The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000. 
 
 Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence. 
 
 The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions. 
 
 The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated. 
 
 The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said. The question now, they said, is how state authorities and the courts will respond to findings that confirm long-suspected problems with subjective, pattern-based forensic techniques — like hair and bite-mark comparisons — that have contributed to wrongful convictions in more than one-quarter of 329 DNA-exoneration cases since 1989. 
 
 
 
 
 
 In a statement, the FBI and Justice Department vowed to continue to devote resources to address all cases and said they “are committed to ensuring that affected defendants are notified of past errors and that justice is done in every instance. The Department and the FBI are also committed to ensuring the accuracy of future hair analysis testimony, as well as the application of all disciplines of forensic science.” 
 
 Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, commended the FBI and department for the collaboration but said, “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.” 
 
 “We need an exhaustive investigation that looks at how the FBI, state governments that relied on examiners trained by the FBI and the courts allowed this to happen and why it wasn’t stopped much sooner,” Neufeld said. 
 
 Norman L. Reimer, the NACDL’s executive director, said, “Hopefully, this project establishes a precedent so that in future situations it will not take years to remediate the injustice.” 
 
 While unnamed federal officials previously acknowledged widespread problems, the FBI until now has withheld comment because findings might not be representative. 
 
 Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a former prosecutor, called on the FBI and Justice Department to notify defendants in all 2,500 targeted cases involving an FBI hair match about the problem even if their case has not been completed, and to redouble efforts in the three-year-old review to retrieve information on each case. 
 
 “These findings are appalling and chilling in their indictment of our criminal justice system, not only for potentially innocent defendants who have been wrongly imprisoned and even executed, but for prosecutors who have relied on fabricated and false evidence despite their intentions to faithfully enforce the law,” Blumenthal said. 
 
 Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), urged the bureau to conduct “a root-cause analysis” to prevent future breakdowns. 
 
 “It is critical that the Bureau identify and address the systemic factors that allowed this far-reaching problem to occur and continue for more than a decade,” the lawmakers wrote FBI Director James B. Comey on March 27, as findings were being finalized. 
 
 The FBI is waiting to complete all reviews to assess causes but has acknowledged that hair examiners until 2012 lacked written standards defining scientifically appropriate and erroneous ways to explain results in court. The bureau expects this year to complete similar standards for testimony and lab reports for 19 forensic disciplines. 
 
 Federal authorities launched the investigation in 2012 after The Washington Post reported that flawed forensic hair matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people since at least the 1970s, typically for murder, rape and other violent crimes nationwide. 
 
 The review confirmed that FBI experts systematically testified to the near-certainty of “matches” of crime-scene hairs to defendants, backing their claims by citing incomplete or misleading statistics drawn from their case work. 
 
 In reality, there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same. Since 2000, the lab has used visual hair comparison to rule out someone as a possible source of hair or in combination with more accurate DNA testing. 
 
 Warnings about the problem have been mounting. In 2002, the FBI reported that its own DNA testing found that examiners reported false hair matches more than 11 percent of the time. In the District, the only jurisdiction where defenders and prosecutors have re-investigated all FBI hair convictions, three of seven defendants whose trials included flawed FBI testimony have been exonerated through DNA testing since 2009, and courts have exonerated two more men. All five served 20 to 30 years in prison for rape or murder. 
 
 University of Virginia law professor Brandon L. Garrett said the results reveal a “mass disaster” inside the criminal justice system, one that it has been unable to self-correct because courts rely on outdated precedents admitting scientifically invalid testimony at trial and, under the legal doctrine of finality, make it difficult for convicts to challenge old evidence. 
 
 “The tools don’t exist to handle systematic errors in our criminal justice system,” Garrett said. “The FBI deserves every recognition for doing something really remarkable here. The problem is there may be few judges, prosecutors or defense lawyers who are able or willing to do anything about it.” 
 
 Federal authorities are offering new DNA testing in cases with errors, if sought by a judge or prosecutor, and agreeing to drop procedural objections to appeals in federal cases. 
 
 However, biological evidence in the cases often is lost or unavailable. Among states, only California and Texas specifically allow appeals when experts recant or scientific advances undermine forensic evidence at trial. 
 
 Defense attorneys say scientifically invalid forensic testimony should be considered as violations of due process, as courts have held with false or misleading testimony. 
 
 The FBI searched more than 21,000 federal and state requests to its hair comparison unit from 1972 through 1999, identifying for review roughly 2,500 cases where examiners declared hair matches. 
 
 Reviews of 342 defendants’ convictions were completed as of early March, the NACDL and Innocence Project reported. In addition to the 268 trials in which FBI hair evidence was used against defendants, the review found cases in which defendants pleaded guilty, FBI examiners did not testify, did not assert a match or gave exculpatory testimony. 
 
 When such cases are included, by the FBI’s count examiners made statements exceeding the limits of science in about 90 percent of testimonies, including 34 death-penalty cases. 
 
 The findings likely scratch the surface. The FBI said as of mid-April that reviews of about 350 trial testimonies and 900 lab reports are nearly complete, with about 1,200 cases remaining. 
 
 The bureau said it is difficult to check cases before 1985, when files were computerized. It has been unable to review 700 cases because police or prosecutors did not respond to requests for information. 
 
 Also, the same FBI examiners whose work is under review taught 500 to 1,000 state and local crime lab analysts to testify in the same ways. 
 
 Texas, New York and North Carolina authorities are reviewing their hair examiner cases, with ad hoc efforts underway in about 15 other states. ||||| Cleveland Wright has asked a D.C. Court judge to clear his name after new DNA test results in 2012 exonerated his co-defendant in two similar 1978 murders. (Alexandra Garcia/The Washington Post) 
 
 Cleveland Wright has asked a D.C. Court judge to clear his name after new DNA test results in 2012 exonerated his co-defendant in two similar 1978 murders. (Alexandra Garcia/The Washington Post) 
 
 Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said. 
 
 The findings troubled the bureau, and it stopped the review of convictions last August. Case reviews resumed this month at the order of the Justice Department, the officials said. 
 
 U.S. officials began the inquiry after The Washington Post reported two years ago that flawed forensic evidence involving microscopic hair matches might have led to the convictions of hundreds of potentially innocent people. Most of those defendants never were told of the problems in their cases. 
 
 The inquiry includes 2,600 convictions and 45 death-row cases from the 1980s and 1990s in which the FBI’s hair and fiber unit reported a match to a crime-scene sample before DNA testing of hair became common. The FBI had reviewed about 160 cases before it stopped, officials said. 
 
 (Related: ‘Irreversible harm’ when FBI didn’t reveal flawed lab work in death-row cases) 
 
 The investigation resumed after the Justice Department’s inspector general excoriated the department and the FBI for unacceptable delays and inadequate investigation in a separate inquiry from the mid-1990s. The inspector general found in that probe that three defendants were executed and a fourth died on death row in the five years it took officials to reexamine 60 death-row convictions that were potentially tainted by agent misconduct, mostly involving the same FBI hair and fiber analysis unit now under scrutiny. 
 
 “I don’t know whether history is repeating itself, but clearly the [latest] report doesn’t give anyone a sense of confidence that the work of the examiners whose conduct was first publicly questioned in 1997 was reviewed as diligently and promptly as it needed to be,” said Michael R. Bromwich, who was inspector general from 1994 to 1999 and is now a partner at the Goodwin Procter law firm. 
 
 Bromwich would not discuss any aspect of the current review because he is a pro bono adviser to the Innocence Project, which along with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is assisting the government effort under an agreement not to talk about the review. Still, he added, “Now we are left 18 years [later] with a very unhappy, unsatisfying and disquieting situation, which is far harder to remedy than if the problems had been addressed promptly.” 
 
 Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole this month ordered that reviews resume under the original terms, officials said. 
 
 (Related: U.S. reviewing 27 death penalty convictions for FBI forensic testimony errors) 
 
 According to the FBI, the delay resulted, in part, “from a vigorous debate that occurred within the FBI and DOJ about the appropriate scientific standards we should apply when reviewing FBI lab examiner testimony — many years after the fact.” 
 
 “Working closely with DOJ, we have resolved those issues and are moving forward with the transcript review for the remaining cases,” the FBI said. 
 
 1 of 25 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Investigating flaws in forensics View Photos A Washington Post investigation reveals that Justice Department officials have known for years that flaws in forensic techniques and weak laboratory standards may have led to the convictions of innocent people across the country, raising the question: How many more are out there? Read related story. Caption A Washington Post investigation reveals that Justice Department officials have known for years that flaws in forensic techniques and weak laboratory standards may have led to the convictions of innocent people across the country, raising the question: How many more are out there? Read related story. Santae A. Tribble, photographed in public defender Sandra Levick’s office in Washington last month. Tribble spent 28 years in prison based largely on analysis of hairs found at the scene of a taxi driver’s murder in 1978. More advanced DNA testing showed that none of the hairs used as evidence shared Tribble’s genetic profile. A judge has vacated his conviction and dismissed the underlying charges. Alexandra Garcia/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 Emily Pierce, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said: “The Department of Justice never signed off on the FBI’s decision to change the way they reviewed the hair analysis. We are pleased that the review has resumed and that notification letters will be going out in the next few weeks.” 
 
 During the review’s 11-month hiatus, Florida’s Supreme Court denied an appeal by a death-row inmate who challenged his 1988 conviction based on an FBI hair match. James Aren Duckett’s results were caught up in the delay, and his legal options are now more limited. 
 
 Revelations that the government’s largest post-conviction review of forensic evidence has found widespread problems counter earlier FBI claims that a single rogue examiner was at fault. Instead, they feed a growing debate over how the U.S. justice system addresses systematic weaknesses in past forensic testimony and methods. 
 
 “I see this as a tip-of-the-iceberg problem,” said Erin Murphy, a New York University law professor and expert on modern scientific evidence. 
 
 “It’s not as though this is one bad apple or even that this is one bad-apple discipline,” she said. “There is a long list of disciplines that have exhibited problems, where if you opened up cases you’d see the same kinds of overstated claims and unfounded statements.” 
 
 Worries about the limitations and presentation of scientific evidence are “coming out of the dark shadows of the legal system,” said David H. Kaye, a law professor at Penn State who helped lead a Justice Department-funded study of fingerprint analysis and testimony in 2012. “The question is: What can you do about it?” 
 
 Courts and law enforcement authorities have been reluctant to allow defendants to retroactively challenge old evidence using newer, more accurate scientific methods. 
 
 The Justice Department and FBI inquiry, which examines convictions before 2000, could provide a way for defendants to make that challenge. Because the government is dropping procedural objections to appeals and offering new DNA testing in flawed cases if sought by a judge or prosecutor, results could provide a measure of the frequency of wrongful convictions. 
 
 Responding to the FBI review, the accreditation arm of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors last year recommended that labs determine whether they needed to conduct similar reviews, and New York, North Carolina and Texas are doing so. 
 
 According to a Justice Department spokesman, officials last August completed reviews and notified a first wave of defendants in 23 cases, including 14 death-penalty cases, that FBI examiners “exceeded the limits of science” when they linked hair to crime-scene evidence. 
 
 However, concerned that errors were found in the “vast majority” of cases, the FBI restarted the review, grinding the process to a halt, said a government official who was briefed on the process. The Justice Department objected in January, but a standoff went unresolved until this month. 
 
 After more than two years, the review will have addressed about 10 percent of the 2,600 questioned convictions and perhaps two-thirds of questioned death-row cases. 
 
 The department is notifying defendants about errors in two more death-penalty cases and in 134 non-capital cases over the next month, and will complete evaluations of 98 other cases by early October, including 14 more death-penalty cases. 
 
 No crime lab performed more hair examinations for federal and state agencies than the 10-member FBI unit, which testified in cases nationwide involving murder, rape and other violent felonies. 
 
 Although FBI policy has stated since at least the 1970s that a hair association cannot be used as positive identification, like fingerprints, agents regularly testified to the near-certainty of matches. 
 
 In reality, there is no accepted research on how often hair from different people may appear the same. The FBI now uses visual hair comparison to rule out someone as a possible source of hair or as a screening step before more accurate DNA testing. 
 
 This month, the inspector general reported that inattention and foot-dragging by the Justice Department and the FBI led them to ignore warnings 15 years ago that scientifically unsupported and misleading testimony could have come from more than a single hair examiner among agents discredited in a 1997 inspector general’s report on misconduct at the FBI lab. 
 
 The report said that as of 1999, Justice Department officials had enough information to review all hair unit cases — not just those of former agent Michael P. Malone, who was identified as the agent making the most frequent exaggerated testimony. 
 
 By 2002, Maureen Killion, then director of enforcement operations, had alerted senior criminal division officials to “the specter that the other examiners in the unit” were as sloppy as Malone, the inspector general said. 
 
 “This issue has been raised with the FBI but not resolved to date,” Killion wrote to then-Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff and his principal deputy, John C. Keeney, in July 2002, the report said. 
 
 Twelve years later, the Florida case shows the continued inadequacy of officials’ response. 
 
 Duckett, then a rookie police officer in Mascotte, Fla., was convicted of raping and strangling Teresa McAbee, 11, and dumping her into a lake in 1987. 
 
 After a state police examiner was unable to match pubic hair found in the victim’s underwear, prosecutors went to Malone, who testified at trial that there was a “high degree of probability” that the hair came from Duckett. 
 
 Such testimony is scientifically invalid, according to the parameters of the current FBI review, because it claims to associate a hair with a single person “to the exclusion of all others.” 
 
 The Florida court denied Duckett’s request for a new hearing on Malone’s hair match. The court noted that there was other evidence of Duckett’s guilt and that the FBI had not entirely abandoned visual hair comparison. 
 
 Duckett attorney Mary Elizabeth Wells confirmed this week that Duckett’s case was under the FBI’s review. Both Wells and Whitney Ray, a spokeswoman for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, said Thursday that parties had not been notified of results, but they otherwise declined to comment. 
 
 Duckett’s case was eligible for the 1996 review as a Malone case but was omitted, even though the inspector general stated that “it was important to the integrity of the justice system” that all of Malone’s death-penalty cases be immediately reviewed. 
 
 The Justice Department declined to comment on the omission. 
 
 Get updates on your area delivered via e-mail ||||| The Justice Department and the FBI have launched a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine whether any defendants were wrongly convicted or deserve a new trial because of flawed forensic evidence, officials said Tuesday. 
 
 The undertaking is the largest post-conviction review ever done by the FBI. It will include cases conducted by all FBI Laboratory hair and fiber examiners since at least 1985 and may reach earlier if records are available, people familiar with the process said. Such FBI examinations have taken place in federal and local cases across the country, often in violent crimes, such as rape, murder and robbery. 
 
 The review comes after The Washington Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people but had not performed a thorough review of the cases. In addition, prosecutors did not notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled. 
 
 On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced that it will conduct the more expansive review. 
 
 “The Department and the FBI are in the process of identifying historical cases for review where a microscopic hair examination conducted by the FBI was among the evidence in a case that resulted in a conviction,” spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said in a statement. “We have dedicated considerable time and resources to addressing these issues, with the goal of reaching final determinations in the coming months.” 
 
 FBI spokeswoman Ann Todd deferred comment to the Justice Department. 
 
 In its April report, The Post identified two District men convicted largely on the testimony of FBI hair analysts who wrongly placed them at crime scenes. Santae A. Tribble, now 51, was convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1978, and Kirk L. Odom, now 49, was convicted of a sexual assault in 1981. Since the Post report, Tribble’s conviction was vacated, and on Tuesday, prosecutors moved to overturn Odom’s conviction and declare him innocent. The Justice Department had not previously reviewed their cases. 
 
 Chitre said the new review would include help from the Innocence Project, a New York-based advocacy group for people seeking exoneration through DNA testing. It also would include the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. 
 
 Steven D. Benjamin, a Richmond lawyer who is incoming president of the association, called the review “an important collaboration” and a departure from one-sided government reviews that left defendants in the dark. 
 
 “Mistakes were made. What is important now is our working together to correct those mistakes,” Benjamin said, adding that his organization will “fully assist in finding and notifying all those who may have been affected.” 
 
 The review comes as the National Academy of Sciences is urging the White House and Congress to remove crime labs from police and prosecutors’ control, or at least to strengthen the science and standards underpinning the nation’s forensic science system. 
 
 The last time the FBI abandoned a forensic practice was in 2005, when it ended efforts to trace bullets to a specific manufacturer’s batch through analyzing their chemical composition after its methodology was scientifically debunked. The bureau released files in an estimated 2,500 bullet-lead cases only after “60 Minutes” and The Post reported the problem in 2007. 
 
 Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department official who investigated the FBI Laboratory in the mid-1990s as inspector general and, more recently, the city of Houston’s crime lab, said the review is important as the nation’s crime labs come under scrutiny. 
 
 “These recent developments remind us of the profound questions about the validity of many forensic techniques that have been used over the course of many decades and underscore the need for continuing attention at every level to ensuring the scientific validity and accuracy of the forensic science that is used every day in our criminal justice system,” Bromwich said. 
 
 The Post reported in April that hair and fiber analysis was subjective and lacked grounding in solid research and that the FBI lab lacked protocols to ensure that agent testimony was scientifically accurate. But bureau managers kept their reviews limited to one agent, even as they learned that many examiners’ “matches” were often wrong and that numerous examiners overstated the significance of matches, using bogus statistics or exaggerated claims. 
 
 Details of how the new FBI review will be conducted remain unclear. The exact number of cases that will be reviewed is unknown. The FBI is starting with more than 10,000 cases referred to all hair and fiber examiners. From those, the focus will be on a smaller number of hair examinations that resulted in positive findings and a conviction. 
 
 It also is unclear whether the review will focus only on exaggerated testimony by FBI examiners or also on scientifically unfounded statements made by others trained by the FBI, or made by prosecutors. Also unclear is at what point government officials will notify defense attorneys or the Innocence Project. 
 
 In past reviews, the department kept results secret and gave findings only to prosecutors, who then determined whether to turn them over to the defense.
– Impressed when an FBI forensic expert testifies in court? Jurors likely are too, but the FBI's hair-comparison unit actually gave unscientific testimony against criminal defendants for more than 20 years before 2000, according to the FBI and the Justice Dept. Among the FBI's 28 microscopic hair experts, 26 "overstated forensic matches" to favor the prosecution in nearly all of the 268 cases reviewed so far, the Washington Post reports. "The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster," says Peter Neufeld, who helped found the Innocence Project. The reviewed cases include 32 defendants given the death sentence, 14 of whom have already died in prison or were executed; about 2,500 cases involving hair matches are being looked at in all. Of course, other evidence may have sufficed to convict defendants found guilty. But the FBI, acknowledging the problem, has agreed to work with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project in reviewing cases between 1972 and 1999. Now 46 states and the District of Columbia are receiving information that could lead to appeals, if defense lawyers, prosecutors, or judges are willing or able. Truth is, there's no scientific standard for matching hair, the Post says. Worse, the forensic-hair scandal is only part of an ongoing review of all criminal forensics, which the Post has reported on here, here, and here. "The forensic science system ... has serious problems that can only be addressed by a national commitment to overhaul the current structure," a science panel concluded back in 2009.