Tainting Evidence:
Inside the Scandals at the
FBI Crime Lab
by John F. Kelly and
Phillip K. Wearne
Scientific crime solving or sci-crime – it is
an image upon which much of the FBI's awesome reputation is based. Humans are
fallible, are inclined to lie and are often motivated by anything but the truth.
The history of crime fighting in the United States is littered with eyewitnesses
who misidentified a suspect, defense lawyers who persuaded juries to find
reasonable doubt, and suspects who had credible alibis. The physical evidence on
the other hand is the silent, definitive witness. The traces of explosives on
Timothy McVeigh's clothes in Oklahoma City, the bloody shoe-prints left by the
killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in Los Angeles, the saliva traces
recovered from the sealed envelope of a letter claiming responsibility for the
bombing of the World Trade Center…all these offer certainty. And certainty
equals proof.
The means of making physical evidence proof is
forensic science, the application of science to legal processes, the application
of science to crime-fighting. Together or apart, the words "forensic"
and "scientific" are today commonly used as everyday adjectives that
imply definitive, detailed and comprehensively argued. It is an image burnished
by popular television detective series like "Quincy" and the coverage
of big cases by Court TV, an image epitomized by the source of the country’s
most famous forensic science, the FBI’s crime lab.
Each year half a million people hear and see the
case for forensic science when they take the public tour of the FBI headquarters
in downtown Washington, D.C. The J. Edgar Hoover Building is a monstrous,
sandy-brown structure that somehow exudes the brooding presence of the man whose
name it bears. With an overhanging, slanting top floor -- the seventh at the
front, the eleventh at the back – the FBI’s HQ looks as though it might
topple onto the traffic in Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue at any moment.
Passing the black-and-white photographic portraits of FBI directors and the
rogue's gallery of the "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives," a narrow escalator
takes visitors to the only working part of the FBI they will see on their visit
-- the laboratory. The sign that greets them proclaims: "61 years of
Forensic Science Service, DNA: The Silent Witness." It’s the sort of
public relations exercise of which J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's former director,
the "The Boss" as he was known to agents for nearly 50 years, would
wholeheartedly approve. To Hoover, image was everything, a legacy that thrives
at the FBI to this day.
"The examiners you see are working on real
cases," says the guide as children press their faces to the panes of glass
that are all that separate the watchers from the watched. "The FBI is the
only place in the United States with a full forensic lab," she adds,
spinning through DNA, Firearms-Toolmarks, Hairs and Fibers, Material Analysis,
Chemistry and Toxicology and Questioned Documents -- the visible components of
the lab's seven-unit Scientific Analysis Section. Here the victims of serious
crime -- rape, murder, violent assault -- are reduced to a piece of bloodstained
clothing, a hair from the carpet, an invisible explosive residue on a
nondescript piece of debris. Only if photos, tapes or handwritten notes come in
as part of the evidence do such people have the faces, voices, or hands that
make them real.
What the tourists see is actually just a fraction
of what makes up the FBI’s Laboratory Division. The Scientific Analysis
Section is one of just five FBI lab sections with a bewildering range of
state-of-the-art expertise, technology and capacity. Today’s Investigative
Operations and Support Section grew out of the Questioned Documents Unit, where
examiners detect crime by chasing paper records. They look at everything from
receipts to handwriting comparisons, targeting everyone from drug smugglers to
kidnappers. Documents also handle all types of impressions -- tire treads, shoe
prints, handwriting or typing imprints. Today, this section includes the
specialist polygraph or "lie detector" unit, a computer analysis unit,
a special photographic unit and specialists in analyzing racketeering records --
illegal gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, and money-laundering.
The Special Projects Section is even more
diverse, with seven units that handle film, video and photographs of suspects or
victims; the famous artists "impressions" of witnesses' descriptions
of suspects; crime-scene plans; and now computer art and design. The aging or
reconstruction of faces of suspects or victims and the reconstruction of crime
scenes is a specialty. This section also prepares all forms of graphics or film
used as exhibits at trial and the false credentials or documentation needed by
FBI agents or informants for undercover work. Here too is the Evidence Control
Center, responsible for the receipt, assignment, and tracking of thousands of
lab samples subjected to hundreds of thousands of examinations every year.
Finally, practicing one of the oldest and
best-known disciplines of forensic science, there is the FBI lab's Latent
Fingerprint Section. Here the main task is developing and comparing
fingerprints, palm prints, footprints and even lip prints with some of the
estimated 200-million imprint records stored at the FBI's National Crime
Information Center in West Virginia. Under an automated
fingerprint-identification system now being developed, law enforcement officials
anywhere in the country will soon be able to match instantly sample prints with
those in the database by means of portable computer images.
Much of the work in all lab departments is
clinical, routine, tedious, even though the samples, which can range from soil
to bullet casings, are often anything but. Yet this is by far the nation's
biggest, most important, best-equipped and most famous crime lab. As an examiner
here, you never know what you are going to get -- it could be a rape one day, an
explosion the next, and a product- tampering case the day after that. "Here
you might start work on the case of a lifetime any day, anytime," says one
employee. And it could come from anywhere. As well as its own cases -- federal
crime or crime that involves more than one state -- the FBI lab takes work from
state, county and municipal law enforcement agencies across the nation. As a
result, its 694 staff handled 136,629 pieces of evidence and performed nearly
700,000 examinations in 1996.
In the past 25 years forensic science has been
transformed, "growing up so fast that even the most sophisticated
researchers cannot keep up," according to Time magazine. Nowhere
more so than in the heart of the FBI lab, the Scientific Analysis Section. Here,
the traditional scientific paraphernalia -- the test tubes, gas tanks, and
microscopes that recall school chemistry classes -- rub shoulders with infrared
spectroscopes, Apple and Dell computers and neutron activators. Forensic science
is now genetics and microbiology in DNA typing, nuclear physics in neutron
activation analysis, analytical chemistry in infrared, ultra-violet or X-ray
spectrometry and statistics in computerized number crunching.
These new technologies have in many cases been
grafted onto a profession that in many of its traditional sub-fields, like
fingerprints, questioned documents, ballistics, hair and fibers, explosives, was
not actually based on science at all but on subjective comparisons by individual
examiners. Yet either way, whether the "soft" science of the
traditional visual comparisons of two hairs, bullets or fingerprints, or the
"hard" science of neutron activation analysis or DNA typing, forensic
science cannot ultimately avoid the human factor. The examiners who do the
tests, run the machines and make the comparisons are only human. At the FBI lab
and the nearly 400 other crime labs in the United States, those people have
turned out to be as flawed as the eye-witnesses, juries or lawyers who make up
the rest of the judicial process.
But if scientific crime-fighting is fallible and
flawed, those problems rarely come to light. One exception was in July 1994,
when U.S. Today and the Gannett News Service published a survey.
Believing that the claim that the bloody glove found on O. J. Simpson's estate
had been planted was far-fetched, the newspaper trawled legal and media
databases for comparative cases. They found 85 instances since 1974 in which
prosecutors had knowingly or unknowingly used tainted evidence that had
convicted the innocent or freed the guilty. In the same period, 48 people
sentenced to death were freed after convictions were found to be based on
fabricated evidence or because exonerating or exculpatory evidence was withheld.
These were just the known cases, cases that for
one reason or another had come to light or made the news. "In the United
States we take science as gospel," said Ray Taylor, a San Antonio-based
lawyer and forensic pathology expert, commenting on the survey. "The public
perception is that faking science is rare. The truth is it happens all the
time."
The tip of this iceberg has been some shocking
individual examples. Fred Salem Zain was a police forensic expert in West
Virginia and Texas for nearly 15 years. Hired as a chemist by West Virginia
State police crime lab in 1979, he testified as an expert in dozens of rape and
murder cases about tests he had never done and results he had never obtained.
Despite complaints, nothing was done. Colleagues taped a magician's wand to one
of Zain's laboratory machines in frustration. In 1989, Zain became head of
serology at the Bexar County Medical Examiner's office in San Antonio. When
asked to review Zain’s work, the Dallas forensic specialist I. C. Stone found
rampant fraud and falsification. In one case, Zain had testified about blood
evidence when no blood had been found; in other cases he reported performing
tests his lab was incapable of doing. Zain was fired. At the last count, five
men jailed for rape and murder have had their convictions overturned as a
result.
West Texas pathologist Ralph R. Erdmann, who
worked as a contract medical examiner in 40 counties, faked more than 100
autopsies on unexamined bodies, and falsified dozens of toxicology and blood
reports. Dozens of other autopsies were botched. In one case he lost a head.
Then there was Louise Robbins, a college anthropology professor who claimed the
ability to match a footprint on any surface to the person who made it. Robbins
appeared as an expert witness for over a decade in more than 20 criminal cases
throughout North America before her claims were thoroughly debunked. Her
testimony helped put more than a dozen people behind bars, including an Ohio man
who spent six years on death row before his conviction was overturned on appeal.
Michael West was a forensic dentist from
Hattiesburg, Miss., who appeared as a scientific expert more than 60 times in 10
states until 1996. At least 20 of these were capital murder cases. West became
famous for his controversial use of long-wave, ultraviolet light and yellow-lensed
goggles to study wound patterns on a body. The equipment is standard:
Ultraviolet light can enhance features on the skin. What West claimed he could
see was not standard: No other forensic expert could pick up the lines and marks
he claimed to see. Robert Kirschner, a former deputy-chief medical examiner who
testified against West, says what West did was closer to voodoo or alchemy than
science. "History is full of people who claimed they could see things, from
ghosts to UFOs," says Kirschner. "But claiming it and proving it are
two different things."
The biggest and self-proclaimed best forensic lab
in the world has not been immune to such rogues. In February 1975, an internal
FBI investigation into the activities of Special Agent Thomas N. Curran, an
examiner in the FBI lab’s serology unit, revealed a staggering record of
perjury, incompetence and falsification. At the trial of Thomas Doepel for rape
and murder in Washington, D.C. in 1974, Curran testified under oath that he had
a bachelor and masters degree in science, that both Doepel and the victim were
blood type O and that the defendant’s shorts bore a single bloodstain. In
reality, Curran had no degree in anything; Doepel, on re-testing, turned out to
be blood type B; and the shorts evidenced two, not one blood stain.
After further complaints, FBI Special Agent Jay
Cochran was instructed to do a full review of Curran’s work. Curran’s
aberrations, like Zain’s, were systemic. Curran had issued reports of blood
analyses when "no laboratory tests were done"; had relied on
presumptive tests to draw up confirmatory results and written up inadequate and
deceptive lab reports, ignoring or distorting tests results. "The real
issue is that he chose to ignore the virtue of integrity and to lie when asked
if specific tests were conducted," concluded Cochran’s report to the then
head of the FBI laboratory, Dr. Briggs White. It was an early warning
of what could happen at the FBI lab. Tom Curran turned out to have lied
repeatedly under oath about his credentials and his reports were persistently
deceptive, yet no one, FBI lab management, defense lawyers, judges, had noticed.
When they did, there was no prosecution for perjury.
Of course, every profession has its rotten
apples. Forensic science is no different from the law, medicine, academia, law
enforcement or anything else. The issue is not the Zains or Currans per se, but
the questions their conduct raises. How did they get into the profession? How
did they get away with it so long? Why are they not stopped and punished? Why do
juries, judges, prosecutors and even defense attorneys believe them?
Take a close look at forensic science and answers
are not hard to come by. The first shock is that most forensic scientists are
not in fact independent experts. About 80 per cent of forensic scientists in
North America are affiliated with police or prosecution agencies. Most of these
work in police laboratories; many are themselves law enforcement officers, as
are most of their superiors. Fred Zain was a state trooper, promoted to
lieutenant; Tom Curran was an FBI Special Agent. The potential conflict of
loyalties and interests is obvious. Scientists are expected to retain a critical
sense, to follow nothing but reason, to maintain an open mind. We expect the
results, the science, to bear witness in court unencumbered by any other
considerations. Complete impartiality may be an aspirational ideal but what
chance is there of coming anywhere near this ideal if the police or FBI pay your
wages?
"It is quite common to find laboratory
facilities and personnel who are, for all intents and purposes, an arm of the
prosecution," notes James Starrs, a professor of law and forensic science
at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. "They analyze material
submitted, on all but rare occasions, solely by the prosecution. They testify
almost exclusively on behalf of the prosecution...As a result, their
impartiality is replaced by a viewpoint colored brightly with prosecutorial
bias." William Thompson, a professor of criminalistics at the
University of Irvine in California agrees. "The culture of such places, run
by police or agents, for police or agents is often just inimical to good
scientific practice. The reward system, promotion, incentives…in the end your
pay check is based on successful prosecutions, not good science."
Nowhere is this truer than at the FBI laboratory
in Washington, the pinnacle of the forensic science mountain in the United
States. Institutional bias here is enshrined in the limitation of the
availability of the lab and its services to state and federal law enforcement
agencies. The FBI lab works for the prosecution and no one else. It is
reinforced by the FBI lab’s reluctance to give or take second opinions.
Generally, evidence submitted to the FBI laboratory may not be taken elsewhere
or vice versa, even though that might be considered the peer-review deemed
essential by scientists. The FBI lab is happy to clear suspects and frequently
does. However, defense teams need to get a court order and be prepared to share
any findings with the prosecution if they want to use the government-funded
facility. Indeed, the lab is even off-limits to defense experts who want to
observe testing.
The prosecutorial attitude was made clear by one
lab veteran now working privately. "People say we're tainted for the
prosecution. Hell, that's what we do! We get our evidence and present it for the
prosecution." In the FBI laboratory, "getting
results," the declared aim of FBI Director Louie Freeh, means securing
prosecutions. But that is only part of the story. Those on the public tour
staring through the viewing windows of the Scientific Analysis Section of the
FBI laboratory might be surprised to learn that many of the white-coated figures
hunched over microscopes or spectrometers are FBI agents. Some have science
degrees, but many, particularly, ironically, those in the most senior positions
do not. They are FBI men and women working for an FBI laboratory.
For more than 20 years, the FBI resisted
replacing its special agents who work in the laboratory with civilian
scientists. Even now, after several years of replacing agents with such
personnel, FBI agents continue to run the lab, occupying virtually all the
senior-management and examiner positions. FBI special agents bring an
"extra dimension" to the analysis of physical evidence, the FBI
insists. The ideal lab specialist "stands in the shoes of the investigator
in the field, whom he is serving," as John McDermott, a senior FBI
official, put it to a Congressional subcommittee in 1981.
Serving the investigator or serving justice?
Close liaison between examining agent and investigator, the core of the FBI’s
argument, can easily create bias that is often so subtle as to be unconscious.
In the first place, there is simply the method of working. "Sometimes they’re
[investigators] pretty confused about what they want, so we’ll call them up to
find out what they’re trying to prove," the then FBI Firearms-Toolmark
Unit chief Jack Dillon told us. "Often we can suggest some better ways of
doing it."
By "doing it" of course Dillon means
trying to prove guilt. "That is what I have come to call putting the cart
before the horsing around," says Professor Starrs. "They're
effectively running the investigation backwards, starting with a hypothesis of
guilt then going out to try and prove it. That is not science. These people
aren't scientists."
Secondly, there is suggestive incrimination.
Numerous studies have shown that advance warning of the results anticipated,
even something as simple as looking for a match or positive identification, is
significantly more likely to produce those results. In just one example,
experiments in 1975 demonstrated that a witness told by police that a suspect
was in an identification line-up was seven times more likely to pick out a
suspect than those advised only that a suspect might be present. Expectations
can be unconsciously passed on, verbally and non-verbally.
One good example of suggestive incrimination
comes from Evan Hodge, a former Firearms-Toolmarks Unit chief at the FBI
laboratory. In an article entitled "Guarding Against Error" he tells
the story of a police inspector who took a 1911A1-model .45- caliber pistol to a
lab for confirmation that it was a murder weapon. "We know this guy shot
the victim and this is the gun he used," the examiner was told. "All
we want you to do is confirm what we already know so we can get the scumbag off
the street. We will wait. How quick can you do it?" The examiner gave them
their instant identification. The suspect confessed and led the police to a
second pistol, also a .45, also a 1911A1 model, which lab tests demonstrated was
the real murder weapon. "We all do this (give in to investigative pressure)
to one extent or another," Evan Hodge admits, arguing that the only
solution is to remove the sources of it from the laboratory completely.
Investigators in the field, and the close contact
the FBI lab advocates with them, are one source of pressure. There are many
more. Prosecutors are one. Politicians, another. The public, yet another. Few
criminal cases today do not lean on forensic science, and as the search for the
means to combat crime has intensified, so have the expectations. At the FBI,
major cases like TRADBOM (the bomb attack on the World Trade Center in New York)
and OKBOM (the Oklahoma City bombing), get the sort of priority, as well as
public and political attention that is, in itself, a source of pressure. These
cases are too big to leave unsolved in the lab, too big to lose in court. The
government will throw infinite investigative and legal resources at them. Lower
down the crime lab chain, the stakes may be just as big locally. Careers may
depend on results. "Don’t expect to get re-elected as a district attorney
in this country if a particularly heinous crime goes unsolved on your
patch," notes one Southern lawyer.
Former FBI supervisor special agent Dr. Frederic
Whitehurst turned whistleblower from such pressures, in particular the culture
clash between the needs of science and the needs of law enforcement that are
accentuated by the dominance of a law enforcement ethos rather than that of
science in the FBI lab. Many accused him of being unable to make the distinction
between pure and practical science. Yet Whitehurst is actually quick to
acknowledge the uniqueness of the forensic process within science. The forensic
scientist seeks to link a sample to an individual, to a substance, to
distinguish it from other specimens in a way no other scientist would even
attempt. The forensic scientist's standard fare is the sort of degraded, soiled
sample that research scientists would trash if it ever came near their
laboratory. The forensic scientist’s goal is not pure knowledge but practical
supposition.
Whitehurst’s contention was simply that such
ends had to be underpinned by scientific method, proven protocols and validated
procedures or they would yield no proven truth, the ultimate aim of both law and
science. Forensic science had to use procedures and processes that had withstood
traditional scientific scrutiny -- i.e., been subjected to publication and peer
review, the sort of "institutional skepticism" that is the cornerstone
of the scientific process. Forensic science examinations should be
full-documented, subject to cross-examination and the results and process
available to the defense. The reality is somewhat different. The openness,
democratic debate, public dissemination, and protracted research that are the
hallmarks of proper science contrast sharply with the secrecy, haste and
authoritarian hierarchy of the crime lab.
For years, some lawyers and many scientists have
argued that forensic science is hardly a branch of science at all in its refusal
and institutional inability to accept or conform to scientific norms. With
relatively little research done in forensic science itself, there has been a
propensity to adopt or adapt half-baked research done elsewhere. The result:
Time after time definitive research in the field of forensic science has only
been done after questions have been raised about the accuracy and reliability of
its procedures, usually in court. The FBI lab, with the biggest forensic science
research facility in the country -- the Forensic Science Research and Training
Center at Quantico, Va. -- has been at the center of many of the resulting
disputes.
The forensic history of voiceprints -- the claim
that a spectrograph could be used to produce a unique pattern for any single
individual's speech -- is particularly instructive. With some research
concluded, a number of courts ruled voiceprints admissible. Only when scientists
from other fields challenged the spectrograph research and a major scientific
controversy erupted did the FBI ask the National Academy of Sciences to review
voiceprint technology. An NAS evaluation committee quickly concluded that the
theory had not been validated. Yet, incredibly, many courts continued
to allow the admissibility of voiceprints long after the NAS study had been
published.
Those that present science to the public at
public expense are surely obliged to understand its basic precepts. Yet many in
the FBI lab do not. Court records throughout the country are littered with
examples. In a recent aggravated-assault and burglary trial in Montana, FBI
fingerprint expert Michael Wieners asserted that a fingerprint experiment he had
done was "scientific" but not "completely scientific." It
was not surprising he could not tell the difference. Challenged about his
familiarity with peer-reviewed literature on fingerprints, Weiners replied:
"Peer reviewed? Could you explain that?"
Complaints about such ignorance preceded Fred
Whitehurst’s arrival at the FBI lab in 1986. In 1981, three prominent
independent forensic scientists criticized FBI science and testimony, citing
three cases in a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy
of Forensic Sciences in Los Angeles. The first was a bank-robbery case in which
the FBI examiner seemed to have been unable to distinguish between a class
characteristic and an individual characteristic in identifying a canvas bag,
despite having a master's degree in forensic science. In the second case, a rape
and murder with semen, blood, saliva and hair samples, the paper criticized the
FBI’s typing procedure. The critics also pointed out that two FBI hair
examiners who had examined the same hair specimens had disagreed on such
fundamentals as how many samples there were, whether they had been bleached, and
whether they had pulled roots. The third case involved gun residue on a shooting
victim's hands that could have exculpated his wife, the defendant, yet had not
been mentioned by the FBI examiner.
The authors of the paper stressed that they did
not consider these cases aberrations. These case studies were, they claimed,
typical of the problems that occurred repeatedly in crime labs and courts. They
noted that FBI lab practice was considered standard by many courts, but
emphasized that they were not singling out the FBI laboratory. The FBI Bureau
did not see it that way. Shortly after the presentation, a former head of the
FBI lab, Thomas J. Kelleher Jr. charged that the authors, Peter Barnett, Ed
Blake and Robert Ogle Jr., had violated the code of ethics of the AAFS in making
the presentation. They had, Kelleher claimed, misrepresented the role of the lab
and the conclusions of FBI examiners. Thus, the actual leveling of the charges,
not the substance of the allegations themselves, became the subject of an
investigation by the AFFS’s ethics committee.
Ultimately it was decided that there was not
"sufficient evidence of misrepresentation of data" by the authors to
support the FBI’s allegation. "The FBI’s allegations were preposterous,
I think we made them look ridiculous," says Ed Blake, now a long-time
critic of the FBI’s forensic science. "We chose the FBI lab to show that
crime labs could get it wrong because we thought they were big enough to take a
little criticism," chuckles Robert Ogle Jr. "Fortunately there was
someone with a scientific background on the ethics committee. They just said:
"Look this is bullshit. You can’t bring ethics charges against people for
giving a scientific paper at a scientific meeting."
Years later, Whitehurst’s charges and his
treatment would mirror those of these three, whose observations, along with
Whitehurst's, would be vindicated by the U.S. inspector general’s report. As
the three critics pointed out in a letter to Professor Starrs’s quarterly
newsletter, Scientific Sleuthing Review, their paper cited "errors
or insufficiencies on the part of the original examiner…management deficiency…[and]
a lack of knowledge." The IG report, 16 years later, cited "failures
by management" and "significant instances of testimonial errors,
substandard analytical work and deficient practices." The damage done to
confidence in crime labs in general and the FBI lab in particular might have
been avoided if the substance of their charges -- not the fact that they had
been made -- had been addressed back in 1981, the three pointed out. But the FBI
lab seemed incapable of addressing these issues or indeed of changing anything
about the way it operated. Indeed, the very manner in which the FBI handled
Whitehurst’s complaints -- dismissing them, burying them, then attacking the
messenger rather than the message -- illustrated how little the culture of the
FBI lab had changed since 1981.
At the core of what the critical experts were
alleging is the poor practice that riddles the FBI lab and much forensic science
in the United States. Documentation is a case in point. Examiners have proved
remarkably loath to write up their bench notes in any adequate scientific
manner. No names, no chain of custody history, no testing chronology, no details
of supervisory oversight, no confirmatory tests, no signatures -- such omissions
are quite normal in FBI lab reports. What they do contain is obfuscation and
overstated conclusions written in an often-incomprehensible style that some
experts have termed "forensonics." Terms like "match" or
"consistent with" are common; chronicled scientific procedures and
protocols to justify them are not.
The motive seems to be to say as little as
possible as unintelligibly as possible with what passes for scientific jargon
and process. Our numerous conversations with former FBI lab personnel and
attorneys have left no doubt why. Since lab reports are discoverable and have to
be provided to the defense, the FBI lab believes that as little as possible
should be given away. The approach to research is no different. The publication
of findings or methodologies might be used to undermine the prosecution of
cases, so no dissemination has been the rule. In short, the FBI's interpretation
of the adversarial approach on which the U.S. judicial system is based, works to
serve neither science nor truth.
As such, the FBI lab's reports have shocked those
outside the U.S. forensic science community. "If these are the ones
(reports) to be presented to court as evidence then I am appalled by the
structure and information content.…[T]he structure of the reports seems to be
designed to confuse," concluded Professor Brian Caddy, head of the forensic
science unit at Strathclyde University in Scotland on being shown the FBI lab's
forensic reports in the Oklahoma City bombing case.
Much the same goes for protocols or established
procedures. Traditionally, many FBI forensic scientists have not used protocols
– the recipes for analyses and the touchstones of scientific procedure --
despite the fact that all scientists accept that not using them produces only
experimental, not proven outcomes. Indeed, in some crime labs, established
protocols do not even exist. "Basically what we've got is a kind of oral
tradition, like medieval English, the Venerable Bede, instead of a regular
scientific protocol manual," claims Steven Jones, Timothy McVeigh's first
defense lawyer in the Oklahoma City bombing case, who has looked into FBI lab
procedures in some depth. "The advantage of the oral tradition of course is
that no one knows what it is."
Such shortcomings are often accentuated in court.
Here pressure from prosecutors is direct. All too often the important caveats
that punctuate forensic science, phrases such as "including but not
excluding," "possible but not certain," "compatible with but
not incompatible with" are forgotten. All too often "could"
becomes "did", an opinion becomes a fact, tests that only suggest are
said to "prove." Even if the forensic scientist is sufficiently
guarded, prosecutors or even judges are often less so.
"The expert may say something quite guarded
like 'was similar' and within minutes you'll hear the prosecutor reinterpret
that as a definitive identification," complains Professor Starrs. "How
many times do you hear the word 'match'. What the hell does it mean? It must be
the most overused word in forensic science." Indeed, surveys have
demonstrated that there is no agreement on the definition of such key terms
among forensic experts themselves.
In the cauldron of the courtroom, testifying
beyond one’s expertise becomes commonplace, especially under the FBI’s
system where auxiliary examiners, often civilian scientists, actually do the
tests, but principal examiners, invariably FBI agents, have tended to do the
testifying. All too often the fingerprint expert is invited to comment or even
speculate on the bloodstains, the firearms expert on the nature of the bomb
explosive, the documents examiner on the toolmarks. When only one expert is
appearing in a multi-discipline case, it's tempting for prosecutors or defense
lawyers to go for an opinion; its also tempting for examiners to embellish,
exaggerate or even lie about their credentials. The case of the FBI’s Tom
Curran, who was variously a zoologist, biologist and psychologist for different
court appearances, is exceptional only in degree.
Incredibly, forensic scientists do not have to
establish competence by obtaining a license or certification -- even from their
peers. There are no federal requirements and, to date, no state has demanded
them. There are, to be sure, professional bodies. The American Board of
Criminalists conducts very general proficiency tests, the American College of
Forensic Examiners holds ethics exams, and perhaps the most highly regarded, the
American Academy of Forensic Sciences, is a professional body whose members
elect and promote each other on merit. But membership in none of these is a
prerequisite to work. There are no certification or minimum standards for a very
simple reason: The profession as a whole has opposed it. As long ago as 1976
certification boards were established in five areas of forensic science in an
effort to establish peer-based bodies that would review credentials, run
qualifying exams, agree on ethical standards, and certify practitioners in their
particular fields. Guidelines were put to the nation's crime lab personnel in a
referendum. They rejected them by a two-to-one vote.
Serologist Fred Zain never took any kind of
proficiency test and the profession could do nothing about him when it had
misgivings. Forensic dentist Michael West was suspended by his professional
body, which he sued. But even suspension did not stop him testifying in court;
indeed his ability to "get results" meant he remained in big demand.
Some such as Ed Blake see the forensic science
profession as a sort of medieval guild with crime lab directors, led by the FBI
lab and its management, acting as the police chiefs, employing, as they do,
four-fifths of the profession. Certainly the failure of the professional
associations to assert themselves has left a vacuum crime lab directors seemed
to have filled, in deciding who will practice and on what terms. As Dr. David
Stoney has remarked, in the absence of certification and thus effective
sanction, there is, in many ways, no forensic science profession as such.
"What are the entry requirements? Employment and function. One joins the
profession when one is hired by a crime laboratory and one begins to write
reports and testify in court."
In the 1970s, the FBI lab began to flex its
muscles to organize the crime labs of the country to fill this vacuum. In 1973,
Duayne Dillon, a criminalist from California, stunned an audience at an AAFS
meeting by stating that the greatest impediment to the widespread adoption of
criminalistics in the U.S. judicial system was the existence of the FBI
laboratory. He was actually well intentioned; Dillon was referring to what he
saw as the isolation and exclusivity of the FBI lab and its belief that there
was no need for other crime labs in the United States. It was also well aimed;
Dr. Briggs White, then the director of the FBI lab, was sitting in the audience.
Furthermore, it was brilliantly timed; J. Edgar Hoover had died the previous
year and Clarence Kelly, keen to shed a little light in the bureau, took over
the FBI in July of that year.
It made sense for the FBI to encourage the
development of local crime labs: It reduced the bureau’s workload. It also
made sense to link new crime labs to Washington, where there was expertise,
information and resources. That year, the FBI lab started training courses for
non-FBI crime lab personnel. The following year, in 1974, Dr. Briggs White was
appointed chairman of what was named the American Society of Crime Laboratory
Directors, an organization designed to improve cooperation and communication
between crime lab directors in the pursuit of "common objectives." A
quarterly magazine, Crime Lab Digest, began publication shortly
afterwards. In 1976, the FBI proposed setting up the Forensic Science Research
and Training Center at Quantico, Va., on the grounds of its training academy. By
1978, the 39,000-square-foot facility was under construction.
By the early 1980s, the FBI was the
overwhelmingly dominant force in servicing the rapid expansion of forensic
science facilities, training everyone from managers to technicians; developing
new forensic science techniques ranging from toxicology to hair identification;
and funding research in academia and private industry across the country. Duayne
Dillon could not have imagined the consequences of his criticism. "ASCLD
and FRTSC gave huge power to a federal agency that had not been active in
forensic science organizations like AAFS. Suddenly the FBI’s lab’s clout
increased enormously."
The FBI’s new power and the enhanced status the
country’s crime lab directors enjoyed as a result of being more closely
associated with the bureau was a fatal blow to the possibility of any agreed,
enforceable ethical code in forensic science. Every two or three months,
Professor Starrs, best known for the spotlight he sheds on the profession in his
quarterly newsletter Scientific Sleuthing Review, gets a phone
call from someone in a crime lab. "They say 'I know the defense attorney
isn't going to ask the right questions and they're going to convict this guy.
What should I do?' Or: 'They said the guy's on the brink of a confession and
they want me to fabricate a fingerprint report,'" he reports. Starrs has
become a sort of confessor figure because as long ago as 1971 he started arguing
publicly for the adoption of an ethical code. What he proposed nearly 30 years
ago could be as useful today.
On personal issues, Starrs suggested:
No consideration or person should dissuade the
forensic scientist from a full and fair investigation of the facts on which
opinion is formulated.
The forensic scientist should maintain an
attitude of independence, impartiality, and calm objectivity to avoid personal
or professional involvement in the proceedings.
A forensic scientist should not tender
testimony that is not within his/her competence as an expert, or conclusions
or opinions within the competence of the jury, acting as laymen.
On procedures, Starrs advocates:
Utmost care in the treatment of any samples or
item of potential evidentiary value to avoid tampering, adulteration, loss, or
other change of original state.
Full and complete disclosure of the entire case
in a comprehensive and well-documented report, to include facts or opinions
indicative of the accused's innocence and the shortcomings of his/her opinion
that might invalidate it.
Forensic scientists should testify to the
procedures undertaken and the results disclosed only when opinions can be
stated in terms of reasonable scientific certainty.
That unless there are special circumstances of
possible intimidation or falsification of evidence, a forensic scientist for
the prosecution should permit the defense to interview him/her before the
trial, an obligation that should not be contingent on the approval of the
prosecutor.
Since they were first articulated in 1971 these
principles have formed the core of other prospective ethical codes. In 1987, Dr.
Joseph Peterson, from the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of
Illinois, suggested a very similar six-point code to the American Academy of
Forensic Sciences at its annual general meeting in San Diego. The American
College of Forensic Examiners incorporated under the motto "Science,
Integrity, Justice," has, since 1993, based its ethics certification exam
on the same principles.
Awareness and agreement is one thing, however,
adherence another, and forensic science had none of these three. In court, the
flaws resulting from the absence of an enforced set of ethical standards,
qualifications and certifying procedures tended to be magnified. The
minimization of admissibility standards in recent years has made matters worse.
For decades, courts applied a general acceptance standard for the admissibility
of novel scientific evidence. Known as the Frye test, a ruling dating
back to the prohibition of polygraph evidence in 1923, the criterion was simple:
Evidence was acceptable in court if the technique or science it was based on had
gained general acceptance in the scientific community. But in 1975, the Federal
Rules of Evidence were adopted, with Federal Rule 702 effectively
supplanting Frye. After 1975, all a scientific or technical expert now
had to do was to satisfy the judge that he or she could provide mere assistance
to the jury beyond the jury's competence.
It is this basement threshold more than anything
else that has given rise to the growing concern about what has been termed
"junk science" in U.S. courtrooms. Its apogee seemed to be one of many
examples cited in Peter Huber’s book Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science
in the Courtroom: a "soothsayer" who, with the help of
"expert" testimony from a doctor and several police officials was
awarded $1 million by a jury for the loss of her "psychic powers"
following a medical scan. Although the emphasis was on civil cases, criminal
cases were not immune to the contagion. Cases are now being settled on the type
of evidence that the scientific community had rejected years before.
The inability of courts to tell the difference
between real and junk science was partially responsible for what seems like
downright laxity when faced with the shortcomings of the forensic examiners.
Ralph Erdmann, the medical examiner from Lubbock County, Tex., cited previously,
pleaded no contest to seven specimen felonies involving faked autopsies,
falsifying evidence, and brokering body parts, yet got only a 10-year probation
order and community service. Fred Zain, the West Virginia and Texas serologist,
was not even punished being acquitted of a variety of criminal charges brought
against him in West Virginia.
Part of the problem in Zain’s case was
illustrative -- it was not even clear if he had broken the law. Zain just left
the impression his tests showed more than they could, claims medical examiner
Vincent DiMaio, Zain's former supervisor. "It's unethical, yes, but not
illegal." Even where there was clear illegality, as with FBI examiner Tom
Curran’s perjury, prosecutions were rare or non-existent. And these were the
prominent cases, the cases that were exposed. Most of the time the inadequacies
in the way forensic science is practiced go far less noticed than in the Zain,
Curran or Erdmann cases.
There are several legal obstacles to rooting out
bad forensic science. The first is lawyers themselves. Few are prepared to
orchestrate a defense around a scientific subject or technology they know little
about; even fewer are prepared to spend the hours or weeks it may take to
prepare. The vast majority of law schools still offer no specific courses
devoted to scientific opinion or expert- witness testimony. "You can ignore
high profile cases like O. J. Simpson. That is not typical. Forensics for
lawyers has been a real blind spot," notes one defense lawyer. The frequent
failure to challenge forensic experts has just preserved an often-undeserved
mystic. "You might as well be a high priest," says John Murdock, a
crime lab director.
Financing is another obstacle. Experts cost
money, the vast majority of defendants do not have it, and the courts are often
reluctant to spend it by authorizing the funds to pay for a defense expert. The
result has been what some experts have termed "an economic presumption of
guilt." Many courts have required defendants to cross near impossible
thresholds of proof of need in order to secure the help of court-ordered
experts. Ironically, proving an expert would make "a material
difference" to the defense case or that doing without one would result in
an unfair trial, as many courts demand, often in itself requires an expert.
The net result is obvious. The vast majority of
defendants in criminal courts in the United States do not have access to
forensic expertise, even though they will almost certainly face forensic
evidence from the prosecution, according to Jack King, public affairs official
at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The prosecution’s
access to crime laboratories, the latest technology, and an unlimited range of
expertise in the most serious cases means that, of all the disparities between
defense and prosecution in the criminal justice system in the United States,
that in the forensic field may be the greatest. The impact on the outcome of a
case, where a defendant’s life or liberty is on the line, can be equally
disproportionate.
Yet even having a defense expert may make little
difference. Defendants have no right to even know if a forensic expert is going
to testify against them in federal court, and they certainly have no right to
confront the scientist who actually performed the tests that might incriminate
them. These obstacles are only part of discovery and disclosure rules that are
stacked against defendants. Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure
makes all "results and reports" of scientific tests discoverable to
the defense. But who says such a report has to be written? Even if a scientific
test is performed, even if dozens of scientific tests are performed, no written
report is obligatory. And oral reports are not discoverable. That is a loophole
the FBI and other crime labs have proved adept at exploiting.
Rule 16 says nothing about the bench notes, the
findings, calculations, or records made during testing. There is no mention of
the graphs or printouts that basic forensic tools like chromatographs or
spectrographs produce. Court after court has ruled that these are not
discoverable, despite the fact that it is these, rather than the reports, which
are often deliberately perfunctory and conclusory, that allow other experts to
assess and check the scientific work carried out. "The crime lab controls
everything -- results, tests, samples," says Professor Thompson. "As a
defense attorney you’re lucky to get a two-page lab report saying it’s your
guy, he’s guilty, thank you very much."
One classic example came in the 1983 trial of
Wayne Williams, accused of two of some 30 deaths of young African-Americans in
and around Atlanta. Barry Gaudette, a hair and fiber expert working with the FBI’s
prosecution experts, testified about complex tests done over 11 days of
examination, but solely from bench notes. They were ruled not subject to
discovery, despite a defense appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court. Another expert
testified about the graphs produced by a spectrophometer, an instrument used to
compare the color of fibers taken from the supposedly rare carpet from Williams’s
bedroom and from his car with those taken from the clothes on the victims’
bodies. The Georgia Supreme Court again denied discovery even though,
paradoxically, it recognized that the interpretation of them formed the basis of
the expert’s testimony. Despite being highly relevant, even material, to a
defense case, the graphs were not subject to discovery. As a result, the guilty
verdict in the case stood.
This sort of tilting of the scales of justice has
left some defendants obtaining more information, often enough to clear
themselves or secure a new trial, under the Freedom of Information Act than
under discovery provisions. In some cases what has subsequently been released
seemed to be what lawyers call Brady material after the landmark judgment
in 1963 that determined that the suppression of evidence material to guilt or
punishment, evidence that is favorable to an accused person, is a violation of
due process.
An obligation to preserve evidence would seem to
be at the heart of the Brady decision. If evidence, specimens, reports,
or bench notes are destroyed or discarded, how can anyone determine what was
exculpatory? But on two separate occasions the Supreme Court has declined to
interpret the Brady ruling as including a duty to preserve evidence.
Startling amounts of evidence – bullets, blood samples, hair – are routinely
trashed at the FBI and other crime labs. Some of this, such as the ammonium
nitrate crystals that implicated Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma bombing, is
absolutely crucial material. At the FBI lab, an even larger amount of paperwork
-- reports, bench notes and charts -- has been lost in a filing and record
retention system no one, including management, seems to be able to rely on.
With no duty to preserve evidence, the right of a
defendant to test or retest evidence becomes even more crucial. Yet there is no
such right written into Rule 16, and the FBI lab and most crime labs in the
country grant no such right. Those seeking the right are routinely told they
will have to get a court order. Photographing or otherwise chronicling testing
procedures has been resisted for years by crime labs. All kinds of excuses,
ranging from security to space, have been offered as to why the FBI lab cannot
allow defense experts to witness tests on its publicly funded premises.
Under the circumstances -- the close ties to the
prosecution, the lack of certification of personnel, the inherent flaws in the
structure and practice of forensic science -- the necessity for regulation of
crime laboratories is obvious. Yet they remain unregulated. What inspection and
accreditation there is is voluntary and subjective. This makes crime labs an
anomaly even within the laboratory field. In 1967, the Clinical Laboratory
Improvement Act set minimum standards and regulations for some clinical
laboratories after proficiency testing had revealed widespread deficiencies.
Following further testing that showed a marked improvement in standards, in 1988
the law was strengthened and extended to cover all clinical labs.
The new legislation introduced mandatory
standards for technical and supervisory staff, licensing requirements and
uniform quality assurance procedures. Forensic laboratories were excluded from
the legislation in both 1967 and 1988. The result? "Clinical laboratories
must meet higher standards to be allowed to diagnose strep throat than forensic
laboratories must meet to put a defendant on death row," in the words of
Eric Lander, a molecular biologist.
Crime labs were considered too good to need
regulation. In reality they were anything but, as the first and to date only
national examination of forensic science labs revealed in a series of tests done
between 1974 and 1977. More than 200 forensic laboratories, all of which
participated voluntarily, carried out all or some of 21 proficiency tests across
a broad range of "evidence" types. The FBI joined the program late and
dropped out early, performing 18 of 21 tests and acting as the
"referee" for other labs in five of these. Although the FBI claimed
its examiners came to no "improper conclusions," the overall results
were absolutely shocking. Seventy-one per cent of those labs participating were
found to have reported faulty results in a blood test, 51.4 per cent made errors
in matching paint samples, and nearly 68 per cent failed a hair test. Some 35.5
per cent of crime labs failed in soil examinations and 28.2 per cent made
mistakes in firearms identification -- a mainstay of forensic science work.
The errors stretched from handwriting comparisons
to hair examination, and the causes were just as broad, according to the
examiners. The Forensic Science Foundation, which carried out the study, blamed
misinterpretation of the test results by careless or untrained examiners,
mislabeled or contaminated standards, inadequate data bases, and perhaps most
serious of all, faulty testing procedures. The foundation made a string of
recommendations: more resources; better education and training; accreditation
and certification programs; and ongoing proficiency and quality-assurance
systems.
The results alarmed Don Edwards, a former FBI
agent who as a Californian congressman had some responsibility for oversight of
the FBI in his capacity as chairman of the House of Representatives Subcommittee
on Civil and Constitutional Rights. In 1979, he began raising questions about
practices at the FBI lab, specifically the lack of accountability. Two years
later, Edwards began trying to pressure the FBI into accepting outside
proficiency testing, but got little support from his colleagues and outright
opposition from the bureau. "[He] tried to use the bully pulpit of his
chairmanship to embarrass/cajole the FBI to do the right thing….The bureau
consistently rejected his efforts," said long-time assistant counsel to the
subcommittee James X. Dempsey. Based on years of trying to oversee
the FBI lab, Edwards himself has no doubts. "The FBI lab should be
independent of the FBI. It has a basic conflict of interest in working for the
prosecution."
The pressure did force the FBI lab to adopt
internal proficiency testing in 1981. The industry as a whole decided to react
by establishing an accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Laboratory
Directors, known rather cumbersomely as the American Society of Crime Laboratory
Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board or ASCLD/LAB. Application for
accreditation was voluntary, and the inspectors, who were other crime lab
personnel, were trained by the FBI lab at its training facility at Quantico. As
such, ASCLD/LAB's description of itself as "independent, impartial and
objective" was debatable. An offshoot of ASCLD, the system was voluntary
and internal, secretive and anonymous, in effect a self-regulatory response to
growing external criticism.
By December 1996, more than 15 years after its
inception, only 138 of the nearly 400 crime labs in the United States had earned
accreditation. ASCLD/LAB refuses to say how many crime labs have tried and
failed to get accredited, and no other information on their proficiency tests
has been made public. Today, forensic scientists disagree on what form
proficiency testing should take, whether it should be "blind," where
the examiner does not know they are being tested, or "open," where its
known to be a test, whether it should be administered externally or internally
and whether the results should be made public or kept private. However, almost
all forensic scientists agree on the importance of proficiency testing, most on
the advantages of external scrutiny. "It’s very easy to just get into a
habit of doing things a certain way without seeing that there might be
problems," says Richard Tanton, a crime lab director in Palm Beach and a
former President of ASCLD. "It happened in our lab. ASCLD/LAB inspectors
came in, made suggestions and we made changes. Lucky we did in retrospect."
The best indication on how crime labs have been
performing since the 1970s comes from a fee-based voluntary proficiency testing
program run by the Forensic Sciences Foundation and Collaborative Testing
Services. Results of testing between 1978 and 1991 have now been published, and
although direct comparisons with the previous testing are almost impossible,
they remain alarming. Dr. Joseph Peterson, who categorized the results,
concludes that "there were some areas of improvement and some areas that
hadn’t changed much." Forensic identification of blood and
drugs had improved but still showed errors. Comparative identifications of
fibers, paint chips, glass and body fluid mixtures such as semen all showed
improper comparison rates of more than 10 percent, some substantially more. They
were in Dr. Peterson's words "categories of serious concern." The new
and growing area of explosives identification also seemed to be a problem.
But improvement or not, was any error rate
acceptable in a country that throughout the 1980s was increasingly resorting to
capital punishment? And if the results of a lab’s proficiency tests were not
published, how could juries take a stand on the probable reliability of any test
results they were trying to make decisions on? "It’s one thing to argue
about the acceptability of the science used but what about the actual practice
of that science? If they aren’t doing it right – and all the evidence is
that crime labs are not -- what’s the point of arguing about whether they
should be doing it in the first place?" asks Professor Thompson. "If
the lab results are wrong, they’ve no relevance to anyone’s guilt or
innocence."
Occasionally, proficiency testing in one
specialist area of forensic science exposes widespread incompetence. In 1995,
Collaborative Testing Services tested 156 U.S. fingerprint examiners -- the
cornerstone of forensic science -- in a proficiency test sponsored by their
professional body, the International Association for Identification. Only 44
percent (68) of those tested correctly identified all seven latent fingerprints
provided. Some 56 percent (88) got at least one wrong, 4 percent (6) of these
failing to identify any. In all, incorrect identifications made up 22 percent of
the total attempted.
In other words, in more than one in five
instances "damning evidence would have been presented against the wrong
person" noted David Grieve, editor of the fingerprinters’ magazine, The
Journal of Forensic Identification. Worse still, examiners knew they were
being tested and were thus presumably more careful and freer from law
enforcement pressures. Calling for immediate action, David Grieve concluded:
"If one in five latent fingerprint examiners truly possesses knowledge,
skill or ability at a level below an acceptable and understood baseline, then
the entire profession is in jeopardy." The same must be true of
every suspect in the country, the vast majority of whom never get a fingerprint
expert onto their defense team or any chance of a re-examination. Many crime
laboratories routinely destroy fingerprint evidence.
It is clear that forensic science is massively
error-ridden, while the flaws in the sole laboratory accreditation program
designed to improve performance are obvious. ASCLD/LAB has no powers to regulate
or inspect a crime lab or to stop a lab that has failed inspection from doing
examinations in criminal justice cases. Many U.S. crime labs have never even
risked inspection and the possibility of failing, most notable among them the
one that bills itself the premier forensic science laboratory in the world --
the FBI lab in Washington.
The FBI's reasoning for not applying for
accreditation is much the same it gives for opting out of the national
proficiency testing program after 1977: cost, pressure of work, and relevance.
More recent variations on these themes have included casting aspersions on ASCLD/LAB's
ability to undertake an accreditation process for a forensic laboratory as large
and diverse as the FBI laboratory, or even insisting that since the FBI lab
would secure accreditation easily there was no point in spending the time and
money going through the process. In fact, internal memos have shown that
managers at the FBI lab have known for years that the FBI lab could not meet
ASCLD/LAB accreditation criteria. Practice, procedures and even the plant itself
at the world’s premier forensic lab have been judged totally inadequate by the
FBI itself.
The FBI lab could not publish its proficiency
results for the same reason. Yet that has not stopped FBI lab managers
pretending otherwise, maintaining the image at the cost of the reality. In April
1981, the Assistant Director for the Laboratory Division of the FBI, Thomas
Kelleher told a congressional subcommittee that the FBI's participation in the
testing program of 1974-75 had been "to see that we didn't appear to say,
"This is for everyone else but not for you." He went on to imply that
the tests were beneath FBI examiners. "The level of proficiency offered was
far below that of the FBI examiners that were working in the particular areas of
our laboratory."
That was the official line. Most managers seemed
to have known that the reality was rather different. More than 16 years later
and long since retired, Kelleher talked to us about the need for ASCLD/LAB
accreditation or some other form of external oversight. "The FBI lab was
always going to need the sobering influence of an impartial organization that
says "You might be big but you’re not great". An organization that
says: "You’ll only be big if….'" he concludes. "After all,
how do you challenge people to do better if everyone’s always telling them
they are the best?"
It was a million-dollar question, not least
because Kelleher’s successors at the FBI lab would spend years avoiding such
external scrutiny. The FBI lab now does its own internal proficiency tests, the
results and methods of which it has bitterly resisted releasing to the courts or
public, sometimes dropping cases rather than releasing data when ordered to do
so by the courts. A number of FBI lab examiners are incompetent, negligent and
worse, slant their results and testimony to ensure the most incriminating
results, even if that means trampling the demands of natural justice. For years,
FBI lab examiners have worked in a lab highly vulnerable to contamination and
many have followed scientific protocols, if indeed they had them, only if they
chose.
FBI lab managers have not only known all this for
years but have also known the real significance of breaking some of the most
fundamental rules of scientific practice. They have connived with both the
incompetence of examiners to prevent any possible embarrassment to the bureau,
and with the bias in examination because it ensured "results":
successful prosecutions that reflect well on themselves. A key part of this,
maintaining the myth that this was the best forensic lab in the world, has
always being blocking external scrutiny of ASCLD/LAB inspectors or anyone else
who would expose that myth. For years, the emperor has indeed had no clothes.
However he could never be seen to be naked if the image of the FBI’s
crackerjack technosleuths, resolving every case presented, was to be upheld.
As the FBI’s research and training facility
came to dominate forensic science research in this country during the 1980s, the
laboratory division continued to employee and promote researchers and examiners
who patently ignored the most basic scientific procedures and fixed results. As
its own staff patently ignored ASCLD guidelines on documentation, record
retention and report writing, the FBI lab would exhort others to follow the
guidelines in the pages of its periodical, Crime Lab Digest. Thousands of
personnel from other crime labs would be trained by an institution that failed
to train or supervise its own staff. Hundreds of crime lab managers from around
the country would be trained by an FBI laboratory division run by managers who
failed to check examiners' work, ignored repeated complaints about sloppy or
negligent work, and even promoted some of the worst offenders.
It was a scandal that kept on growing, affecting
hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. A scandal of atrocious forensic science that
not only threatened to punish the innocent but to free the guilty. A scandal
that demonstrated that J. Edgar Hoover lived on, that the FBI lab was
unaccountable even to the rest of the FBI, let alone to Congress, the scientific
community or the general public. It was a scandal that when it finally broke
would be all the more devastating as result of years of pretence, denial and
face-saving, years of putting image before reality.
Excerpted with permission of the publisher, The
Free Press, from the book, Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI
Crime Lab by John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne.
Readers may purchase an
autographed copy of the book Tainting
Evidence directly from the author by sending a check or money order in the
amount of $25 (shipping and handling included) to:
John F. Kelly
1832 Biltmore Street, NW, Apt. 35
Washington, D.C. 20009
His email address is: KJohn39679@aol.com
