Justice Department to Review Use of Forensic Evidence in Thousands of Cases

Flawed Work by FBI Led to At Least One Wrongful Execution Paper Reports

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that the Justice Department and FBI “have launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence”

They report this is the largest undertaking of post-conviction review ever done by the FBI.

“It will include cases conducted by all FBI Laboratory hair and fiber examiners since at least 1985 and may reach earlier if records are available, people familiar with the process said. Such FBI examinations have taken place in federal and local cases across the country, often in violent crimes, such as rape, murder and robbery,” the Washington Post reports.

The report comes three months after the Washington Post report on April 16, “Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.”

Officials had reviewed cases back in the 1990s after reports of sloppy work by the FBI crime lab was found to be producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials.

However, the paper reported, “Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.”

The Post reported, “As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.”

The paper noted a Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle, who was executed back in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review.

The Washington Post reported in April, “Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo.”

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department announced that it will conduct the more expansive review.

“The Department and the FBI are in the process of identifying historical cases for review where a microscopic hair examination conducted by the FBI was among the evidence in a case that resulted in a conviction,” spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said in a statement. “We have dedicated considerable time and resources to addressing these issues, with the goal of reaching final determinations in the coming months.”

In its April report, the Post identified two District men convicted largely on the testimony of FBI hair analysts who wrongly placed them at crime scenes.

Sentae Tribble, who is now 51, was convicted back in 1978 of killing a taxi cab driver.  Mr. Tribble’s conviction has since been vacated.

Reported the Washington Post on May 16: “Although the judge threw out Tribble’s 1980 conviction and said he could not be tried on the charge again, the ruling does not exonerate him. An attorney for Tribble requested time to file papers and, if necessary, have a hearing next month to determine innocence.”

“Mr. Tribble’s struggle for justice is not yet over. He will now seek a certificate of innocence from the court,” said Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service.

The April article also featured Kirk Odom, who served a sentence and was released from prison in 2003.  Now 49, he had been convicted of raping, sodomizing and robbing a 27-year-old woman before dawn in her Capitol Hill apartment in 1981.

However, DNA testing back in January revealed that the hair fragment in his case could not have come from Odom.

He becomes the latest man in DC in the last two months and third in three years to have a conviction overturned due to erroneous hair matches claimed in court by FBI forensic experts.

“More than 30 years after Mr. Odom’s conviction, DNA testing reveals that he suffered a terrible injustice,” U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. wrote in a two-page filing in D.C. Superior Court.

“The United States expresses its profound regret for the harm suffered by Mr. Odom, and requests that this Court immediately vacate Mr. Odom’s convictions and dismiss the indictments against him with prejudice,” Mr. Machen wrote.

“Though we can never give him back the years that he lost, we can give Mr. Odom back his unfairly tarnished reputation,” Mr. Machen wrote. “Three decades ago, law enforcement got it wrong: Mr. Odom did not commit this crime. . . . It is never too late to secure justice – even if that means correcting a grave injustice from decades earlier.”

Illustrating the tragic nature of wrongful convictions, the man whose DNA actually matched the stains is a convicted sex offender, however, he will not be charged with the crime since the statute of limitations has expired.

That means that, while Mr. Odom was wrongly in prison, the actual perpetrator will never be punished.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

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