At least three prisoners in South Carolina, including one who is serving life, might have been wrongly convicted based on bad forensic science and exaggerated testimony from crime lab analysts.
Their cases are among more than 2,000 criminal convictions across the country under review by the Department of Justice and FBI. Investigators are trying to determine whether federal experts overstated the significance of hair evidence in prosecutions dating back to 1985.
A Washington Post investigation into the FBI’s use of flawed evidence drew the attention of the Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization, to the names of two Palmetto State defendants affected by the review, Roy D. Brooks and Anthony H. Stackhouse. Brooks was convicted of homicide in 1984 and sentenced to life. Stackhouse was sentenced to 50 years in 1986 for attempted sexual assault and burglary. Both apparently were tried in state court.
The third defendant has been identified by staff at the local network of the Innocence Project, which isn’t releasing his name because it doesn’t yet have the inmate’s permission to do so, said member Joseph M. McCulloch Jr., a criminal defense lawyer in Columbia.
“We’re still digging through hundreds of cases,” he added.
Paul Cates, communications director at the Innocence Project’s New York headquarters, said the FBI and Justice Department are collecting trial transcripts and other court documents in cases involving questionable hair analysis to determine if there were, in fact, errors worth further investigation. He said the feds have agreed to notify local prosecutors about any potential wrongful convictions based on hair evidence. They also will provide a list of those affected prisoners to the Innocence Project so the agency can make sure the defendants were contacted. The state Attorney General’s Office did not respond to a request for an interview about the federal investigation.
Science under scrutiny
Before the advent of DNA testing, hair recovered from a crime scene often became the lynchpin in the prosecution’s case, with forensic technicians testifying that they were able to match hairs to defendants or victims based on a microscopic analysis of the samples.
But it turned out that the FBI’s comparison technique wasn’t nearly as reliable or conclusive as experts had led juries to believe, according to a study published in 2009 by the National Academy of Sciences.
“They [analysts] made it seem as if the hair matched to the exclusion of all other people, which is overbroad,” said Cates. “The reality is that there has never been a scientific analysis done about how a match would actually be a match and what that would mean.”
The National Academy of Science report led the feds to acknowledge that their expert testimony may have been flawed after all. But it took the exonerations of three prisoners in the Washington D.C. area to spur the nationwide post-conviction review.
As part of the effort, the Justice Department has made an unprecedented agreement that it will not seek the dismissal of any wrongful conviction claims before the courts have considered the merits of each petition, even if the statute of limitations has lapsed.
Two of the local defendants who may benefit from the review, Brooks and Stackhouse, were first identified in a secret investigation of the FBI’s crime lab that was commissioned by the Justice Department in 1997 in the wake of allegations of misconduct at the lab.
The findings of that inquiry were given to state and federal prosecutors, but in many cases the information was not shared with the courts or defendants, according to a recent report from the Washington Post. The newspaper obtained the results through Freedom of Information Act requests.
The independent reviewers who looked at Brooks’ and Stackhouse’s cases could not determine the scientific validity of the hair tests used in their convictions because the FBI analysts’ notes were sparse and contained abbreviations that were virtually impossible to interpret.
More investigations possible
The earlier Justice Department investigation red-flagged two other South Carolina defendants, Allen S. Peake and Clifton J. Campbell, both of whom were convicted of homicide in the 1980s, but neither case appears to have involved hair evidence. Peake had been released from prison at the time of the inquiry and Campbell is serving a life sentence. Their cases will not be included in the current review, though they could be reopened later.
Because serious doubts have been raised about the trustworthiness of other FBI forensic analysis techniques used to compare everything from bite marks to the analysis of carpet fibers, more cases may eventually be reopened, said McCulloch, the local Innocence Project member.
“The problem of flawed science goes much further than this,” he said.
“There’s some indication that the Justice Department is looking at hundreds of cases in our specific area and some information has already been given to prosecutors, though we don’t know how inclusive that information is,” McCulloch said. “It is my hope that the people involved in our system of justice operate in good faith and come forward.”
In the meantime, McCulloch said he and other staff at the Innocence Project will be busy sifting through stacks of case files searching for defendants who might qualify for relief. It’s a difficult job, he said, especially considering that many state crime lab technicians were trained at the FBI’s lab.
“It’s like a knowledge infection,” he said. “It’s very difficult to track.”
- Follow Phillip Bantz on Twitter @SCLWBantz