Government Giving Authority a Bad Name — According to the Washington Post, the FBI Consistently Lied about Forensic Evidence

© 2015 Peter Free

 

25 April 2015

 

 

The apparently still “evil” (post-Hoover) FBI

 

Libertarians may be fundamentally wrong about our ability to live less than anarchically without the controlling aspects of government. But our American version of modern governance appears to be doing everything that it can to prove that centralized authority is Freedom’s abomination:

 

 

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

 

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

 

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

 

© 2015 Spencer S. Hsu, FBI admits flaws in hair analysis over decades, Washington Post (18 April 2015)

 

Bigger than just a smidegeon of misdirection

 

Consider this:

 

 

NACDL executive director Norman Reimer said in an interview with Associations Now that the flaws in the system had been known for years now.

 

“What we were finding was that the examiners … wouldn’t just simply say that there was a microscopic similarity [between the two hairs], but they would go beyond that and say it was a 100 percent match, essentially misleading the jury into concluding that the evidence had a certain value that it didn’t actually have,” Reimer said.

 

This problem doesn’t stop with the FBI labs or federal prosecutions. The review focuses on the first few hundred cases, involving FBI examiners, but the same mistakes and faulty testimony were likely presented in any state prosecutions that relied on the between 500 and 1,000 local or state examiners trained by the FBI.

 

Some states will automatically conduct reviews. Others may not. Much of the evidence is now lost.

 

© 2015 Dahlia Lithwick, Pseudoscience in the Witness Box, Slate (22 April 2015) (extracts)

 

 

In larger perspective

 

The “Lyin’ FBI” revelation, of course, comes after years of evidence that the Feds are spying on everyone, imprisoning and killing some of us with impunity, and blasting tens of thousands of foreigners out the life-terminating wazoo.

 

 

The moral? — Perhaps a dose of anarchy would not, hypothetically, be so bad

 

It might be less hypocritical and its sources of fragmented power less concealed.

 

The philosophical irony here is that freedom-squashers inside government are proving the right wing crazies outside it correct.

 

The pendulum of lunacy has bypassed Sanity’s middle. We in the rational center are seemingly outmuscled by Lifeboat Earth’s violent kooks.