STORY: "The man who was jailed for 22 years - on the fantasy evidence of a single hair," by reporter Ed Pilkington, published by the Guardian.
SUB-HEADING: Kirk Odom spent 31 years in prison and on parole after pseudoscientific analysis that has finally been discredited. Now the FBI admits it was wrong – in Odom’s case, and many thousands like it
GIST: The prosecution case against Odom was flimsy at best. The victim had
seen her assailant only fleetingly and in the dark, and the composite
drawing that had been based on her description – the one that the police
officer had thought looked just like him – referred to a black male of
“medium complexion” when Odom’s skin is very dark. He also had a
convincing alibi, having been asleep at his mother’s house at the time
of the attack. With such shaky evidence, Odom assumed that the authorities would
soon realise their mistake and the whole nightmare would go away.
“I didn’t think anything was going to come of this, because I hadn’t
done anything,” he says. But when it came to trial, prosecution lawyers produced their ace
card. They had a hair, they told the jury. A single strand of “negroid”
hair found on the victim’s nightgown that must have come from the
rapist.........Special Agent Myron T Scholberg of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation stood before the jury and delivered the coup de grace. He
worked at the FBI’s grand-sounding microscopic analysis unit in
Washington, he said, where he was a world-leading expert in the even
grander-sounding science of “hair microscopy”. Scholberg told the jury
that he had analysed the rapist’s hair found at the crime scene and
compared it microscopically with a sample hair taken from Odom’s head.
The comparison had produced an exact match, which was significant
because that was a “very rare phenomenon”. Having performed thousands of
similar hair examinations over the previous 10 years, the FBI
agent told the court, there had been only eight or 10 times when hairs
from two different people were so similar that he could not tell them
apart – suggesting the firm probability that the rapist’s hair and
Odom’s hair had come from the same scalp. The
testimony, proudly invoking the certainties of science, did its job:
the verdict came in guilty. On the basis of that single hair Kirk Odom
was to spend the next 22 years in prison and a further nine living the
half-life of a paroled sex offender. The trouble was, Scholberg’s testimony wasn’t scientific, and it
wasn’t true. Fast forward to 2009, by which time Odom had spent 28 years
in prison and on parole. In that year the National Research Council of
the National Academy of Sciences released a landmark report
into the practice of forensic analysis in the US. The report pointed
out a basic problem with the idea that you can compare two hair samples
and produce a positive match. No statistics exist, the council pointed
out, that map the distribution of hair properties in the general
population, and that renders it impossible to make any meaningful
calculations about the probabilities of a particular hair type being
found. As a result, “all analyst testimony … stating that a crime scene
hair was ‘highly likely’ to have come, ‘very probably’ came, or did come
from the defendant violates the basic scientific criterion that
expressions of probability must be supported by data”. To put that in plain English, Scholberg’s statement to the jury at
the Odom trial – that the match he had found between the defendant’s and
the rapist’s hair was a “very rare phenomenon” – was complete fantasy..........Fast forward to 2009, by which time Odom had spent 28 years
in prison and on parole. In that year the National Research Council of
the National Academy of Sciences released a landmark report
into the practice of forensic analysis in the US. The report pointed
out a basic problem with the idea that you can compare two hair samples
and produce a positive match. No statistics exist, the council pointed
out, that map the distribution of hair properties in the general
population, and that renders it impossible to make any meaningful
calculations about the probabilities of a particular hair type being
found. As a result, “all analyst testimony … stating that a crime scene
hair was ‘highly likely’ to have come, ‘very probably’ came, or did come
from the defendant violates the basic scientific criterion that
expressions of probability must be supported by data”. To put that in plain English, Scholberg’s statement to the jury at
the Odom trial – that the match he had found between the defendant’s and
the rapist’s hair was a “very rare phenomenon” – was complete fantasy. Where did this pseudoscientific belief in the ability to match hairs
come from? Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project, which has led much
of the work in DNA exonerations of innocent prisoners, and co-author
William Carrington have traced it back
to 1855 when prosecutors in Mississippi claimed they could identify the
murderer of a cotton plantation owner by hairs found at the crime
scene. The sophistication of the analysis – or lack of it – barely changed
over the next century. But what did change after the second world war
was that the FBI embraced the technique, embellishing it with the
scientific seal of approval.......... The sophistication of the analysis – or lack of it – barely changed
over the next century. But what did change after the second world war
was that the FBI embraced the technique, embellishing it with the
scientific seal of approval.........Why then did it take a further 27 years to declare Odom innocent? And
why did the FBI’s team of highly trained, internationally connected
specialists cling to the procedure, putting thousands more potentially
innocent people behind bars?.........Three men so far – Gates, Odom and Santae Tribble – have been
exonerated as a result of the epic unravelling of the FBI’s faith in
hair analysis. Everyone now agrees they are just the tiniest tip of a
massive iceberg. With 2,500 cases awaiting review, and possibly tens of
thousands more as yet unidentified across the 50 states, it could be
many more years before this tale is done. “We rely on fair trials at which the government has to prove guilt
beyond all reasonable doubt,” Levick said. “In perhaps tens of thousands
of these cases, the defendant was denied a fair trial as the
prosecution produced false or misleading testimony from hair analysts –
we have to re-examine all of these cases, whether or not we can prove
actual innocence.”"
The entire story can be found at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
