In 2003, I was asked to investigate the 1988 murder conviction of a former Mansfield, Ohio, police officer who insisted he was innocent. While reviewing the case, I learned that the only physical evidence linking the officer to the crime was provided by FBI hair and fiber expert Michael P. Malone, who testified that two fibers found on the victim matched the carpet fiber in the squad car the officer drove the night the victim disappeared.
Malone’s crucial testimony concerned me. I had read the excellent book Tainting Evidence: Inside The Scandals At The FBI Crime Lab , which detailed numerous examples of how Malone had given false and misleading testimony in criminal trials. Records I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the Mansfield case was one of them.
The records showed that the prosecutor’s office supposedly was notified of this, but word never reached the former officer in prison until he heard it from me. It turns out that this failure to notify the defendant that the testimony used against him had been determined to be false or misleading wasn’t unusual.
According to a report in The Washington Post today, the U.S. Justice Department has known for years that flawed forensic analysis by Malone and others might have led to convictions of potentially innocent people nationwide but didn’t notify the defendants or their attorneys.
“As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects,” The Post says.
Wrongful Convictions Blog 
The uses and abuses of forensics. Whilst we lament the dearth of the technology in Africa, we must hedge against it’s flaws to avoid injustice.
Does anybody else find this just staggering?
Should the FBI have made findings public and conducted a full-scale case review? Probably.
But there is no escaping blame for the prosecutors that were notified.
We are all human and capable of making honest mistakes. What is unforgivable is to refuse to admit that a mistake has been made when this is found to be the case. The conduct I find to be the most egregious is the failure to inform defense council or the defendants themselves after incarceration that there might have been erroneous evidence presented at trial that led to conviction. Granted the court system is over burdened but this is no excuse for prosecutors to avoid disclosing exculpatory evidence.