US reviews 27 death penalty convictions due to FBI errors
RT | July 18, 2013
The FBI has reviewed thousands of criminal cases and suspects that 27 death penalty convictions may have been secured by using faulty and exaggerated testimonies that may have wrongfully linked defendants to crimes.
A joint review by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department was launched after the Washington Post last year reported that flawed forensic work by FBI hair examiners might have led to the convictions of innocent people. The article suggested that Justice Department officials knew of the flaws, but failed to acknowledge them.
Last July, federal officials announced that they would investigate old criminal cases to see if faulty testimonies influenced death penalty convictions. More than 21,700 FBI Laboratory files are being examined, and at least 120 convictions have already been identified as potentially suspicious. Of these, about 27 were death penalty convictions, the Post reports.
Investigators suspect that these convictions may have been influenced by FBI hair examiners who exaggerated the significance of their findings. These experts linked defendants to crimes based on “matches” from microscopic analysis of hair found at crime scenes. Many of these experts claimed that their hair analysis tests definitively confirmed the identity of the offender.
But such statements were often misleading: since the 1970s, FBI reports have usually stated that hair tests are not adequate proof to link a suspect to a crime, since these tests can be flawed.
In cases where solely a hair analysis led to a suspect’s conviction, US courts may have mistakenly locked up innocent people – or in some cases, sentenced them to death.
“One of the things good scientists do is question their assumptions,” David Christian Hassell, director of the FBI Laboratory, told the Post. “No matter what the field, what the discipline, those questions should be up for debate. That’s as true in forensics as anything else.”
The federal review of convictions has raised awareness about the problems that hair tests can pose when there is no other evidence to prove a suspect’s guilt. Texas executes more inmates than any other US state, and its Forensic Science Commission on Friday decided to scrutinize hair cases at all labs under its jurisdiction.
The review also led to a stay of execution in May. Willie Jerome Manning, a 44-year-old man convicted of murdering two college students in 1992, was scheduled to die by lethal injection in Mississippi. But the Justice Department discovered flaws in the forensic testimony that led to his conviction, which halted the execution pending further investigation.
It is unclear how many inmates are on death row or may have been executed already as a result of faulty hair tests, but the FBI says it will announce partial results of its examination later this summer. The review is currently prioritizing cases in which defendants can be punished by execution. Once that review is complete, the agency will examine cases in which defendants are currently imprisoned.
July 19, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Capital punishment, Criminal law, FBI, FBI scandal, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Forensic science, Science, Security, United States Department of Justice, USA | Leave a comment
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The Zeolite Book — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
The volcanic mineral medicine will not patent — for the toxic burden medicine will not name
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Zeolite is old. It is in Roman concrete that has held for two thousand years. It’s in the water filters of ancient cisterns. It’s in the stomachs of Pacific livestock whose keepers knew, somehow, that this grey crumbling rock made the animals healthier. It’s in Soviet clinical protocols from the 1960s. It’s in the standard emergency response to the Chernobyl explosion.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl reactor failure, the Soviet Union manufactured and distributed natural zeolite at industrial scale — for soil remediation, for livestock feed, for human consumption, for the cleanup itself. Karl Hecht, who had been director of the Institute for Experimental and Clinical Pathophysiology at the Charité of Humboldt University Berlin, spent the six decades after that building the clinical research base — on silicon’s role in human health, on zeolite’s clinical safety, on its applications in ageing. In 2018, Pavelić and colleagues published a comprehensive clinical safety review of natural clinoptilolite in Frontiers in Pharmacology. In 2019, Mastinu analysed its binding affinities. In the Western medical literature, these works sit largely uncited.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a volcanic mineral with six decades of Soviet clinical work behind it, two major peer-reviewed Western reviews, and ongoing clinical use across the former Eastern Bloc, remains almost entirely absent from Western medical practice — and what the toxic burden it’s meant to address actually is.
The Zeolite Book gathers the Soviet clinical record, the Western peer-reviewed studies, three contemporary practitioner voices, and three serious counterviews into one honest treatment. That’s why the book runs to seven appendices. 288 pages, four parts, three practitioner voices, three counterviews, seven appendices. The honest treatment is the argument.
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