Artistic Leaps in Forensics
The Innocence Project reports that a judge released Donald Eugene Gates from an Arizona prison last week. Gates had been convicted in 1982 rape and murder in Washington, DC - the only problem with the conviction was that Gates was innocent.
A judge determined that an FBI forensic analyst’s (Michael Malone) testimony during the trial largely exaggerated otherwise meaningless results. Malone testified that hairs found at the scene were “microscopically indistinguishable” from Gates’ hairs. That one statement sealed Gates’ fate, but went far beyond the bounds of possible conclusions that could be drawn from a hair comparison.
As I intimated in yesterday’s post, microscopic hair evidence is notoriously unreliable. It involves a simple game of match. In other words, the analyst “eyeballs” the evidence and declares two hairs to be alike. While it sounds simple enough, human hair is not nearly as discriminating as someone’s DNA. There is no evidence that one person’s hair is unique to that one person. To the contrary, hair analysis can only reveal potential similarities between specimens – but there is no empirical evidence to demonstrate the statistical likelihood that two specimens might share common characteristics.
Now, Malone’s forensic conclusions have been challenged in other cases, but it’s troubling that this is happened last week given that a 1997 Justice Department review discredited his work, no formal review of his convictions has ever been conducted. The Judge who presided over the Gates case recently ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office to conduct such a review.
When will the “artful” work of forensic technicians be recognized for what it is – art and not science. Too many cases have been reversed for this to be a “one bad apple” problem.
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