FBI Scandal: Flawed Forensics Rampant, Impacted Many Cases

Lily Dane

Over two years ago, the Justice Department and the FBI began a review of thousands of criminal cases to determine if any defendants were wrongfully convicted based on flawed forensic testimony.

The review included 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.

Mass Incarceration: 21 Amazing Facts About America’s Obsession With Prison

Michael Snyder

Nobody in the world loves locking people behind bars as much as Americans do. We have more people in prison than any other nation on the planet. We also have a higher percentage of our population locked up than anyone else does by a very large margin.

But has all of this imprisonment actually made us safer? Well, the last time I checked, crime was still wildly out of control in America and for the most recent year that we have numbers for violent crime was up 15 percent. The number of people that we have locked up has quadrupled since 1980, but this is not solving any of our problems. Clearly, what we are doing is not working.