We have a story tonight about crime and unusually modern science.
In the late 1980's, DNA testing brought a new
level of scientific certainty to America’s courtrooms, convicting the guilty…
DNA evidence has helped put hundreds of violent criminals behind bars.
… freeing the innocent…
DNA testing proved they didn't do it.
…and calling into question the forensic science that had sent many of them to prison
in the first place.
The only physical evidence linking him to the murder, has been discredited.
It’s science, but it’s not as foolproof as you might think.
Before DNA, the criminal justice system had long relied on microscopic hair analysis,
a forensic technique whose impact is only beginning to become clear.
We started asking ourselves, “What do we know?”
In 1981, Kirk Odom saw how a few hairs could change a man’s life.
I used to go jogging, like, every Sunday.
This particular Sunday morning, as I was leaving out of the house, the Metropolitan police
was knocking on the door.
The police had noticed Odom a few weeks earlier when they were scouring the neighborhood for
a suspect who broke into a woman’s apartment and raped her at gunpoint.
The policeman said, “Oh, he looks a little bit like a composite sketch I saw of the rapist.”
I told them that I was at home in bed -- and my moms can verify that – but
they didn’t believe me.
The victim soon picked Odom out of a lineup, though her identification was called into question.
She only had a fleeting opportunity to see the perpetrator.
But the police had another piece of evidence – a hair found on the victim’s nightgown.
They didn’t give me any information.
They just wanted hair from my groin area.
They wanted hair from top of my head.
The police sent the hairs to the FBI’s renowned crime lab.
There, some of the nation's most experienced forensic scientists used high-powered microscopes
to check more than a dozen characteristics -- from pigment distribution to scale patterns–
that told them whether a hair could have come from a suspect.
We would look at hairs all the time, every day.
If you look at something every day, routinely, you get very good at noticing small differences.
Max Houck would later join this elite unit of hair and fiber experts.
Some of the people that I worked with were fantastic.
They had such a keen eye, such good discrimination.
They saw things that I just didn’t think you could see.
The examiners’ skills had been honed through decades of scientific crime fighting at the Bureau.
Comparisons show that a strand of hair from the assailant’s scalp is exactly the same
as the hair of one suspect being held by police.
By the 1970s, microscopic hair comparisons were an essential part of the FBI arsenal.
Even a single hair may supply evidence.
When Odom’s case came to trial in 1981, the FBI’s analysis was clear.
It was explained to me that they matched the hairs, one hair with another.
The most important evidence came from the hair microscopist, who said,
“I can’t say it’s unique but I can say the chances of it coming from anybody
other than Kirk Odom are small.”
I could put myself in one of the juror’s places, you know, and say, “Well yeah, he must have did it."
It took just a few hours for the jury to convict Odom.
He was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
Six years into Odom’s prison term, a revolutionary new technology burst onto the scene.
Scientists say they can take one hair from a crime scene, isolate its DNA,
and match it with a sample from a suspect.
At the FBI, one of the nation’s foremost forensic laboratories, they are running extensive
tests, determining how the agency can take advantage of the new technology.
By the mid-90s, hair examined under a microscope at the FBI was often sent for a DNA test.
Houck remembers one day, early on, when he got at DNA report on two hairs his unit had
found to be microscopically indistinguishable.
The results were jarring.
The hairs didn’t come from the same individual.
We started talking about, “Well, what did we see?”
“Why did we think it did match?”
“How good are we?” in a sense.
There’s always a chance you might be wrong.
We never really knew what that chance was.
Houck started tracking how often DNA showed that hairs that appeared
microscopically indistinguishable actually came from different people,
and in 2002, published his results.
About 11 percent of the time, mitochondrial DNA said, “No.
That hair actually came from someone else.”
It kinda shook us up.
But it wasn't the only warning about the subjective nature of hair analysis, which was also being
done in state and city crime labs across the country.
One FBI hair and fiber expert – Michael Malone – had already come under fire.
Malone positively identified the victim’s hair on a blanket –
a blanket that was never at the crime scene.
And scrutiny of other cases would follow
Now, 12 years later, the new DNA tests proved their innocence.
If they stopped to think about it,
they would’ve known that what they were doing was scientifically invalid.
But no one did it.
Just let it go.
Since the early 90s, Peter Neufeld and the Innocence Project had been using DNA analysis
to re-test crime scene evidence in old cases – and free wrongly convicted prisoners.
And by 2012, the numbers were startling. According to the Innocence Project, nearly a quarter
of the more than 300 people exonerated by DNA, had been convicted, in part, by hair analysis.
So how did an accepted forensic technique lead to so many problems?
It’s not like DNA, where they can say 1 in 1.8 billion.
There aren’t any statistics -- that’s the essential dilemma that a hair examiner is in.
I can’t put a number to it.
There was absolutely a disconnect between what I could say as a scientist and what prosecutors
– or defense attorneys – wanted me to say.
While FBI lab reports typically stated that hair analysis wasn’t a means of positive
identification, on the witness stand some examiners made it sound like it was -- by
implying a near certain match, or by using unsubstantiated statistics.
The manager of the Montana state crime lab, testified there was a one in 10,000 chance
that hairs found at the scene did not come from Bromgard.
In Kirk Odom’s case, the prosecutor explained that the FBI analyst had examined thousands
of hairs during his long career and only rarely found hairs he couldn’t tell apart.
If you have no numbers, how can you use words like “remote,” or “extremely rare”?
And that’s what they were doing with great frequency.
Saying things like, “I’ve worked a lot of cases,” or, “I’ve looked at thousands of hairs."
Some of those phrases are the ones we were told to use.
And no one ever said, “Don’t say that.
That’s not good science.”
Lay lawyers and lay judges and lay jurors simply didn’t understand it and accepted it as God.
Many jurors were primed to accept testimony about forensics like hair analysis, having
seen it used in crime fiction from Sherlock Holmes
to modern TV dramas.
By 2012, hair evidence was making headlines for another reason – three high profile
exonerations featured in a Washington Post investigation of flawed hair testimony.
And all three men had been convicted in part by hair analysis done by the FBI.
One of the men was Kirk Odom,
who had already served his entire sentence by the time he received the news.
Three different crimes, three different men, all exonerated.
Three different FBI examiners.
In fact, in one of the three cases, it was actually the chair of the FBI Hair Unit.
That's when the FBI began to really worry.
The FBI says it is now going through thousands of other cases from the days before DNA testing
to see whether witnesses or prosecutors exaggerated the significance of the FBI's hair analysis.
Dozens of these people are currently on death row.
One execution was shut down hours before they were gonna execute the man in Mississippi.
Neufeld and the Innocence Project are working with the FBI
in this landmark review of more than 2500 cases.
I fully expect that in 90 to 95 percent of those cases, the FBI will conclude that their
own agents provided scientifically invalid, erroneous testimony.
Even if that’s the case, it doesn't mean the convictions will be overturned;
other evidence may still uphold the original verdicts.
The FBI, which wouldn't comment on Neufeld’s prediction, says prosecutors and defense attorneys
will review the evidence and help determine if any other suspects were wrongfully convicted
-- like Kirk Odom, who spent 22 years in prison.
I didn’t get a chance to raise my daughter.
She barely knows me.
And that really hurts.
DNA testing of the crime scene evidence not only exonerated Odom, it also led to another
suspect, who escaped prosecution because the statute of limitations had expired.
That man committed another sex offense just two weeks after Odom was sentenced.
In each and every case where we’ve identified the real perpetrator, with one exception – okay
– he or she committed other serious, violent crimes during those intervening years.
So, you wanna get it right, make it more scientific to make the system more reliable,
and ultimately more just.
It’s that simple.