WASHINGTON -- Nearly every criminal conviction reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of an investigation started in 2012 into 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 in 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.
The investigation resumed after the Justice Department's inspector general criticized 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 re-examine 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 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.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole this month ordered that reviews resume under the original terms, officials said.
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.
Emily Pierce, a Justice Department spokesman, 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 state 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.
Courts and law enforcement authorities have been reluctant to allow defendants to retroactively challenge old evidence using newer, more accurate scientific methods.
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.
"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."
A Section on 07/30/2014