we MUST trust the government, even though there's mistakes.

[SmarterthanYou]

right apple????

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radle...orensi_b_2365141.html?utm_hp_ref=the-agitator

The FBI's crime lab was at one point reputed to be one of the most elite, well-run labs in the world. Not so much anymore. For the last year, the agency has been embroiled in a huge and growing scandal in which its crime lab technicians have been found to have vastly overstated the value and conclusiveness of forensic evidence in criminal cases. The breadth and seriousness of the problem have only come to light in the last year or so, although there have been warning signs going back to the 1990s. The number of convictions affected is in the thousands, possibly the tens of thousands.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...ef9c2e-4965-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_print.html

In July, the Justice Department announced a nationwide review of all cases handled by the FBI Laboratory's hair and fibers unit before 2000 --at least 21,000 cases -- to determine whether improper lab reports or testimony might have contributed to wrongful convictions.

But about three dozen FBI agents trained 600 to 1,000 state and local examiners to apply the same standards that have proved problematic.

None of the local cases is included in the federal review. As a result, legal experts say, although the federal inquiry is laudable, the number of flawed cases at the state and local levels could be even higher, and those are going uncorrected.

It would be difficult to overstate just how catastrophic this is. It's a scandal that strikes at the very heart of our democratic system of government, and it isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves. We're talking about one of the most basic functions of government -- the administration of justice. And we're talking about nationwide systemic failures in the way the government has been presenting scientific evidence in the courtroom going back 40 years, over tens of thousands of cases, all with the approval of the courts in which that evidence was presented.

Worse yet, the Justice Department had to be dragged kicking and screaming into conducting even the federal review.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...justice-dept/2012/04/16/gIQAWTcgMT_print.html

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

Justice Department officials said that they met their legal and constitutional obligations when they learned of specific errors, that they alerted prosecutors and were not required to inform defendants directly.

Think about that......"Taxpayer-paid employees of the Justice Department had direct and exclusive knowledge that there may be hundreds of innocent people in prison, they knew that flawed forensics in these cases needed to be reviewed, and their justification for not doing more as these people continued to rot in prison was, Hey, we did the bare minimum required of us by law... "