How can these fellows sleep at night?
“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.”
“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.”
Personally, twice I had FBI field agents as my neighbor, and I while my n=2 can hardly be generalized, my first impression (and you only get one chance to make a good first impression) is that the FBI doesn't get to hire the cream-of-the-crop. Maybe it's not the staff fault: the FBI seems to be investing a lot more in their PR department than in its departments actually doing the job in the trenches.
As a result, they tend to accept promises of accuracy that line up with their biases, and not dig too deeply into methods.
People do that sort of thing all the time, not out of maillice , but out of ignorance or bias.
The article doesn't even talk about what the actual problems were. Was the forensics based on wrong assumptions or research later proven inaccurate.
There is a difference between being wrong in good faith, being wrong because of bias, and straight up lying.
Even the statistics in this article reek of bias. 95% of reports overstated the matches. By how much? Are we talking about 99.9% matches being called 100%. Or are we talking about 30% chance being called 100%. How many times was it substantially overstated?
The biggest problem is that there isn't really an academic field for most of forensics. Which is pretty odd.
The reason you should care about the distinction is because many people think bad things only happen when people purposely act badly. But a lot of bad is done by people acting with good intentions or neutral intentions. This ironically leads people to falsely trusting systems to do the right thing.
A bunch of well meaning FBI examiners can end up jailing innocent people if they are all using the same text book that got some facts wrong.
Plus like I said, it's not even clear that innocent people were sent to jail because of this. At least it's not clear from the article, I haven't looked for the report that is mentioned.
edited for coffeeless grammar