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FBI Lab Mistakes Get Thousands Of Innocent People Convicted (Picture)
or a while now, thanks in part to the reporting of the Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu, it’s been known that something was not quite right with the FBI’s hair forensics unit in the past. But only but only recently has the FBI admitted that failings within the unit led to hundreds, maybe thousands of questionable convictions before 2000.
In one particularly shocking case from 1978, two FBI-trained hair analysts who helped in the prosecution of a murder case couldn’t even tell the difference between human hair and dog hair.
The case involved a murder in Washington D.C. that year. The victim, a cab driver, was robbed and killed in front of his home. Before long, police centered upon Santae Tribble, then a 17-year-old local from the neighborhood, as a suspect.
Tribble maintained his innocence. But no matter what he said and how much his friends vouched, two FBI forensics experts claimed that a single strand of hair recovered near the scene of the crime matched Tribble’s DNA. Thanks to that evidence, which was groundbreaking at the time, Tribble was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years to life in prison after 40 minutes of jury deliberation, reported the Washington Post.
He would go on to serve 28 years until the truth came out: an independent analysis found that the FBI testimony was flawed. Not a single hair that was found on the scene matched his DNA. After attorneys brought the evidence to the courts, Tribble was exonerated of the crime, though he’d already been released from prison. “The Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that he did not commit the crimes he was convicted of at trial,” a judge wrote in the certificate of innocence released at the time, in 2012.
It gets worse. Not only did none of the hairs presented as evidence in trial belonged to Tribble, the private lab found that one of the hairs actually came from a dog. MOREHERE
