Nearly all the expert technicians with the FBI's forensic unit presented inaccurate or bogus evidence in most court cases they testified in in the 20 years before 2000, according to an investigation and story published in the Washington Post.
The Post reports that the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project found that of 28 examiners with the bureau's microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches to favor prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed. The cases include 32 death-penalty cases. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the two groups disclosed.
Pretty shocking stuff out of the nation's most trusted and pre-eminent forensic authority. The FBI's crime lab had been widely considered the bellwether for forensic investigation.
As such, the lab's work should exist above approach, a shining example of integrity and objectivity when it comes to something as serious as determining an accused person's guilt or innocence. Actually that's the case for every crime laboratory.
Hearing this brought a rush of memories from my years as editor of the Hot Springs Sentinel-Record and as an investigative reporter for WEHCO Media in Little Rock between 1982 and 1986. The evidence that former Democrat reporter Clay Bailey and I found proved that inaccurate and biased results from our state's Crime Lab had become rampant in Arkansas during that period.
Before, it was over six bodies across our state had been exhumed and Crime Lab-created problems were discovered in each case. Gov. Bill Clinton finally put a stop to the politically embarrassing exhumations.
In weeks of stories, I recall quoting from a sign posted inside the FBI crime lab that proudly reassured everyone that their sacred obligation was to objectively analyze evidence in criminal cases across the nation. Few would argue that our states and nation must rely upon crime labs with impeccable integrity if justice has a chance in the criminal-justice system. False lab results have resulted in who knows how many innocents being convicted or even executed.
I came to realize the crucial importance of hair analysis at the FBI's lab in 1982 after writing for months on the innocence of a man named Ronald Carden of Bigelow. He'd been convicted of murdering a Jane Doe.
Carden was awaiting sentencing when I returned to Arkansas from the Chicago Sun-Times to do investigative reporting for the Arkansas Democrat and WEHCO Media.
The only piece of physical evidence the state had used to link Carden to Jane Doe was a single hair supposedly discovered on the victim's nearly nude body. She'd been strangled with a bootlace and dumped in the forest outside Little Rock to be discovered a few days later.
Carden, a husband, veteran and father of a 10-year-old son, had professed his innocence from the moment of arrest. But he made an ideal suspect and a circumstantial case was created with that one hair. A state Crime Lab technician at trial testified that the hair matched one taken from Carden's body.
(That reminded me of the late Little Rock attorney Gene Worsham telling me of a former state lab technician in one of Worsham's criminal cases who'd been overheard asking officers at the lab, "So fellas, what do we want to find here?" Then there was another autopsy technician who kept a blue light on his vehicle to stop people as an officer of the law.)
Anyway, as the days passed and I dug deeper into the murder and Carden's conviction, I drove to Pocahontas and discovered (then proved) the victim's name had been Mildred Honeycutt. That mattered because William Walter Perry, an inmate already behind bars for another crime, previously had confessed to murdering Mildred Honeycutt a year earlier, using a bootlace, then dumping her body.
The Pulaski County sheriff had dismissed Perry's confession at the time as simply "fantasizing." No wonder. This was the same sheriff who'd made the case against Carden and warned me that if I "mistakenly" named Mildred Honeycutt as Jane Doe I'd be climbing out on a thin limb that would break. Even the state's Crime Lab dentist had compared dental records between Jane Doe and Mildred Honeycutt (as one of several missing women during the investigation) and determined there was no match.
Meanwhile, after several stories confirming Jane Doe's identity and raising many other questions in the case, Carden's judge had enjoyed a big ol' belly full of the mess. He ordered the single hair found on her body along with the comparative Carden hair sample sent to the FBI's crime lab to see if the state's analysis between them had been correct. Several weeks passed.
The results finally came back and, as best I recall, said they could find no match between the hairs. All the FBI lab could state definitively was that the hair supposedly found on Mildred's body did come from a white male.
That did it for the irate judge. Carden's conviction was thrown out. He was set free.
Yes, my friends, the findings from these crime labs, the ultimate authority we hope will reliably be the most free from political influences and deception, often mean the difference between lives behind bars and death. Anything less than purest integrity is corrupt and wholly unacceptable.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com.
Editorial on 04/25/2015