The FBI Laboratory is a division within the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation that provides forensic analysis support services to the FBI, as well as to state and local law enforcement agencies, free of charge.
The lab is located at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Quantico, Virginia.
Opened November 24, 1932, the lab was first known as the Technical Laboratory. It became a separate division when the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) was renamed as the FBI.
The Lab staffs approximately 500 scientific experts and special agents. The lab generally enjoys the reputation as the premier crime lab in the United States. However, during the 1990s, its reputation and integrity came under withering criticism, primarily due to the revelations of Special Agent Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, the most prominent whistleblower in the history of the Bureau.
Whitehurst was a harsh critic of conduct at the Lab. He believed that a lack of funding had affected operations and that Lab technicians had a pro-prosecution bias. He suggested they were FBI agents first and forensic scientists second, due to the institutional culture of the Bureau, which resulted in the tainting of evidence.
From September 1934 to September 1975, the Lab was located on the 6th floor and the attic of the Justice Department Building in Washington, D.C. Public tours of the lab work area were available until the FBI moved across the street to the newly constructed J. Edgar Hoover Building in 1974.
Tours of the J. Edgar Hoover Building were available, but the tour route shifted away from the lab work space, thus sealing the lab from public view.
More information: FBI
The Lab expanded to such an extent that the Forensic Science Research and Training Center (FSRTC) was established at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
Methods at the FSRTC have helped establish standardized forensic practices for law enforcement agencies. The FBI Lab has been in Quantico since the relocation from Washington since April 2003.
The more widespread use of DNA testing in the late 20th century brought renewed scrutiny to the scientific reliability of many of the FBI Laboratory's forensic analyses. Scientific experts consider DNA -which first became widely used in courts in the 1990s- to be the only near-certain indicator of a forensic match.
The scientific reliability of FBI hair analysis has been questioned, as DNA testing has exonerated persons convicted where the only physical evidence was hair analysis. In addition, in a high percentage of cases, the FBI has learned that its expert witnesses overstated the reliability of hair analysis in testimony in court cases.
In 2013 the Department of Justice began a review of thousands of cases from 1982 through 1999 referred to the FBI for hair analysis.
By 2015 it found that these included 32 death penalty convictions, of which 14 people had died in prison or been executed, and narrowed its review to cases that went to court. It has focused on cases in which hair analysis played a part in convictions, in order to follow up with defendants.
In a subsequent investigation in 2012, the DOJ found that evidence related to hair analysis had been falsified, altered, or suppressed, or that FBI agents had overstated the scientific basis of their testimony, to the detriment of defendants. In 2013, the Department of Justice began a review of cases referred to them for hair analysis from 1982 through 1999, as many as 10,000 cases, to determine whether their agents' testimony resulted in wrongful convictions.
DNA testing has revealed some convicted inmates to be innocent of violent crime charges against them.
In 2015 the FBI reported that their expert witnesses overstated the reliability of hair analysis in matching suspects 96 percent of the time, likely influencing conviction of some defendants.
More information: Washingtonian
Cases are still being overturned as a result of incorrect hair analysis testimony.
In 2012 DNA testing revealed the innocence of three inmates from the District of Columbia who had been convicted to life and served years in prison based on hair analysis evidence and testimony by FBI experts. They have received large settlements from the city because of wrongful convictions and damages of the lost years.
Bullet and gun analysis is another forensic discipline that has been identified in recent studies as being less scientifically reliable than thought. The Bureau established an interdisciplinary commission in 2013 to establish the highest scientific standards in forensic testing and to understand the limits of these tests, and how they may be properly used in court.
With a heightened attention to scientific rigour in its forensic testing, the FBI lab in 2005 abandoned its four-decade-long practice of tracing bullets to a specific manufacturer's batch through chemical analysis, after its methods were scientifically debunked.
A blue-ribbon panel of the National Academy of Sciences raised concerns about the FBI's reliance on forensic testing in a 2009 report that found nearly every familiar staple of forensic science to be scientifically unsound and highly subjective.
In 2016 a man was exonerated and freed in Virginia, based on DNA evidence, after serving 33 years in prison. He had been convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to life in part based on several FBI experts testifying to identification of him by bite-mark patterns, to a medical certainty.
Scientists say that such certainty is impossible to gain by this test. The DNA testing showed that he was not the perpetrator of the crime. As the Washington Post reported, No court in the United States has barred bite-mark evidence, despite 21 known wrongful convictions, a proposed moratorium in Texas and research showing that experts cannot consistently agree even on whether injuries are caused by human teeth.
This forensic test has been highly suspect for some years, but prosecutors and police continue to rely on it, and FBI agents make claims about it.
More information: PBS Learning Media
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