Feds to review FBI lab work in thousands of convictions

From [HERE] The Justice Department and the FBI announced today that they will review thousands of convictions to determine whether crucial lab tests of hair and fiber evidence were flawed. It's the FBI's largest post-conviction review and will cover cases dating to at least 1985, sources told The Washington Post. The paper reported in April that officials had "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."

The Innocence Project, whose independent reviews have exonerated death-row inmates and others wrongly convicted of crimes, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers will assist with the review. The Justice Department and the FBI are identifying cases for review where FBI hair examination helped convict someone, Justice Department spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said.

"We remain committed to working closely with our law enforcement partners to go through thousands of cases, all of which are more than a decade old, and to assemble evidence for purposes of conducting a thorough and meaningful review of convictions," she said.

The Post identified two men convicted in separate cases largely on the testimony of FBI hair analysts who wrongly placed them at crime scenes. A judge has tossed out the murder conviction of one man, and the government is seeking to vacate the sexual-assault conviction of the other.

The Innocence Project has details of one exoneration case involving exaggerated testimony from an FBI hair-and-fiber analyst.