Convicted defendants left uninformed of forensic flaws found by Justice Dept.

Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2012-04-18 02:40

Article here. Excerpt:

'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.'

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Comments

... if the defendants mentioned in this article were female that the rush to suppress exculpatory evidence would have been so great?

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Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2012-04-18 02:41

I don't know about that Matt, but according to my parents rights group* and my own experiences, evidence and information only moves in one direction, that's the direction of the prosecuting team. Government employees and public servants seem to be in cahoots with each other and have free flowing information between agencies. I am most familiar with how reports and evidence moves from the police dept to the public prosecutor, but defendants have a hard time even collecting a police report involving the very incident he/she is being charged for. It is very inconsistent between local departments and is often up to the government employee behind the desk to interpret the rules/laws, but they never make it easy for defendents no matter what the gender.

It should be simple, whatever is available to one team should be available to the other team without any additional obstacles. In fact they should not even send it to one team w/o simultaneously sending it to the other team as well.

*several parents (including my own) have tried to defend their teenagers against charges brought on by over-zealous police officers without even able to obtain original police reports or see the evidence; but of course the prosecutors have full access to all the reports and evidence.

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Submitted by Kris on Wed, 2012-04-18 06:27