Finalist: The Washington Post, by The Washington Post

PROBLEMS WITH FORENSIC EVIDENCE

After review, Justice Dept. told only prosecutors

By Spencer S. Hsu

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

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.

In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo.

The case of a Maryland man serving a life sentence for a 1981 double killing is another in which federal and local law enforcement officials knew of forensic problems but never told the defendant. Attorneys for the man, John Norman Huffington, say they learned of potentially exculpatory Justice Department findings from The Washington Post. They are seeking a new trial.

Justice Department officials said that they met their legal and constitutional obligations when they learned of specific errors, that they alerted prosecutors and were not required to inform defendants directly.

The review was performed by a task force created during an inspector general’s investigation of misconduct at the FBI crime lab in the 1990s. The inquiry took nine years, ending in 2004, records show, but the findings were never made public.

In the discipline of hair and fiber analysis, only the work of FBI Special Agent Michael P. Malone was questioned. Even though Justice Department and FBI officials knew that the discipline had weaknesses and that the lab lacked protocols — and learned that examiners’ “matches” were often wrong — they kept their reviews limited to Malone.

But two cases in D.C. Superior Court show the inadequacy of the government’s response.

Santae A. Tribble, now 51, was convicted of killing a taxi driver in 1978, and Kirk L. Odom, now 49, was convicted of a sexual assault in 1981.

Key evidence at each of their trials came from separate FBI experts — not Malone — who swore that their scientific analysis proved with near certainty that Tribble’s and Odom’s hair was at the respective crime scenes.

But DNA testing this year on the hair and on other old evidence virtually eliminates Tribble as a suspect and completely clears Odom. Both men have completed their sentences and are on lifelong parole. They are now seeking exoneration in the courts in the hopes of getting on with their lives.

Neither case was part of the Justice Department task force’s review.

A third D.C. case shows how the lack of Justice Department notification has forced people to stay in prison longer than they should have.

Donald E. Gates, 60, served 28 years for the rape and murder of a Georgetown University student based on Malone’s testimony that his hair was found on the victim’s body. He was exonerated by DNA testing in 2009. But for 12 years before that, prosecutors never told him about the inspector general’s report about Malone, that Malone’s work was key to his conviction or that Malone’s findings were flawed, leaving him in prison the entire time.

After The Post contacted him about the forensic issues, U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr. of the District said his office would try to review all convictions that used hair analysis.

Seeking to learn whether others shared Gates’s fate, The Post worked with the nonprofit National Whistleblowers Center, which had obtained dozens of boxes of task force documents through a years-long Freedom of Information Act fight.

Task force documents identifying the scientific reviews of problem cases generally did not contain the names of the defendants. Piecing together case numbers and other bits of information from more than 10,000 pages of documents, The Post found more than 250 cases in which a scientific review was completed. Available records did not allow the identification of defendants in roughly 100 of those cases. Records of an unknown number of other questioned cases handled by federal prosecutors have yet to be released by the government.

The Post found that while many prosecutors made swift and full disclosures, many others did so incompletely, years late or not at all. The effort was stymied at times by lack of cooperation from some prosecutors and declining interest and resources as time went on.

Overall, calls to defense lawyers indicate and records documented that prosecutors disclosed the reviews’ results to defendants in fewer than half of the 250-plus questioned cases.

Michael R. Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and the inspector general who investigated the FBI lab, said in a statement that even if more defense lawyers were notified of the initial review, “that doesn’t absolve the task force from ensuring that every single defense lawyer in one of these cases was notified.”

He added: “It is deeply troubling that after going to so much time and trouble to identify problematic conduct by FBI forensic analysts the DOJ Task Force apparently failed to follow through and ensure that defense counsel were notified in every single case.”

Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said the federal review was an “exhaustive effort” and met legal requirements, and she referred questions about hair analysis to the FBI. The FBI said it would evaluate whether a nationwide review is needed.

“In cases where microscopic hair exams conducted by the FBI resulted in a conviction, the FBI is evaluating whether additional review is warranted,” spokeswoman Ann Todd said in a statement. “The FBI has undertaken comprehensive reviews in the past, and will not hesitate to do so again if necessary.”

John McCormick had just finished the night shift driving a taxi for Diamond Cab on July 26, 1978. McCormick, 63, reached the doorstep of his home in Southeast Washington about 3 a.m., when he was robbed and fatally shot by a man in a stocking mask, according to his widow, who caught a glimpse of the attack from inside the house.

Police soon focused on Santae Tribble as a suspect. A police informant said Tribble told her he was with his childhood friend, Cleveland Wright, when Wright shot McCormick.

After a three-day trial, jurors deliberated two hours before asking about a stocking found a block away at the end of an alley on 28th Street SE. It had been recovered by a police dog, and it contained a single hair that the FBI traced to Tribble. Forty minutes later, the jury found Tribble guilty of murder. He was sentenced in January 1980 to 20 years to life in prison.

Tribble, 17 at the time, his brother, his girlfriend and a houseguest all testified that they were together preparing to celebrate the guest’s birthday the night McCormick was killed. All four said Tribble and his girlfriend were asleep between 2 and 4:30 a.m. in Seat Pleasant.

Tribble took the stand in his own defense, saying what he had said all along — that he had nothing to do with McCormick’s killing.

The prosecution began its closing argument by citing the FBI’s testimony about the hair from the stocking.

This January, after a year-long effort to have DNA evidence retested, Tribble’s public defender succeeded and turned over the results from a private lab to prosecutors. None of the 13 hairs recovered from the stocking — including the one that the FBI said matched Tribble’s — shared Tribble’s or Wright’s genetic profile, conclusively ruling them out as sources, according to mitochondrial DNA analyst Terry Melton of the private lab.

“The government’s entire theory of prosecution — that Mr. Tribble and Mr. Wright acted together to kill Mr. McCormick — is demolished,” wrote Sandra K. Levick, chief of special litigation for the D.C. Public Defender Service and the lawyer who represents Gates, Tribble and Odom. In a motion to D.C. Superior Court Judge Laura Cordero seeking Tribble’s exoneration, Levick wrote: “He has waited thirty-three years for the truth to set him free. He should have to wait no longer.”

In an interview, Tribble, who served 28 years in prison, said that whether the court grants his request or not, he sees it as a final chance to assert his innocence.

“Ms. Levick has been like an angel,” Tribble added, “. . . and I thank God for DNA.”

Details of the new round of hair testing illustrate how hair analysis is highly subjective. The FBI scientist who originally testified at Tribble’s trial, Special Agent James A. Hilverda, said all the hairs he retrieved from the stocking were human head hairs, including the one suitable for comparison that he declared in court matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.”

In August, Harold Deadman, a senior hair analyst with the D.C. police who spent 15 years with the FBI lab, forwarded the evidence to the private lab and reported that the 13 hairs he found included head and limb hairs. One exhibited Caucasian characteristics, Deadman added. Tribble is black.

But the private lab’s DNA tests irrefutably showed that the 13 hairs came from three human sources, each of African origin, except for one — which came from a dog.

“Such is the true state of hair microscopy,” Levick wrote. “Two FBI-trained analysts, James Hilverda and Harold Deadman, could not even distinguish human hairs from canine hairs.”

Hilverda declined to comment. Deadman said his role was limited to describing characteristics of hairs he found.

Kirk Odom’s case shares similarities with Tribble’s. Odom was convicted of raping, sodomizing and robbing a 27-year-old woman before dawn in her Capitol Hill apartment in 1981.

The victim said she spoke with her assailant and observed him for up to two minutes in the “dim light” of street lamps through her windows before she was gagged, bound and blindfolded in an hour-long assault.

Police put together a composite sketch of the attacker, based on the victim’s description. About five weeks after the assault, a police officer was talking to Odom about an unrelated matter. He thought Odom looked like the sketch. So he retrieved a two-year-old photograph of Odom, from when he was 16, and put it in a photo array for the victim. The victim picked the image out of the array that April and identified Odom at a lineup in May. She identified Odom again at his trial, telling jurors her assailant “had left her with an image of his face etched in her mind.”

At trial, FBI Special Agent Myron T. Scholberg testified that a hair found on the victim’s nightgown was “microscopically like” Odom’s, meaning the samples were indistinguishable. Prosecutors explained that Scholberg had not been able to distinguish between hair samples only “eight or 10 times in the past 10 years, while performing thousands of analyses.”

But on Jan. 18 of this year, Melton, of the same lab used in the Tribble case, Mitotyping Technologies of State College, Pa., reported its court-ordered DNA test results: The hair in the case could not have come from Odom.

On Feb. 27, a second laboratory selected by prosecutors, Bode Technology of Lorton, turned over the results of court-ordered nuclear DNA testing of stains left by the perpetrator on a pillowcase and robe.

Only one man left all four partial DNA profiles developed by the lab, and that man could not have been Odom.

The victim “was tragically mistaken in her identification of Mr. Odom as her assailant,” Levick wrote in a motion filed March 14 seeking his exoneration. “One man committed these heinous crimes; that man was not Kirk L. Odom.”

Scholberg, who retired in 1985 as head of hair and fiber analysis after 18 years at the FBI lab, said side-by-side hair comparison “was the best method we had at the time.”

Odom, who was imprisoned for 20 years, had to register as a sex offender and remains on lifelong parole. He says court-ordered therapists still berate him for saying he is not guilty. Over the years, his conviction has kept him from possible jobs, he said.

“There was always the thought in the back of my mind . . . ‘One day will my name be cleared?’ ” Odom said at his home in Southeast Washington, where he lives with his wife, Harriet, a medical counselor.

Federal prosecutors declined to comment on Tribble’s and Odom’s specific claims, citing pending litigation.

One government official noted that Odom served an additional 16 months after his release for an unrelated simple assault that violated his parole.

However, in a statement released after being contacted by The Post, Machen, the U.S. attorney in the District, acknowledged that DNA results “raise serious questions in my mind about these convictions.”

“If our comprehensive review shows that either man was wrongfully convicted, we will promptly join him in a motion to vacate his conviction, as we did with Donald Gates in 2009,” Machen said.

Popularized in fiction by Sherlock Holmes, hair comparison became an established forensic science by the 1950s. Before modern-day DNA testing, hair analysis could, at its best, accurately narrow the pool of criminal suspects to a class or group or definitively rule out a person as a possible source.

But in practice, even before the “ ‘CSI’ effect” led jurors to expect scientific evidence at every trial, a claim of a hair match packed a powerful, dramatic punch in court. The testimony, usually by a respected scientist working at a respected federal agency, allowed prosecutors to boil down ambiguous cases for jurors to a single, incriminating piece of human evidence left at the scene.

Forensic experts typically assessed the varying characteristics of a hair to determine whether the defendant might be a source. Some factors were visible to the naked eye, such as the length of the hair, its color and whether it was straight, kinky or curly. Others were visible under a microscope, such as the size, type and distribution of pigmentation, the alignment of scales or the thickness of layers in a given hair, or its diameter at various points.

Other judgments could be made. Was the hair animal or human? From the scalp, limbs or pubic area? Of a discernible race? Dyed, bleached or otherwise treated? Cut, forcibly removed or shed naturally?

But there is no consensus among hair examiners about how many of these characteristics were needed to declare a match. So some agents relied on six or seven traits, while others needed 20 or 30. Hilverda, the FBI scientist in Tribble’s case, told jurors that he had performed “probably tens of thousands of examinations” and relied on “about 15 characteristics.”

Despite his testimony, Hilverda recorded in his lab notes that he had measured only three characteristics of the hair from the stocking — it was black, it was a human head hair, and it was from an African American. Similarly, Scholberg’s notes describe the nightgown hair in Odom’s case in the barest terms, as a black, human head hair fragment, like a sample taken from Odom.

Hilverda acknowledged that results could rule out a person or be inconclusive. However, he told jurors that a “match” reflected a high likelihood that two hairs came from the same person. Hilverda added, “Only on very rare occasions have I seen hairs of two individuals that show the same characteristics.”

In Tribble’s case, federal prosecutor David Stanley went further as he summed up the evidence. “There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair,” he said in his closing arguments, sounding the final word for the government.

Stanley declined to comment.

The Tribble and Odom cases demonstrate problems in hair analysis that have been known for nearly 40 years.

In 1974, researchers acknowledged that visual comparisons are so subjective that different analysts can reach different conclusions about the same hair. The FBI acknowledged in 1984 that such analysis cannot positively determine that a hair found at a crime scene belongs to one particular person.

In 1996, the Justice Department studied the nation’s first 28 DNA exonerations and found that 20 percent of the cases involved hair comparison. That same year, the FBI lab stopped declaring matches based on visual comparisons alone and began requiring DNA testing as well.

Yet examples of FBI experts violating scientific standards and making exaggerated or erroneous claims emerged in 1997 at the heart of the FBI lab’s worst modern scandal, when Bromwich’s investigation found systematic problems involving 13 agents. The lab’s lack of written protocols and examiners’ weak scientific qualifications allowed bias to influence some of the nation’s highest-profile criminal investigations, the inspector general said.

From 1996 through 2004, a Justice Department task force set out to review about 6,000 cases handled by the 13 discredited agents for any potential exculpatory information that should be disclosed to defendants. The task force identified more than 250 convictions in which the agents’ work was determined to be either critical to the conviction or so problematic — for example, because a prosecutor refused to cooperate or records had been lost — that it completed a fresh scientific assessment of the agent’s work. The task force was directed to notify prosecutors of the results.

The only real notice of what the task force found came in a 2003 Associated Press account in which unnamed government officials said they had turned over results to prosecutors and were aware that defendants had been notified in 100 to 150 cases. The officials left the impression that anybody whose case had been affected had been notified and that, in any case, no convictions had been overturned, the officials said.

But since 2003, in the District alone, two of six convictions identified by The Post in which forensic work was reassessed by the task force have been vacated. That includes Gates’s case, but not those of Tribble and Odom, who are awaiting court action and were not part of the task force review.

The Gates exoneration also shows that prosecutors failed to turn over information uncovered by the task force.

In addition to Gates, the murder cases in Texas and Maryland and a third in Alaska reveal examples of shortcomings.

All three cases, in addition to the District cases, were handled by FBI agent Malone, whose cases made up more than 90 percent of scientific reviews found by The Post.

In Texas, the review of Benjamin Herbert Boyle’s case got underway only after the defendant was executed, 16 months after the task force was formed, despite pledges to prioritize death penalty cases.

Boyle was executed six days after the Bromwich investigation publicly criticized Malone, the FBI agent who worked on his case, but the FBI had acknowledged two months earlier that it was investigating complaints about him.

The task force asked the Justice Department’s capital-case review unit to look over its work, but the fact that it failed to prevent the execution was never publicized.

In Maryland, John Norman Huffington’s attorneys say they were never notified of the findings of the review in his case, leaving them in a battle over the law’s unsettled requirements for prosecutors to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence and over whether lawyers and courts can properly interpret scientific findings.

In Alaska, Newton P. Lambert’s defenders have been left to seek DNA testing of remaining biological evidence, if any exists, while he serves a life sentence for a 1982 murder. Prosecutors for both Huffington and Lambert claim they disclosed findings at some point to other lawyers but failed to document doing so. In Lambert’s case, The Post found that the purported notification went to a lawyer who had died.

Senior public defenders in both states say they received no such word, which they say would be highly unlikely if it in fact came.

Malone, 66, said he was simply using the best science available at the time. “We did the best we could with what we had,” he said.

Even the harshest critics acknowledge that the Justice Department worked hard to identify potentially tainted convictions. Many of the cases identified by the task force involved serious crimes, and several defendants confessed or were guilty of related charges. Courts also have upheld several convictions even after agents’ roles were discovered.

Because of the focus on Malone, many questionable cases were never reviewed.

But as in the Tribble and Odom cases, thousands of defendants nationwide have been implicated by other FBI agents, as well as state and local hair examiners, who relied on the same flawed techniques.

In 2002, the FBI found after it analyzed DNA in 80 selected hair cases that its agents had reported false matches more than 11 percent of the time. “I don’t believe forensic science truly understood the significance of microscopic hair comparison, and it wasn’t until [DNA] that we learned that 11 percent of the time, two hairs can be microscopically similar yet come from different people,” said Dwight E. Adams, who directed the FBI lab from 2002 to 2006.

Yet a Post review of the small fraction of cases in which an appeals court opinion describes FBI hair testimony shows that several FBI agents gave improper testimony, asserting the remote odds of a false match or invoking bogus statistics in the absence of data.

For example, in testimony in a Minnesota bank robbery case, also in 1978, Hilverda, the agent who worked on Tribble’s case, reiterated that he had been unable to distinguish among different people’s hair “only on a couple of occasions” out of more than 2,000 cases he had analyzed.

In a 1980 Indiana robbery case, an agent told jurors that he had failed to tell different people’s hair apart just once in 1,500 cases. After a slaying in Tennessee that year, another agent testified in a capital case that there was only one chance out of 4,500 or 5,000 that a hair came from someone other than the suspect.

“Those statements are chilling to read,” Bromwich said of the exaggerated FBI claims at trial.

Todd, the FBI spokeswoman, said bureau lab reports for more than 30 years have qualified their findings by saying that hair comparisons are not a means of absolute positive identification. She requested a list of cases in which agents departed from guidelines in court. The Post provided nine cases.

Todd declined to say whether the bureau considered taking steps to determine whether other agents intentionally or unintentionally misled jurors. “Only Michael Malone’s conduct was questioned in the area of hair comparisons,” Todd said. “The [inspector general] did not question the merits of microscopic hair comparisons as a scientific discipline.”

Experts say the difference between laboratory standards and examiners’ testimony in court can be important, especially if no one is reading or watching what agents say.

“It seemingly has never been routine for crime labs to do supervision based on trial testimony,” said University of Virginia School of Law professor Brandon L. Garrett. “You can have cautious standards, but if no one is supervising their implementation, it’s predictable that analysts may cross the line.”

A review of the task force documents, as well as Post interviews, found that the Justice Department struggled to balance its roles as a law enforcer defending convictions, a minister of justice protecting the innocent, and a patron and practitioner of forensic science.

By excluding defense lawyers from the process and leaving it to prosecutors to decide case by case what to disclose, authorities waded into a legal and ethical morass that left some prisoners locked away for years longer than necessary. By adopting a secret process that limited accountability, documents show, the task force left the scope and nature of scientific problems unreported, obscuring issues from further study and permitting similar breakdowns.

“The government has hidden behind the veil of secrecy to shield these abuses despite official assurances that justice would be done,” said David Colapinto, general counsel of the National Whistleblowers Center.

The American Bar Association and others have proposed stronger ethics rules for prosecutors to act on information that casts doubt on convictions; opening laboratory and other files to the defense; clearer reporting and evidence retention; greater involvement by scientists in setting rules for testimony at criminal trials; and more scientific training for lawyers and judges.

Other experts propose more oversight by standing state forensic-science commissions and funding for research into forensic techniques and experts for indigent defendants.

A common theme among reform-minded lawyers and experts is taking the oversight of the forensic labs away from police and prosecutors.

“It’s human to make mistakes,” said Steven D. Benjamin, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It’s wrong not to learn from them.”

More specifically, the D.C. Public Defender Service, Benjamin’s group and others said justice would be served by retesting hair evidence in convictions nationwide from 1996 and earlier. “If microscopic hair analysis was a key piece of evidence in a conviction, and it was one of only a limited amount of evidence in a case, would it be worthwhile to retest that using mitochondrial DNA? I would say absolutely,” said Adams, the former FBI lab director.

The promised review by federal prosecutors of hair convictions in the District would not include cases before 1985, when FBI records were computerized, and would not disclose any defendant’s name. That approach would have missed Gates, Odom and Tribble, who were convicted earlier.

Representatives for Machen, the FBI and the Justice Department also declined to say why the review should be limited to D.C. cases. The Post found that 95 percent of the troubled cases identified by the task force were outside the District.

Avis E. Buchanan, director of the D.C. Public Defender Service, said her agency must be “a full participant” in the review, which it has sought for two years, and that it should extend nationwide. “Surely the District of Columbia is not the only place where such flawed evidence was used to convict the innocent,” she said.

Staff researcher Jennifer Jenkins and database editor Ted Mellnik contributed to this report.

By Spencer S. Hsu

Santae Tribble was watching Wolfman Jack on TV that Friday night in August 1978 when police surrounded his mother’s house in Southeast Washington.

Tribble, downstairs in the basement with his girlfriend, thought the fuss was over two unpaid traffic tickets.

Instead, officers took the surprised 17-year-old to headquarters. Years later, Tribble, now 51, struggled to find the words to accept what ensued: a murder conviction and his imprisonment for nearly three decades.

“I just never believed — I never believed that — I never believed that they could prove a person . . . guilty that was innocent,” he said quietly in his lawyer’s office. “I never thought I would be found guilty until I was actually found guilty.” He added, “I didn’t see the light of day again for 25 years.”

Tribble agreed to discuss his case while on lifetime parole and in the presence of his D.C. Public Defender Service lawyer, Sandra K. Levick. Tall, lean and possessing the watchful bearing of a man who has spent his entire adult life in prison or on parole, Tribble said he hoped that describing his case and the toll of lost decades would help prevent wrongful convictions, although his own fate remains pending before a judge.

Released from prison in 2003 after serving 25 years for a slaying for which he has always maintained his innocence, he spent an additional three years in jail for failing to meet his parole conditions. He left a halfway house this fall and spent the winter staying with a friend and searching for work to pay rent.

At an age when others ponder retirement, he said his prospects of building a life without a high school diploma, work history or skills are “kind of bleak.”

“It’s hard to find jobs, and I’m not as qualified as many,” Tribble said. “. . . The fact I’m on parole for robbery and murder, that doesn’t help.”

Still, Tribble is more upbeat than he was in prison. “Many people [were] concerned about my adjustment back to society. I think the hardest thing to adjust to was leaving society,” Tribble said. “To be snatched away from everyone that you’ve ever known, your family,” he said, his voice drifting off.

The following account is drawn from interviews, Tribble’s trial transcript and other court records. The passage of time has dimmed memories, and several witnesses have died.

In Washington in the summer of 1978, President Jimmy Carter was preparing to host a Middle East peace summit between the leaders of Egypt and Israel at nearby Camp David, and a young city council member named Marion Barry was making in his first bid for mayor.

For Tribble, who had dropped out of school in the ninth grade, it “was an average summer” of sports and hanging out with friends and girls. But changes loomed as what would have been his junior year in high school ended, and boys in the neighborhood moved away, joined the service or took jobs. “I remember like it was yesterday,” he said with a smile.

Tribble and his brother and two sisters grew up working class, with a mother who worked full time as an assistant nurse at Glendale Hospital, then cooked her children “a proper dinner.” She took them on summer trips to Atlantic City and to see cousins in Austin. When Santae started elementary school, their father, a federal warehouse laborer, left home.

Santae drifted. After dropping out, he bused tables, pumped gas and held summer jobs. When his older sister, Jewell, gave birth to her second child and moved back home with their mother, he helped take care of the children.

Tribble’s friend Cleveland Wright had other interests. Three years older than Santae, Wright came from rural North Carolina to the city and preferred catching crayfish and squirrels in the green spaces of Anacostia to the playground sports favored by local kids.

By Santae’s teens, the pair had found a shared taste for dice and cards, winning up to $60 a day. Still, as he turned 17, Tribble said, he was spending more time with a girlfriend and thinking of his future.

Tribble thought he might follow his brother, James Jr., into the Army. But the new volunteer military was raising education requirements and accepting as few as one in 10 applicants from the District, where unemployment by 1978 had topped 48 percent for black teenagers.

Jewell suggested the Job Corps and a high school equivalency degree first.

But, Tribble said, “all that was halted in the summer of ’78 when the police came.”

That July, two men were killed within blocks of Tribble’s mother’s home. Both victims were middle-aged white men who were robbed and shot to death with a .32-caliber handgun in the early morning hours as they returned to their homes. William Horn, 52, was a floral-shop worker coming back from a night out. John McCormick, 63, was a Diamond Cab driver who was finishing the night shift.

No one could identify a shooter in either crime. But the commotion outside her house awakened McCormick’s wife, Belva, and she heard her husband pleading for his life. Through a window she saw a lone assailant wearing a stocking mask, then rushed to call police.

McCormick’s body lay on his front porch. A police dog found a stocking on a sidewalk a block away. Months later, the FBI would report that a single hair inside it matched Tribble’s “in all microscopic characteristics.”

Besides the hair, prosecutors’ case was shaky, relying on two informants and a missing gun. Bobby Jean “B.J.” Phillips told police nine days after McCormick’s death that Tribble and Wright sold a .32-caliber revolver for $60 to her roommate, who also was Wright’s girlfriend. Phillips turned over shell casings she said were fired from the gun, which she later said had disappeared.

Meanwhile, a friend of Tribble and Wright’s, Ronald Willis, also 17, implicated Wright in Horn’s slaying. He told police that Tribble had nothing to do with it.

That November, Willis changed his story, testifying to a grand jury that Tribble told him he was Wright’s lookout. On Jan. 17, 1980, the day Tribble’s first-degree-murder trial began, Willis, who was facing charges for robbery and a probation violation, was sentenced in a plea bargain to reduced charges. He received two years’ probation as a youth offender and was released.

Phillips’s story also evolved. At first, she claimed that Tribble admitted to being “around” when Wright shot a man in circumstances matching Horn’s death. Later still, Phillips said Tribble told her he was with Wright when he shot McCormick, although her story conflicted in several ways with what police knew about the crime.

Police determined that .32-caliber slugs recovered from both victims were fired by the same gun. But they could not link the slugs to the missing weapon sold by Wright and Tribble. Police found a box of bullets in Tribble’s closet but could not link them to the shell casings turned over by Phillips.

Tribble was acquitted in Horn’s killing after a jury, with no corroborating evidence, weighed the unreliability of an informant seeking reduced prison time. Willis spent most of the two decades after Tribble’s trial in prison for burglaries, thefts, robberies and an assault on a police officer.

In his own defense, Tribble was adamant on the stand, in a lie-detector test and in statements over the years about whether he had anything to do with the stocking, the robberies or the shootings: “No, sir.”

Tribble and his brother, girlfriend and a houseguest all testified that Tribble had spent that night in Seat Pleasant at his mother’s apartment while she was out of town. His record was clean, besides two $10 fines he paid for playing dice in public.

Federal prosecutor David Stanley focused on the hair in his closing arguments.

“There is one chance, perhaps for all we know, in 10 million that it could [be] someone else’s hair,” Stanley said.

After a three-day trial, jurors deliberated about two hours before asking a question: “Which stocking was found at end of alley on 28th St” a block away? After it was confirmed it was the one containing a single hair that the FBI traced to Tribble, the jury’s verdict came 40 minutes later: not guilty in Horn’s death but guilty of murdering McCormick. Tribble was sentenced to prison for 20 years to life.

Wright had the opposite result: He was acquitted in McCormick’s death but convicted of killing Horn.

Tribble was denied parole when he first became eligible after 20 years. Despite his clean prison disciplinary record, the parole board cited the severity of his offense and his age at the time of the crime. He ended up serving 25 years.

Finally, Tribble recalled, he heard an official on the parole board say, “From everything I’m looking at, we don’t have any choice but to give this man a date.” In April 2003, he stepped off a bus at the Greyhound station in downtown Washington, embracing his son and brother.

His father, who visited him “practically every Saturday” while he was imprisoned locally, died in 1992. Tribble’s mother died in 1994, five years after she sent a snapshot inscribed, “To my baby son, with all my love, Mom.” Sister Jewell, who had been like a surrogate mother, died of AIDS in 1996. Tribble missed their funerals.

To meet the Tribble brothers is to imagine a life that might have been. James Jr. is a civilian Army worker and sings in the church men’s choir in his Woodbridge neighborhood. His family tries to take a cruise every two years. Santae can’t join them; under terms of his parole, he cannot hold a passport.

“Everybody believed he was innocent,” James Tribble said. “Two detectives pulled me aside and told me that they knew Santae didn’t do anything. They wanted Cleveland.”

Both brothers called the Public Defender Service’s pursuit of Tribble’s case and the preservation of testable evidence a godsend.

In December 2009, Tribble was reading The Washington Post and shouted out loud, “This is me!” A District man named Donald Gates who was convicted of murder based on an FBI hair match had been exonerated by DNA. He called Gates’s lawyer. In February 2011, Levick filed court papers seeking to have evidence in Tribble’s case retested.

Nearly one year later, on Jan. 5, Mitotyping Technologies of State College, Pa., returned results. None of the 13 hairs recovered from the stocking — including the one that the FBI said matched Tribble’s — shared Tribble’s or Wright’s genetic profile, conclusively ruling them out as sources, according to analyst Terry Melton.

It will be up to a judge to decide if Tribble deserves a retrial or a declaration of innocence.

Wright, a Safeway clerk, is also seeking to overturn his conviction after nearly 29 years in prison, saying neither he nor Tribble had “anything to do with either murder.”

Stanley, the prosecutor, declined to comment.

In interviews, McCormick’s children said that as terrible as their father’s slaying was, their late mother would have wanted to get the real killer. “That’s how she was brought up, and that’s how I was brought up,” said John McCormick, 63, a retired roofer in Live Oak, Fla.

Phillips, who now goes by the name Bobby Bess, acknowledged that she remembered Tribble’s case but declined to comment in an interview. Asked what he would say to Phillips or Willis, Tribble said: “I think they have their own demons to deal with. . . . I think they’re all suffering in their own personal ways.”

As for the police and prosecutors who put him behind bars, Tribble paused.

“Coming into this, I believed in the American justice system,” Tribble said. “In my particular case, I felt over the years that they just wanted a conviction more than they wanted to actually capture the person who was responsible for the crime.”

Tribble expressed no regret, even though refusing to accept a plea deal and maintaining his innocence cost him years more in prison.

“As stubborn as I was then, I think I’d still be just as stubborn now,” he said.

Tribble now dreams of a “normal life” — a job and “a place where my [son and two grandchildren] could come to . . . and just be a family.”

“I’m going to use this as the final chapter of this story, whether it turns out all the way in my favor or not,” he said. “It’s my chance to tell everyone for the last, final time that I was convicted of a crime I didn’t commit.”

It was what Tribble tried to tell police that night in August 1978.

Staff researcher Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.

Justice Dept., FBI kept tight reins on process, findings of task force

By Spencer S. Hsu, Jennifer Jenkins and Ted Mellnik

The bombshell came at the most inopportune time.

An FBI special agent was testifying in the government’s high-profile terrorism trial against Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheik” suspected of plotting the first attack on the World Trade Center.

Frederic Whitehurst, a chemist and lawyer who worked in the FBI’s crime lab, testified that he was told by his superiors to ignore findings that did not support the prosecution’s theory of the bombing.

“There was a great deal of pressure put upon me to bias my interpretation,” Whitehurst said in U.S. District Court in New York in 1995.

Even before the Internet, Whitehurst’s extraordinary claim went viral. It turned out he had written or passed along scores of memos over the years warning of a lack of impartiality and scientific standards at the famed lab that did the forensic work after the World Trade Center attack and in other cases.

With the FBI under fire for its handling of the 1993 trade center attack, the Oklahoma City bombing and the O.J. Simpson murder case, officials had to act.

After the Justice Department’s inspector general began a review of Whitehurst’s claims, Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh decided to launch a task force to dig through thousands of cases involving discredited agents, to ensure that “no defendant’s right to a fair trial was jeopardized,” as one FBI official promised at a congressional hearing.

The task force took nine years to complete its work and never publicly released its findings. Not the results of its case reviews of suspect lab work. Not the names of the defendants who were convicted as a result. And not the nature or scope of the forensic problems it found.

Those decisions more than a decade ago remain relevant today for hundreds of people still in the U.S. court system, because officials never notified many defendants of the forensic flaws in their cases and never expanded their review to catch similar mistakes.

A review of more than 10,000 pages of task force documents and dozens of interviews demonstrate that the panel operated in secret and with close oversight by FBI and Justice Department brass — including Reno and Freeh’s top deputy — who took steps to control the information uncovered by the group.

“It was not open,” said a person who worked closely with the task force and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the bureau and Justice Department maintain a strong influence in forensic science. “Maybe [a coverup] wasn’t the intent, but it did seem to look that way. . . . It was too controlled by the FBI.”

The documents and interviews tell a story of how the Justice Department’s promise to protect the rights of defendants became in large part an exercise in damage control that left some prisoners locked away or in the dark for years longer than necessary. The Justice Department continues to decline to release the names of defendants in the affected cases.

A Washington Post review of the department’s actions shows an agency struggling to balance its goal of defending convictions in court with its responsibility to protect the innocent. The Justice Department’s decision to allow prosecutors to decide what to disclose to defendants was criticized at the time and allowed most of the process to remain secret. But by cloaking cases in anonymity, failing to ensure that defendants were notified of troubles with their cases and neglecting to publicly report problems or recommend solutions, the task force obscured problems from further study.

Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said the federal review met constitutional requirements by allowing prosecutors in the affected cases to make the final decision whether to disclose potentially exculpatory information to the defendants.

“In January 1996 the Department established a Task Force to advise prosecutors of the Office of Inspector General investigation of the FBI lab,” Sweeney said in a statement. The task force worked with prosecutors and the FBI “to notify the relevant prosecutors [local, state and federal] so that they could determine what information needed to be disclosed to defense counsel.”

If the Justice Department was secretive, the agency’s independent inspector general was not. Michael R. Bromwich’s probe culminated in a devastating 517-page report in April 1997on misconduct at the FBI lab.

His findings stopped short of accusing agents of perjury or of fabricating results, but he concluded that FBI managers failed — in some cases for years — to respond to warnings about the scientific integrity and competence of agents.

The chief of the lab’s explosives unit, for example, “repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without a scientific basis” in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Bromwich wrote. The head of toxicology lacked judgment and credibility and overstated results in the 1994 Simpson investigation. After the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the key FBI witness “worked backward,” tailoring his testimony to reach the result he wanted. Other agents “spruced up” notes for trial, altered reports without the author’s permission or failed to document or confirm their findings.

The investigation led to wide-ranging changes, including higher laboratory standards and requirements for examiners.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department set out to evaluate discredited agents’ work in thousands of cases that had gone to trial.

Jim Maddock, the FBI’s assistant general counsel, told reporters that the goal of the new task force was to identify any potentially exculpatory information that had arisen in any criminal case involving agents criticized in the report.

“We are undertaking that review,” Maddock said at an April 15, 1997, news conference. “And when it is done, we will give a full accounting of our findings.”

Interviews and documents show that key decisions about the task force’s work were made at the highest levels, including the decisions to exclude defense lawyers from the review and not publicly release the findings.

Task force participants said Reno signed off on the decision allowing prosecutors to decide what to disclose, because normal legal and constitutional requirements give prosecutors that discretion.

Justice Department officials also believed that the public release of the 1997 inspector general report generated enough publicity to give defense attorneys and their clients opportunities to appeal, task force participants said.

“Our job was to do the scientific reviews and then to send the results to the prosecutors, and they were responsible for determining whether they were going to disclose or not,” Lucy L. Thomson, the chief of the task force, said in an interview. “That was just the way Janet Reno decided to do it.”

Reno is physically ailing and was unable to comment for this article.

Her deputy attorney general until April 1997, Jamie Gorelick, said Reno “was very, very interested in assuring that we weren’t keeping in prison people who deserved to have their convictions reviewed.”

“I am sure she tried as hard as she could to keep the pressure on the bureau and on the criminal division,” Gorelick said.

Documents show that the FBI and Justice Department set strict rules about what information would be disclosed as they prepared to battle defendants who challenged convictions.

The department planned to “monitor all decisions” by federal prosecutors over whether to disclose information, the head of the criminal division, John C. Keeney, wrote in a memo to all U.S. attorneys on Jan. 4, 1996. The division stood ready, if necessary, to “evaluate the allegations and, if appropriate rebut them,” he wrote.

In addition, the Justice Department and the FBI negotiated over the limit and scope of the task force review, the documents show.

For example, in a June 1997 memo, Keeney told federal prosecutors that the criminal division and the FBI would “arrange for an independent, complete review of the Laboratory’s findings and any related testimony” in all convictions in which they found there was a “reasonable probability” that work by discredited agents had affected the conviction or sentence.

But two months later, the senior attorney in charge of the task force told Keeney’s deputy that the FBI indicated that it planned to require “a cursory paper review” only and generally did not plan to reexamine evidence.

That attorney in charge, Thomson, told Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kevin V. DiGregory in an Aug. 19, 1997, memo that the FBI also wanted to keep the focus off the most vulnerable cases by not conducting reviews if a case was still in litigation or on appeal — even though the panel’s work would have been most relevant to a judge at those times.

There were other hitches. One year later, in August 1998, Thomson complained to DiGregory that “no scientists have been retained to date” by the FBI to conduct reviews of cases in which defendants may have been wrongly convicted.

Reviews were “needed as soon as possible in order to avoid possibly undercutting prosecutors’ arguments . . . and to ensure that defendants will not exhaust opportunities to file post-conviction relief motions,” Thomson said.

As it turned out, reviews would continue for six years, leaving defendants in jail after having been convicted in cases with faulty forensics.

Keeney died last year after retiring in 2010 as the longest-serving federal prosecutor in U.S. history. DiGregory did not return messages left at his home and passed through an associate.

Thomson, now a privacy expert, said that the reviews were not cursory and that she did not know whether any defendants had lost opportunities to appeal their convictions.

As the cases became known to state and local prosecutors, many moved swiftly and made full disclosures. Others stymied the effort, whether intentionally or not.

Because of the sheer passage of time, files, trial transcripts or other records often were lost or destroyed. Personnel turnover in prosecutors’ offices often left behind no living memory of cases. Many state and local prosecutors worked in small offices with enormous active caseloads and had little stake in the Justice Department process.

As a result, reviewers dropped plans to require that state and local prosecutors sign statements when they determined a discredited agent’s work was pivotal to a case, or to explain in writing if they determined it was not, records show.

That reduced the paper trail. As long as the task force got the information, a participant said, it did not matter whether it was written down.

The task force did order reviews for multiple cases in which prosecutors refused to cooperate. For example, Tampa prosecutor Harry Lee Coe III, now deceased, told the department that his lawyers were too overworked to review questioned death penalty cases, documents show.

In South Carolina, the task force completed a scientific review in late 2002 in the case of Roy David Brooks, who had been convicted of murder. But the review came after the state had destroyed records. And the destruction of records came days after the task force wrote to prosecutors for the third time in four years seeking such records.

Even when cases were disclosed to defense counsel, it was not clear what was disclosed.

In some cases, one-sentence notifications were sent to defendants, many of whom were indigent, still in prison or without attorneys.

“Please find enclosed a copy of the Attachment to Independent Case Review Report for CDRU#6480 Case File #95-253567, which we received, from the U.S. Department of Justice,” stated the entirety of a letter from prosecutors in Tampa to one defendant in April 2001. That letter came 18 years after the offense.

The attached three-page report did not contain the defendant’s name — only strings of four- and eight-digit FBI and Justice Department code numbers. It had nothing to indicate that it involved the particular defendant’s case or the meaning of bland statements of scientific results.

In other cases, records indicate that prosecutors told defendants or their attorneys early on about the inspector general’s report but never mentioned that the task force found more-specific problems.

The task force gradually wound down when Thomson and DiGregory departed. A new administration arrived months before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which transformed priorities. In 2002, Michael Chertoff, then assistant attorney general for the criminal division, narrowed the review to speed its completion, dropping unspecified “small cases.”

Through a spokesman, Chertoff declined to comment.

In addition, the criminal division stopped asking prosecutors to notify it if they turned over review results to defense attorneys.

Research director Madonna Lebling and researcher Aaron Carter contributed to this report.

By Spencer S. Hsu

In Hollywood, the moment the good guys trace a hair, a bullet fragment or a fingerprint, it’s game over. The bad guy is locked up.

But the glamorized portrait is not so simple in real life.

Far from infallible, expert comparisons of hair, handwriting, marks made by firearms on bullets, and patterns such as bite marks and shoe and tire prints are in some ways unscientific and subject to human bias, a National Academy of Sciences panel chartered by Congress found. Other techniques, such as in bullet-lead analysis and arson investigation, survived for decades despite poorly regulated practices and a lack of scientific method.

Even fingerprint identification is partly a subjective exercise that lacks research into the role of unconscious bias or even its error rate, the panel’s 328-page report said.

“The forensic science system, encompassing both research and practice, has serious problems that can only be addressed by a national commitment to overhaul the current structure,” the panel concluded in 2009.

Now, Congress and the Obama administration are trying to regulate forensic science to help establish standards. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) are weighing legislation that could subject techniques to greater scientific scrutiny and help establish their ranges of accuracy.

A Leahy bill would create a new office of forensic science in the Justice Department. Rockefeller is preparing legislation to expand the role of the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in setting scientific standards and research goals.

The Obama administration is also looking to “strengthen the linkage between cutting-edge science . . . and the forensic tests used by law enforcement,” said Rick Weiss, spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Police and law enforcement agencies have rebuffed recommendations to remove crime labs from their control.

Since 2002, failures have been reported at about 30 federal, state and local crime labs serving the FBI, the Army and eight of the nation’s 20 largest cities.

Advances in DNA testing are exposing errors at unexpected rates. In November, researchers with the Urban Institute reported that new DNA testing appeared to clear convicted defendants in 16 percent of Virginia criminal convictions between 1973 and 1988 in which evidence was available for retesting.

A 2009 study of post-conviction DNA exonerations — now up to 289 nationwide — found invalid testimony in more than half the cases.

“There are just too many related problems for this to be dealt with ad hoc,” said Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

More DNA testing alone is not the answer, experts say. Biological evidence historically is collected in fewer than 20 percent of criminal cases. Other questioned forensic techniques are used far more often, with mistakes harming defendants and crime victims whose true assailants remain at large.

The National Academy of Sciences report cited the lack of effective standards for examiners, laboratories and court testimony. It also criticized Justice Department agencies for a dearth of research into problems and for being “too wedded” to the status quo to be trusted to lead reforms.

“This is our generation’s sole opportunity” to get arguments out of the adversarial system and resolved through science, said Thomas L. Bohan, who was president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 2010. “It’s a shame they couldn’t have done a good job 10 or 20 years ago.”

Arson investigation is an example of how research has dramatically improved practices.

Since 1990, the number of U.S. structure fires attributed to arson has dropped by half. One reason is that scientific test burnings have disproved the notion that some burn marks could be caused only by liquid accelerants.

Meanwhile, scientific doubts have festered for decades with fingerprint examination. While fingerprint analysis is one of the most valuable and frequently applied investigative tools, its accuracy has not been scientifically defined.

FBI examiners claimed until recently that they can match fingerprints to the exclusion of any other person in the world with 100 percent certainty using a method with an error rate essentially of zero. The academy report found that assertion was “not scientifically plausible” and had chilled research into error rates.

In 1999, a Justice Department official, Richard Rau, told a federal court that the department delayed such a study because of the legal ramifications. As recently as last year, Pennsylvania State University researcher Cedric Neumann was denied a department grant to determine potential fingerprint error rates using closed cases.

Neumann declined to comment for this article.

A person familiar with the episode blamed a polarized climate in the adversarial legal system, saying, “Few agencies in the forensic-science community want to be the first ones associated with an error rate.” The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive federal research funding decisions.

Meanwhile, errors occur. In 2004, DNA for the first time exonerated a person convicted with a fingerprint match and, separately, the FBI made its first publicly acknowledged fingerprint misidentification. Brandon Mayfield, a Portland, Ore., lawyer, mistakenly was arrested in connection with the terrorist train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people. The FBI apologized.

Since then, the Justice Department has begun research to try to quantify how complete a fingerprint must be to properly declare a match; how different conditions may affect the reliability of examinations; whether computers can do such work; and how to present forensic testimony about probabilities to judges and juries. The FBI has also required “blind verification” of results by agents unfamiliar with initial examinations.

The bureau said that skilled analysts are extraordinarily accurate, at least when they know they are being tested. An FBI study with Noblis Corp. last year found that when 169 examiners compared thousands of fingerprints and decided there was enough information to declare a match or not, they were correct 99.8 percent of the time.

Still, the Mayfield case highlighted the need for research into real-world conditions. A 2006 study by a London-based scientist, Itiel E. Dror, asked experts to analyze fingerprints that, unbeknownst to them, they had analyzed earlier in their careers. This time, however, examiners were given biasing statements, such as that a suspect had confessed or that a suspect was locked up at the time of the offense. In 16.6 percent of cases, examiners reversed earlier judgments.

Crime lab directors and prosecutors welcome calls for more money for research and to improve examiners and facilities. But with budgets tight at all levels, Washington has few other tools to prompt 350 state and local labs across the country to improve.

Because techniques have not been scientifically proved does not mean they do not work, defenders say, and mistakes can be handled traditionally through case-by-case appeals.

“In the real life of the criminal justice system, we need more resources for those who are on the front lines,” said Scott D. Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association. Noting that prosecutors handle 20 million non-traffic cases a year, Burns said, “The sky isn’t falling, and we usually get it right.”

Pete M. Marone, director of the Virginia Department of Forensic Science and chairman of the Consortium of Forensic Science Organizations, urged Congress not to “reinvent the wheel” by abandoning all existing accreditation standards or groups such as the one he represents.

“Don’t judge forensic science today based on errors from 30 years ago,” Marone said. “What we need is someone setting a research agenda and direction. . . . We need leadership.”

By Spencer S. Hsu

Justice Dept., FBI to revisit thousands of criminal investigations

By Spencer S. Hsu

Kirk Odom, convicted of 1981 rape, served 20 years in prison

By Spencer S. Hsu

DOUBTS ABOUT STATE, LOCAL HAIR MATCHES

Federal training linked to suspect court testimony

By Spencer S. Hsu

Months after his conviction was thrown out, Santae Tribble waits to be declared innocent

Santae A. Tribble was 17 years old when he was charged with felony murder of a D.C. taxi driver. His 1980 conviction was overturned this year after DNA testing showed that evidence critical to the jury’s finding of his guilt was based on flawed forensic work. Mr. Tribble, now 51 and out of jail, hasn’t been able to move on with his life because he has yet to receive a certificate of innocence from D.C. Superior Court. In effect, he remains presumed guilty until certified innocent.

The administration and Congress need to do more to fix lab testing

(Unattributed editorial.)

Kirk L. Odom and Donald E. Gates for nearly 30 for crimes they did not commit. Santae A. Tribble spent 28 years behind bars, even though DNA evidence now shows he almost undoubtedly was not the culprit.

Wrongful convictions and the dark side of criminal science

(Unattributed editorial.)

Kirk L. Odom is innocent.

HAIR LED TO MURDER CONVICTION

DNA work in case later revealed error

By Spencer S. Hsu