Appeals Court Overturns 47-Year-Old Murder Conviction Predicated On Faulty FBI Hair Analysis Evidence

Failures

from the DOJ's-forty-year-credibility-gap dept

For years, FBI forensic experts have been overstating their certainty about… well, everything. Every piece of forensic evidence — the stuff eventually proven to be junk science bolstered by junk stats — was given the official “Thumbs Up of Absolute Certainty” during testimony.

Eventually (very eventually), it was exposed for the courtroom snake oil it actually was. The FBI, duly chastened, promised to keep doing the same damn thing in perpetuity no matter what actual scientists using actual scientific methods had to say.

For decades, this was standard operating procedure. A study by The Innocence Project found FBI forensic experts had been overstating their findings in court, resulting in a large number of potentially bogus convictions. The DOJ also admitted this error, but chose only to inform prosecutors of its findings, leaving it up to them to erase their own wins from the board.

One of these dubious “hair match” cases has finally made its way to the appellate level. John Ausby, convicted of rape and murder in 1972, is challenging his conviction based on the prosecution’s reliance on FBI experts’ overstatements. Thanks to the DOJ’s admission this expert testimony was likely flawed, Ausby can actually pursue this so long after the fact.

Unfortunately, the lower court claimed the hair match testimony wasn’t instrumental to the guilty verdict. It maintained the verdict would have been reached without the FBI forensic expert’s assertions of certainty and the prosecution’s reliance on this key — but ultimately bogus — piece of evidence.

The DC Circuit Appeals Court disagrees [PDF]. As it points out, the situation isn’t as simple as the lower court makes it appear. There was additional evidence used to convict Ausby, but the record shows the prosecution relied on the expert’s statement that the hairs from the murder scene were an “exact match” — something it reiterated during closing arguments.

Given the combination of evidence used to convict Ausby, the court finds this overstatement of certainty was instrumental in his conviction.

Agent Neill’s testimony was neither the sole piece of evidence on which the prosecution hung its case nor redundant or irrelevant. We ultimately conclude, however, that Agent Neill’s testimony falls on the material side of the spectrum. Agent Neill’s testimony was the primary evidence that directly contradicted Ausby’s defense theory—that Ausby had been in Noel’s apartment during her two-week absence but not on the day of her rape and murder.

As the court notes, other evidence somewhat supported Ausby’s alibi, but it was seemingly shut down by the prosecution’s insistence that the hair recovered from the scene could only have come from Ausby.

That Agent Neill’s testimony played a key role in debunking Ausby’s defense is borne out by the prosecution’s emphasis in its closing rebuttal that Agent Neill’s microscopic hair-comparison analysis “is not a positive means of identification but it amounts to a positive means here.” Thus, without Agent Neill’s hair-comparison testimony, there is a reasonable likelihood that the jury could have accepted Ausby’s defense theory.

Forty-seven years later, Ausby’s conviction is being vacated. If it hadn’t take the DOJ forty years to realize it had a forensic evidence problem, this injustice could have been undone decades sooner.

Filed Under: doj, false conviction, fbi, forensics, hair, john ausbry, murder