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Bad FBI Science

A forensic whistleblower on the latest scandal.


We caught up with Dr. Whitehurst this week in the wake of the latest allegations of scientific misfeasance at the FBI crime lab. We now know that nearly every FBI scientist at the lab before the year 2000 — 26 out of 28 — overstated his or her “expert” conclusions about matches from analyses of hair samples collected from crime scenes and/or suspects. Hundreds of cases, at least, have been tainted, including at least one dozen cases that resulted in a sentence of death.



But you don’t need Fred Whitehurst telling you this. The National Academies of Science already has told us that. They’ve already told us that it’s all crap. The FBI is still putting out invalidated work product, and I do not believe the FBI is going to fix this. As soon as this week’s news is last week’s news, they are going to stop the reform. What was revealed this week was known since 1998. They knew there were issues, and they did nothing about it.

Why don't more FBI scientists blow the whistle on their colleagues who are undertaking questionable lab work?

Doesn't make sense. Once you embarrass the FBI, you lose your job, your reputation, your kids can't look forward to college, your mortgage defaults, you get a job working as a correctional officer or serving coffee, no one really seems to care. You have to be insane to tell the truth at the FBI, absolutely insane. The recent Senate hearing concerning whistleblowing at the FBI spells it out very clearly. FBI managers will destroy anyone who does not give them the answers they demand.

What are some of the perverse incentives built into the system?


What specific steps need to be taken to fix the problems?

We have an adversarial justice system that encourages gamesmanship, ambush, secrecy, cheating. Lab analysts go along with the practices in our adversarial justice system. Because they don't have to compete with real scientists, they don't have to question their own work product. And so they are mentally lazy. We need to establish a National Defense Forensic Institute to do what science does, try to prove the null hypothesis. Let the FBI and states and local law enforcement have their own labs. Let them slant their results. And then let defense counsel be assisted by real scientists from the Defense Forensic Institute, an organization of scientists who can publish openly, criticize openly, do research openly with the sole end of questioning government forensic lab science.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.