah. So Obama, you know, he assembled the Forensic Science Commission. He also, like you said, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science, PCAST, yeah, they put up this report that was incredibly damning, and really specific about the problems in forensics. And you had this Forensic Science Commission that was made up of actual scientists, along with some lawyers, but the idea was that we were going to, you know, figure out where the problems are and work to correct them or fix them. But when the PCAST report came out, as you said, Obama’s own Attorney General Loretta Lynch, basically sort of dismissed it and said, ‘We’re not going to follow these recommendations.’ And you know, I think it’s about control. I think the Justice Department, the FBI does not want outside people telling it what forensics it can and can’t use. They want to be able to use whatever they need to solve crimes, to get convictions. So then the Trump administration takes over and Sessions immediately disbands the Forensic Science Commission, actually declined to renew their charter and instead they say, ‘Well, we’re going to handle forensics internally’ and they appoint this career prosecutor to oversee sort of the use of forensics in the Justice Department and a guy who, who actually was on the Forensic Science Commission but if you talk to other people who were on that commission, they say basically, his role was to object to everything they wanted to do. So this is the guy that Trump then puts in charge of forensics in the Justice Department. And the FBI is considered probably the kind of gold standard of crime labs, but it has had a lot of problems. There were the anthrax cases that got two wrong suspects, and ruined two lives over their investigation there. And then there’s the hair fiber analysis that I mentioned earlier, where you’ve got tens of thousands of cases that may have been corrupted. For a long time, the FBI was claiming that every box of bullets of ammunition had a unique chemical signature, and so if you found a bullet at the crime scene, and you took this signature and it matched a box of bullets at a suspect’s house that that bullet could have only come from that box. Turns out, it was complete crap. There was never any science behind that. So when Rod Rosenstein gets out in front of the prosecutors, as he’s given various versions of this talk, but he’s basically saying, ‘Just trust us, we’re handling this internally, you know, we’ve got our best people on this. We take science very seriously.’ We shouldn’t trust them. I mean, that’s an enormous amount of power, the ability to kind of use these different methods of analysis to put people in prison or even sentence people to death, that needs outside supervision, it needs to be treated with skepticism, and the FBI’s own record, I think, really hammers that point home.""
The entire transcript - and supporting links and materials - can be read at the link below:https://theappeal.org/justice-in-america-episode-27-junk-forensic-science/
PUBLISHER'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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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