October 2, 2023 • 36 mins
Even when examined under a microscope, the similarities that can be observed between two hairs are open to wide interpretation, there are no definitive traits that can prove with any scientific certainty that a suspect’s hair matches a hair found at a crime scene. Yet hair comparison analysis was still being used to falsely identify and convict innocent people up until the year 2000 and people are still incarcerated who were convicted based on this false evidence.
So how did this evidence get admitted into courts in the first place?
Josh Dubin speaks with Vanessa Antoun, Senior Resource Counsel at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) to learn about Hair Microscopy Evidence.
Kate Judson, Executive Director of the Center for Integrity in Forensic Sciences, updates Josh Dubin's Wrongful Conviction: Junk Science.
To learn more and get involved, please visit:
https://cifsjustice.org/donate/
https://www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/junk-science
Wrongful Conviction: Junk Science is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey folks, Kate Judson here, I'm a lawyer and the
executive director of the Center for Integrity and Forensic Sciences.
We're back with another episode of Junk Science, a series
we first released in twenty twenty, but these stories are
just as relevant as ever. This week's episode focuses on
hair microscopy, a forensic discipline that compares hair found on
(00:25):
a victim or at a crime scene to the hair
of a suspect. The problem, and from the title of
the show, you know what I'm going to say, The
problem is that hair microscopy is junk science. Even with
a microscope, it is next to impossible to accurately prove
that two hairs came from the same person without DNA testing.
(00:49):
Since this episode aired in twenty twenty, there was another
exoneration on a hair microscopy case that made big headlines.
In twenty one one, Anthony Broadwater was exonerated of the
crime of raping author Alice Sebold, who's best known for
the novel The Lovely Bones. Anthony Broadwater was convicted of
(01:12):
the rape in nineteen eighty two with eyewitness testimony and
hair microscopy, two methods we now know are flawed. At
his exoneration hearing, the judge said that he was deeply
sorry that this never should have happened. Anthony Broadwater broke
down in tears. The wrongful conviction that had ruined his
life was overturned, and his innocence finally validated. Unfortunately, we
(01:38):
don't know how many other Anthony Broadwaters are out there.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Washington, DC, A muggy summer day finally starts to cool
as night falls. Street lights turn on, Crickets chirp, there's
the soft jingle of the tags on a dog caller.
A black poodle walks up someone's porch steps, sniffs around.
The dog leaps back down the stairs when its owner
calls its name. A few hours later, on those same
(02:11):
porch steps, the man who lives there slowly walks up,
and a masked figure walks up behind him. There's a gunshot.
Someone screams. The shooter makes a run for it, ripping
a stocking mask from his face. It lands on a
porch step as he disappears down the street into the night.
(02:34):
You live down the street from where the gunshot went off.
Three days later, you're hanging out with your girlfriend and
your mom's basement sitting on the couch watching TV. Your
mom is upstairs cleaning up after dinner, and then there's
a knock at the door. You hear someone introduce themselves
as an officer, officers something or other, and damn it,
(02:58):
you think, and your teenage mind you figure he must
be there about the parking ticket you got a few
weeks ago and didn't pay yet. Your mom's gonna be pissed.
You head upstairs, but they cuff you and take you away.
You're brought down to the station and put in a cell,
and they tell you that you'll be tried for the
(03:19):
murder of your neighbor. The next day you're transferred to
the county jail and you're beginning to absorb the shock
of it all. The one thing that you can't get
past is the filth. It's just terrible in there, everything
from the bugs to the food, to the living conditions
and the noise. The noise is unbearable. You can hardly sleep.
(03:42):
You begin to miss out on things. Your family summer
vacation comes and goes. Six months pass. You would have
had your ged by now. A year slips by, and
then a year turns into a year and a half.
Your nieces and nephews, the ones the you helped raise
or growing up. You've spoken to them a few times,
(04:04):
but they haven't come to visit. Are they thinking that
their uncle may have done this? You miss out on
the final years of being a care free teen. It
seems as though everything's moving on without you. Finally, after
two agonizing years, your case goes to trial. You want
(04:24):
to get your life back. You didn't kill anyone. You
were in that same basement all night when someone else
climbed your neighbors steps and ended his life with a
single gunshot blast of the head. A few weeks ago,
an officer came to your cell and cut some of
your hair. Of course, you willingly let them take it
(04:46):
because you were sure it would help prove your innocence.
As you sit in the courtroom at your trial, the
prosecutor says that there was a nylon stocking mass found
at the scene of the crime. An FBI agent takes
the stand for the prosecution and tells the jury, I
compare the defendant's hair to the thirteen hairs found on
the mask. This agent tells the jury that the defendant's
(05:10):
hair is indistinguishable from one of those thirteen hairs. The
prosecutor says, there's one chance, perhaps for all we know
in ten million, that it could be someone else's hair.
This single hair proves critical because it's the only physical
evidence that ties you to the homicide. You're told the
(05:34):
jury's reached a verdict. They shuffle back into the courtroom,
and none of them will look at you. When you
hear the word guilty, there's the sudden eruption of uncontrolled sobbing,
like the turning on of a spigot. There's the unraveling
of your mother in whales. Not my baby, My baby
(05:54):
didn't do it. Your ants are crying, your relatives are
trying to console each other. There's just a medley of
weeping and misery. You feel like you're going to pass out.
The room is sideways, and then it's upside down, and
then you're all white. All you can hear, all you
can see. Everything turns white, and you go numb. You're
(06:18):
sentenced to twenty years to life and stay prison, and
then there is nothing. Everything goes blank. You do everything
you can to prove your innocence. You write letters, study
the law. Your father comes to busy you. Just about
every single Saturday. But he dies four years after your arrest.
(06:43):
Your mom dies two years after that, and you can't
go to either of their funerals. You can't help but
to think, did this kill them? My wrongful conviction. You
sit in your cell, numb most days, and you try
to recall little things that will bring some comfort. To
smell your mother's cooking, sitting around playing cards with your friends,
(07:08):
holding hands with your girlfriend, and your mother's basement watching TV.
You live a lifetime in that prison, thirty three long years.
It takes all of that time for the district attorney
to finally agree to test the DNA contained in the
hair that was found on that stalking mask that dropped
(07:29):
to the steps of that porch. It turns out the
way you knew it would. Your DNA does not match
any of those thirteen hairs. But they do figure out
who one of the hairs belongs to, and it's not
a person. Turns out that one of the hairs they
found on that stocking mask, and argue to the jury
(07:49):
was a human hair belong to that poodle. When you
re enter the world, they say you're free, but are
you really? You went in as an eighteen year old
boy and came out a fifty one year old man,
and you've aged beyond your years. Your fighting an illness
caused by the burden of carrying around your innocence for
(08:11):
your entire adult life. You die at the age of
fifty nine, enjoying only eight free years with what's left
of your family. But your death, your suffering is not
in vain. After you were found to be innocent, the
FBI starts to re examine over three thousand cases where
(08:31):
similar evidence was used. They're looking for other people who,
like you, were wrongfully convicted of crimes they didn't commit,
people whose lives were destroyed by the junk science of
hair comparison analysis. The story you just heard is based
(08:52):
on true events of Sante Treble's life. He was wrongfully
convicted in nineteen seventy eight, an exonery in twenty twelve.
He passed away in July of twenty twenty. This episode
is dedicated to him. I'm Josh duban civil rights and
(09:15):
criminal defense attorney and Innocent ambassador to the Innocence Project
in New York. Even when examined under a microscope, the
similarities that can be observed between two hairs are open
to a wide interpretation. In other words, there are no
definitive traits that can prove with any scientific certainty that
(09:35):
a suspect's hair matches a hair found at a crime scene.
Yet hair comparison analysis was still being used to falsely
identify and convict innocent people up until the year two
thousand and today there are still people who are incarcerated
that were convicted based on this false evidence. So how
(09:56):
did this evidence get admitted into courts in the first place.
Turns out, hair my crosscubee was born in the eighteen hundreds,
and the methods used to analyze and compare human hairs
haven't changed much since. In eighteen sixty nine, a man
(10:21):
named John Dorsey was accused of killing his wife by
beating her over the head with a club in his
own yard in Massachusetts. During the trial, two men claimed
that they had seen hairs attached to the alleged murder weapon,
and that the hair appeared to be brunette human hair
that was the color of mister Dorsey's wife's hair. Mister
(10:43):
Dorsey was shocked his wife was brunette, but so were
as horses. According to mister Dorsey, the club wasn't a
murder weapon. It was just one of many pieces of
wood that was set out by the horse stables. The
hair and the clubs didn't belong to his wife, but
was a hair that had fallen from his horse's tail.
(11:03):
But the court ruled that mister Dorsey couldn't present this
account about the horse hair. Meanwhile, the testimony from the
men claiming that the hair was mister Dorsey's wife's was permitted.
Mister Dorsey was eventually convicted of killing his wife. This
was the first time a courd admitted hair comparison analysis
(11:24):
as evidence in our legal system, and it definitely wouldn't
be the last. Over a century later, animal hair and
human hair would again be an issue in the Sante
Triple case.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
That case was just an example of the overconfidence in
overreaching and what it could do to different individuals. The
idea that not only could they be wrong about linking
a hair to a person, which they can because you
can't do that at all, but that they can't even
identify what is human here and what isn't. Not only
(12:02):
did it occur in that case, but it continued to
occur unchecked. That was just outrageous, all right.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
So joining us today is Vanessa Antone and Vanessa is
a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
I think will refer to them as the NACDL, And
this is just a wonderful, wonderful group. I'm a member
of the NACDL, and it is a policy and advocacy
organization that really is on the ground working for reforms
(12:38):
and improvements in the criminal justice system. You're going to
learn about a really remarkable project that they have been
involved in with the FBI, and Vanessa is a key
member of this project. And what they are doing is
reading hundreds of transcripts from old cases and cases where
(12:58):
defendants and the accused were convicted and in many cases
wrongfully convicted based on hair comparison analysis. So to start, Vanessa,
hair comparison analysis is also called hair microscopy, and we'll
use these terms interchangeably, but tell us a little bit
about what hair microscopy or hair comparison analysis is exactly.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
It's looking at hair under a microscope, as you would
think from the title. But what a well trained hair
examiner was supposed to be able to do is look
at different characteristics and hair and try to make an
association from those characteristics. They look at characteristics like the
(13:45):
color and the thickness, whether it looks wavy, if it
has what they call scales on the cuticle, whether it's
smooth or ragged. They also look at the part of
the hair that's the medula, which is the middle of
the hair, and they look at the shape of that,
the thickness, the color. They also look at the cortex,
(14:08):
which is the main part of the hair, and that
gives the hair characteristics like the pigment. And when they
do the examination, they make note of all these characteristics
in like a known sample of hair, and then they
seek to compare that to the evidentiary hair.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
So it sounds scientific, I guess in a way. The
examiner takes some hair from the suspect's head, and they
know where that's coming from because it's the person that's
accused of the crime, right in front of them, sitting
in a jail cell. So they take that hair and
put it in a little bag and label it, and
(14:45):
they take that hair sample and compare it to what
you refer to as the evidentiary hair or the unknown
sample that was found at the scene of a crime.
And so they're looking at characteristics of the hair found
at the crime scene and and seeing if the person
that they claim committed this crime has hair that matches
(15:05):
these characteristics. But the problem seems to be that there
are so many different characteristics and variables and hair that
matching one hair to another, and you know, doing that
to try to find out whether it came from the
same person isn't as easy as some might think.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
In reading all of these transcripts from hair examiners, you know,
throughout decades until two thousand, they would tell you that
there's a range even in a person's own head of hair.
They don't all look identical.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So where does hair microscop be really run into trouble?
Why isn't it reliable?
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Microscopic hair comparison doesn't rely on a chemical analysis or
a set of concrete standards to associate or to make
a comparison. It's what is known as a pattern and
matching discipline. So it's basically eyeballing it. It's a subjective
(16:09):
forensic discipline. In fact, in the words of one of
the FBI hair examiners, it's the most subjective of the
forensic disciplines. As another microscopic hair examiner said, you just
you know, sometimes you get a feeling about a hair
and you know, it just bowls you over and you
just look at it. And so that's why there won't
(16:30):
be a database. You can't make a database of that
type of subjective feeling about hair.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, I get it. I mean, you could make a
database of people's subjective feelings about hair, but it's not
going to tell you very much. But it really begs
the question why were prosecutors using this to try to
get convictions. If it's so subjective and so speculative, why
were they using it at all.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Generally they would start out operating on the you know,
the trans for principle that if your hair falls out
and you are in a location or you're near someone,
hair can transfer to another person or to the place
that you're in close proximity to. So it could give
evidence of someone's presence in a certain location or with
(17:18):
a certain person. When that is one of the few
pieces of evidence you have, obviously you want to pursue that.
And a lot of these cases, not all, but a
lot of them were in pre DNA times, so this
would be very powerful evidence when you can't just DNA
(17:38):
test something. So what you had is the hair.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
But DNA testing had come out in the nineties, so
why wasn't it being used on hair evidence? Why were
prosecutors still an FBI examiners for that matter, still using
this hair comparison analysis.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
When we think of DNA testing, that's nuclear DNA testing.
And the problem with hair and why this happened was
because unless there was tissue at the root of the hair,
like if you yank your hair out and it may
or may not have some tissue at the root. Unless
there was tissue there that could be tested with nuclear DNA,
(18:18):
you couldn't do a DNA test on hair. All you
could do is eyeball it under a microscope. Until mitochondrial DNA,
you know, a different type of DNA testing allowed testing
of the hair shaft to give a result. So in
all those decades that was not there, that technology wasn't
(18:39):
being used, and it wasn't until around two thousand that
even you know, the FBI lab started using that in
all the cases, and that is when they could actually
look at the hair and say conclusively, no, it wasn't
from this individual.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
I want to talk about three cases that all occurred
around the Washington, DC area. One was Sante Tribble, who
we mentioned earlier, where a dog hare was mistaken for
a human air. Now another case was the case of
Donald Eugene Gates, and Donald Gates was accused of raping
and killing a girl in a park. Now, during his trial,
(19:27):
an FBI special agent testified that Donald's hair was quote
microscopically indistinguishable end quote from hairs found on the victim's body,
and based on that that the hair from the crime
scene probably belonged to Donald Gates. And so Donald was
convicted and sentenced to twenty years to life in prison.
(19:51):
And then there's yet a third case, and that is
the case of an eighteen year old named Kirk Odom.
Now this one was, you know, another sort of mind
bending example of this junk science being applied, because here
you have mister Odom just walking down the street one day.
He's on his way to go see his infant daughter
(20:13):
at his house, and a cop stops him on the
street and says, you know, you look like the guy
in this picture. And the picture was a sketch that
had been drawn based on a description given by a
woman that had been attacked blindfolded and raped by a
stranger with a gun, and the victim only got a
brief look at her attacker, but the officers drew the
(20:36):
sketch based on what she described, which was basically a
young black man. Based on that, the officer arrests Kirk Odem.
And you have another example of an FBI agent testifying
at a trial. And here the agent gets on the
stand and says kirk Odom's hair matches essentially hair found
(20:59):
on the victor's nightgown. And they used the same sort
of language that is indistinguishable from Kirk's hair. Kirk spent
over twenty two years in prison. So what happens next
is mitochondrial DNA testing finally becomes available, right, that's the
DNA testing of hair. And all three of these men's
(21:20):
hair was tested, and what do you know, none of
their DNA matched any of the hairs that were found
at the scenes of these crimes. And at this point,
the FBI couldn't hide behind this anymore. So tell us, Vanessa,
what happens next.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Well, I was lucky enough to be working with an ACDL.
When NACDL joined in work in a partnership with the FBI,
the Department of Justice and the Innocence Project to conduct
a review of the FBI hair examiner's cases from you know,
whenever they started, when the earliest we could find up
(21:58):
to about two thousand, and that came about for a
couple reasons, one of which was the National Academy of
Sciences Report on Strengthening Forensic Science, which looked at patterned
and matching disciplines, including specifically hair comparison, and said, you know,
it just doesn't have a sufficient foundation to be used
(22:19):
for identifying people.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
So the NACDL is working with the FBI and you
start going through all of these old cases. You're reading
the transcripts, and these are trials where hair evidence was
used to get a conviction. So what did you find.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Part of the frustration that the lawyers had and that
we all had reading these transcripts back to back was
the continued nature of the same statements that were unscientific,
and so we called them error type one, two and three.
And in Layman's terms, air type one is basically where
(22:58):
they're making a one to one association between a person
and a hair, which can never be done with microscopic
hare comparison. So that's when an examiner either states or
implies that the evidentiary hair can be associated to a
specific individual to the exclusion of all others, and that
(23:18):
would include statements indicating that hair is unique. Sometimes an
analogy of a fingerprint was used in testimony. Well, it's
not exactly like a fingerprint, but it kind of is,
and that's why we can say that this hair came
from this person. So that's that one to one association,
and that is absolutely incorrect. You can't say hair is
(23:41):
unique and use it to associate people. You know, you
shouldn't have to say it's like this or it's like that.
You should just say what it is. And if what
it is isn't enough, then it shouldn't be used to
connect the hair to a person. That wasn't really the
most common type of error or scientifically invalid statement we saw.
(24:04):
It was usually what we call air two and what
I'm talking about. There are statements like, well, it would
be rare if two hairs that looked this similar came
from two different individuals, And those were the things we
were looking for in the review, and unfortunately found that
(24:25):
in the majority, the vast majority, over ninety percent of
cases where FBI examiners gave testimony, the conclusions were exaggerated,
and there were scientifically unsupported statements in the testimony.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Look, I always knew this was bad, but ninety percent
of the cases, I mean, that's just an insane statistic.
And you know, our listeners really need to remember that
these weren't just any experts coming in to give testimony.
This is the FBI. This is, you know, an organization
that has a reputation for having a attained higher knowledge,
(25:01):
you know, knowing more than just everyday people.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
When an FBI examiner comes in, especially in a state case,
great weight is given to what they say. It is
very impressive to have the FBI show up and explain
a discipline and tell you what something means in their experience.
And that's what happened. In some cases, an FBI was
(25:29):
asked to do hair examination when the local examiners couldn't
make an association, which makes the whole thing even more
questionable because the inquiry should end there. You shouldn't be
able to try to find someone else who will give
you the answer that you want. Also, they found that
the FBI hair examiners kept their identity as law enforcement
(25:51):
agents first and foremost, and they found that instead of
acting like impartial scientists, the FBI lab culture at the
time embraced the agent examiners acting like more like detectives,
and that that approach should have been pulled back. And remember, no,
you're independent. This is scientific. You're not part of the
(26:14):
law enforcement investigative team. You're a scientist.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
So, Vanessa, you read transcripts from a ton of cases,
a lot of testimony. Were there any that really stood
out to you where you sat back and said, Wow,
this is really bad.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
A couple of things where I thought I could not believe.
This was the case where the examiner said that he
had significant experience, you know, examining pubic cares from people
from Mexico, and therefore he could exclude people from Mexico
from having contributed the pubic care in the case at hand.
(26:50):
Obviously that was because the alternate suspects other than the
defendant were from Mexico. So that was entirely made up.
I mean, I can't even there's no point trying to
be nice about it. That's not a thing anybody can
ever say, and it was just made up. You can't
say that a hair came from an individual of a
(27:12):
particular racial group. They can look at the hair and
talk about some of the ancestral origins and some of
the classifications into groups at a huge broad level, which
really wouldn't have value and you know, crime investigation. But
they absolutely can't say that it did or did not
come from a person from a certain country. So that's
(27:36):
you know, that's pretty ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
So after you review the transcripts from a case, and
let's say you determine that you know, an expert or
a so called expert came in and gave testimony and
said that were just outside the bounds of science, and
there was a conviction. What happened next? What were the
next steps of the review?
Speaker 3 (28:09):
I seek to assist folks in finding counsel and hooking
them up with lawyers who could assist them to pursue
any claims they might have. If that type of evidence
was used in their case, they would do the DNA
testing on the hair, or if no hair could be
found after all these years, because these are old cases,
(28:31):
they would do testing on other biological evidence as long
as a chain of custody could be established.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
So look, I just have to say, and if this
is a shameless plug so be it. The NACDL is
just it's a remarkable organization because you're not only exposing problems,
which you certainly did here, but it goes that extra
step to helping people that you know, have been the
victim of a wrongful conviction or the victim of of
(29:00):
you know, testimony that goes outside the bounds of science,
and getting them help and hooking them up with lawyers.
So you must, Vanessa, have had an interesting experience from
all these cases. What is your biggest takeaway from this work?
Speaker 3 (29:16):
No matter how much you want a conviction or how
much other evidence you think you have of guilt, it's
never appropriate to admit unsupported science and the idea that
using certain techniques are needed as tools to quote unquote
catch the bad guys, which is still a conversation that's
(29:39):
going on with forensic science today. That's the fear that
law enforcement won't have the tools they need to catch
people or to convict people. And the appropriate response should be, well,
those tools have to be scientifically valid and they have
(29:59):
to be science typically sound.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
So can't this model that the NACDL and the FBI
employed here, which is re reviewing cases and exposing problems
and helping right these wrongs. Can't this model be applied
to other disciplines of junk science? It just seems so effective.
Then you're able to help so many people.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
As a result of the FBI hair Review and other
movements to make sure forensic science was more reliable for
the courtroom, there were plans in the Department of Justice
in the last administration to do similar reviews of other
pattern and matching disciplines, to take a historical look back
(30:44):
and see if in some other disciplines in the FBI
lab that were susceptible to similar errors, if similar errors
had occurred, and like the hair review, to find those
and identify them and provide notification and give a means
for folks to address those potential scientific overstatements.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
All right, So the way you say that evans when
you say there are were plans in the Department of
Justice to do this historical look back, makes me have
the sinking suspicion that maybe it didn't pan out.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
What happened that, along with several other plans, was rolled
back by then Attorney General Sessions. Under the new administration,
it has become a little harder. We have to be
extra vigilant when you're dealing with the situation where plans
for progress were abandoned. So while a lot of progress
(31:46):
has been made, there's a lot to be done. You know,
cases are still litigation. Cases still need to be litigated.
So yeah, the struggle continues.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
You might be listening to this wondering what you can
do to help. Thanks to the work that Vanessa is
doing with the NACDL, many individuals have been exonerated. But
being exonerated means moving from a life of injustice and
hardship in prison to another kind of very difficult life
outside of prison. Take for example, Drew Whitley. In nineteen
(32:24):
eighty nine, the manager of McDonald's was murdered in Pennsylvania.
Another McDonald's employee was there when the crime occurred. The
witness could not see the face of the perpetrator because
he was wearing a ski mask, but he claimed nonetheless
that the person that committed the crime had been Drew Whitley,
his neighbor. Investigators found a hair on a ski mask
(32:46):
which was found near the crime scene. They compared it
to Drew's hair and claimed that it matched Drew. Whitley
was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. After fighting
for years, Drew was finally able to get the hairs
from the crime I'm seeing tested for mitochondrial DNA. The
hairs did not belong to him, and he was exonerated
(33:06):
in two thousand and six. The trauma from his wrongful
conviction remains. He's always looking over his shoulder with the
constant and perhaps justified worry that a police officer will
bring him back to prison for no good reason at all.
Something that strikes me about a lot of these men
who have been convicted based on hair comparison evidence, like Drew, Whitley,
(33:29):
and Kirk Odom, is that many of them have shaved
their heads after their release. I can't help but to
wonder if it's because of this fear that someone will
find their hair where it shouldn't be and the nightmare
will begin all over again. After serving seventeen years for
a crime he didn't commit, dru was finally released, but
(33:51):
he didn't receive any compensation from the state. So here's
someone that lives a literal nightmare, struggling behind bars to
prove his innocence, and now he has to struggle to
survive on the outside. Right now, fifteen states in this
country don't offer any compensation to exonerreies. The thirty five
(34:12):
states that do differ widely in the amounts that they offer,
and it's often difficult to satisfy all of the procedural
requirements to qualify for the money. As you can imagine,
there are always loopholes, and the states often exploit them.
Money can't give back the years of someone's life that
they were robbed of, but compensation does help. It eases
(34:34):
an exneries path forward and healing and living a more
comfortable life. The Innocence Project is fighting to hold states
accountable for compensating wrongfully convicted individuals. Until all states enact
legislation to compensate the wrongly convicted, that fight will continue.
The Innocence Project has set up a fund to support exonreies.
(34:56):
The fund is currently expanding to cover those exoneries who
are facing job loss or economic hardships due to COVID nineteen.
You can donate to this fund by going to Innocenceproject
dot org slash Exonery dash Fund DASH twenty twenty. You
can also support the amazing work that the NACDL is
(35:18):
doing by donating to the NACDL Foundation for Criminal Justice.
You could find out more about that at NACDL dot org.
Next week, we'll explore the junk science of shoe print
(35:39):
and tire track evidence. Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number One. Thanks to our executive producer Jason Flahm
and the team at Signal Company Number One executive producer
Kevin Wartis and senior producers Karen Kornhaber and Britz Spangler.
(36:00):
Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow
me on Instagram at dubin Josh. Follow the Wrongful Conviction
podcast on Facebook and on Instagram at wrongful Conviction and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hey folks, Kate Judson here, I'm a lawyer and the
executive director of the Center for Integrity and Forensic Sciences.
We're back with another episode of Junk Science, a series
we first released in twenty twenty, but these stories are
just as relevant as ever. This week's episode focuses on
hair microscopy, a forensic discipline that compares hair found on
(00:25):
a victim or at a crime scene to the hair
of a suspect. The problem, and from the title of
the show, you know what I'm going to say, The
problem is that hair microscopy is junk science. Even with
a microscope, it is next to impossible to accurately prove
that two hairs came from the same person without DNA testing.
(00:49):
Since this episode aired in twenty twenty, there was another
exoneration on a hair microscopy case that made big headlines.
In twenty one one, Anthony Broadwater was exonerated of the
crime of raping author Alice Sebold, who's best known for
the novel The Lovely Bones. Anthony Broadwater was convicted of
(01:12):
the rape in nineteen eighty two with eyewitness testimony and
hair microscopy, two methods we now know are flawed. At
his exoneration hearing, the judge said that he was deeply
sorry that this never should have happened. Anthony Broadwater broke
down in tears. The wrongful conviction that had ruined his
life was overturned, and his innocence finally validated. Unfortunately, we
(01:38):
don't know how many other Anthony Broadwaters are out there.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Washington, DC, A muggy summer day finally starts to cool
as night falls. Street lights turn on, Crickets chirp, there's
the soft jingle of the tags on a dog caller.
A black poodle walks up someone's porch steps, sniffs around.
The dog leaps back down the stairs when its owner
calls its name. A few hours later, on those same
(02:11):
porch steps, the man who lives there slowly walks up,
and a masked figure walks up behind him. There's a gunshot.
Someone screams. The shooter makes a run for it, ripping
a stocking mask from his face. It lands on a
porch step as he disappears down the street into the night.
(02:34):
You live down the street from where the gunshot went off.
Three days later, you're hanging out with your girlfriend and
your mom's basement sitting on the couch watching TV. Your
mom is upstairs cleaning up after dinner, and then there's
a knock at the door. You hear someone introduce themselves
as an officer, officers something or other, and damn it,
(02:58):
you think, and your teenage mind you figure he must
be there about the parking ticket you got a few
weeks ago and didn't pay yet. Your mom's gonna be pissed.
You head upstairs, but they cuff you and take you away.
You're brought down to the station and put in a cell,
and they tell you that you'll be tried for the
(03:19):
murder of your neighbor. The next day you're transferred to
the county jail and you're beginning to absorb the shock
of it all. The one thing that you can't get
past is the filth. It's just terrible in there, everything
from the bugs to the food, to the living conditions
and the noise. The noise is unbearable. You can hardly sleep.
(03:42):
You begin to miss out on things. Your family summer
vacation comes and goes. Six months pass. You would have
had your ged by now. A year slips by, and
then a year turns into a year and a half.
Your nieces and nephews, the ones the you helped raise
or growing up. You've spoken to them a few times,
(04:04):
but they haven't come to visit. Are they thinking that
their uncle may have done this? You miss out on
the final years of being a care free teen. It
seems as though everything's moving on without you. Finally, after
two agonizing years, your case goes to trial. You want
(04:24):
to get your life back. You didn't kill anyone. You
were in that same basement all night when someone else
climbed your neighbors steps and ended his life with a
single gunshot blast of the head. A few weeks ago,
an officer came to your cell and cut some of
your hair. Of course, you willingly let them take it
(04:46):
because you were sure it would help prove your innocence.
As you sit in the courtroom at your trial, the
prosecutor says that there was a nylon stocking mass found
at the scene of the crime. An FBI agent takes
the stand for the prosecution and tells the jury, I
compare the defendant's hair to the thirteen hairs found on
the mask. This agent tells the jury that the defendant's
(05:10):
hair is indistinguishable from one of those thirteen hairs. The
prosecutor says, there's one chance, perhaps for all we know
in ten million, that it could be someone else's hair.
This single hair proves critical because it's the only physical
evidence that ties you to the homicide. You're told the
(05:34):
jury's reached a verdict. They shuffle back into the courtroom,
and none of them will look at you. When you
hear the word guilty, there's the sudden eruption of uncontrolled sobbing,
like the turning on of a spigot. There's the unraveling
of your mother in whales. Not my baby, My baby
(05:54):
didn't do it. Your ants are crying, your relatives are
trying to console each other. There's just a medley of
weeping and misery. You feel like you're going to pass out.
The room is sideways, and then it's upside down, and
then you're all white. All you can hear, all you
can see. Everything turns white, and you go numb. You're
(06:18):
sentenced to twenty years to life and stay prison, and
then there is nothing. Everything goes blank. You do everything
you can to prove your innocence. You write letters, study
the law. Your father comes to busy you. Just about
every single Saturday. But he dies four years after your arrest.
(06:43):
Your mom dies two years after that, and you can't
go to either of their funerals. You can't help but
to think, did this kill them? My wrongful conviction. You
sit in your cell, numb most days, and you try
to recall little things that will bring some comfort. To
smell your mother's cooking, sitting around playing cards with your friends,
(07:08):
holding hands with your girlfriend, and your mother's basement watching TV.
You live a lifetime in that prison, thirty three long years.
It takes all of that time for the district attorney
to finally agree to test the DNA contained in the
hair that was found on that stalking mask that dropped
(07:29):
to the steps of that porch. It turns out the
way you knew it would. Your DNA does not match
any of those thirteen hairs. But they do figure out
who one of the hairs belongs to, and it's not
a person. Turns out that one of the hairs they
found on that stocking mask, and argue to the jury
(07:49):
was a human hair belong to that poodle. When you
re enter the world, they say you're free, but are
you really? You went in as an eighteen year old
boy and came out a fifty one year old man,
and you've aged beyond your years. Your fighting an illness
caused by the burden of carrying around your innocence for
(08:11):
your entire adult life. You die at the age of
fifty nine, enjoying only eight free years with what's left
of your family. But your death, your suffering is not
in vain. After you were found to be innocent, the
FBI starts to re examine over three thousand cases where
(08:31):
similar evidence was used. They're looking for other people who,
like you, were wrongfully convicted of crimes they didn't commit,
people whose lives were destroyed by the junk science of
hair comparison analysis. The story you just heard is based
(08:52):
on true events of Sante Treble's life. He was wrongfully
convicted in nineteen seventy eight, an exonery in twenty twelve.
He passed away in July of twenty twenty. This episode
is dedicated to him. I'm Josh duban civil rights and
(09:15):
criminal defense attorney and Innocent ambassador to the Innocence Project
in New York. Even when examined under a microscope, the
similarities that can be observed between two hairs are open
to a wide interpretation. In other words, there are no
definitive traits that can prove with any scientific certainty that
(09:35):
a suspect's hair matches a hair found at a crime scene.
Yet hair comparison analysis was still being used to falsely
identify and convict innocent people up until the year two
thousand and today there are still people who are incarcerated
that were convicted based on this false evidence. So how
(09:56):
did this evidence get admitted into courts in the first place.
Turns out, hair my crosscubee was born in the eighteen hundreds,
and the methods used to analyze and compare human hairs
haven't changed much since. In eighteen sixty nine, a man
(10:21):
named John Dorsey was accused of killing his wife by
beating her over the head with a club in his
own yard in Massachusetts. During the trial, two men claimed
that they had seen hairs attached to the alleged murder weapon,
and that the hair appeared to be brunette human hair
that was the color of mister Dorsey's wife's hair. Mister
(10:43):
Dorsey was shocked his wife was brunette, but so were
as horses. According to mister Dorsey, the club wasn't a
murder weapon. It was just one of many pieces of
wood that was set out by the horse stables. The
hair and the clubs didn't belong to his wife, but
was a hair that had fallen from his horse's tail.
(11:03):
But the court ruled that mister Dorsey couldn't present this
account about the horse hair. Meanwhile, the testimony from the
men claiming that the hair was mister Dorsey's wife's was permitted.
Mister Dorsey was eventually convicted of killing his wife. This
was the first time a courd admitted hair comparison analysis
(11:24):
as evidence in our legal system, and it definitely wouldn't
be the last. Over a century later, animal hair and
human hair would again be an issue in the Sante
Triple case.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
That case was just an example of the overconfidence in
overreaching and what it could do to different individuals. The
idea that not only could they be wrong about linking
a hair to a person, which they can because you
can't do that at all, but that they can't even
identify what is human here and what isn't. Not only
(12:02):
did it occur in that case, but it continued to
occur unchecked. That was just outrageous, all right.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
So joining us today is Vanessa Antone and Vanessa is
a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
I think will refer to them as the NACDL, And
this is just a wonderful, wonderful group. I'm a member
of the NACDL, and it is a policy and advocacy
organization that really is on the ground working for reforms
(12:38):
and improvements in the criminal justice system. You're going to
learn about a really remarkable project that they have been
involved in with the FBI, and Vanessa is a key
member of this project. And what they are doing is
reading hundreds of transcripts from old cases and cases where
(12:58):
defendants and the accused were convicted and in many cases
wrongfully convicted based on hair comparison analysis. So to start, Vanessa,
hair comparison analysis is also called hair microscopy, and we'll
use these terms interchangeably, but tell us a little bit
about what hair microscopy or hair comparison analysis is exactly.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
It's looking at hair under a microscope, as you would
think from the title. But what a well trained hair
examiner was supposed to be able to do is look
at different characteristics and hair and try to make an
association from those characteristics. They look at characteristics like the
(13:45):
color and the thickness, whether it looks wavy, if it
has what they call scales on the cuticle, whether it's
smooth or ragged. They also look at the part of
the hair that's the medula, which is the middle of
the hair, and they look at the shape of that,
the thickness, the color. They also look at the cortex,
(14:08):
which is the main part of the hair, and that
gives the hair characteristics like the pigment. And when they
do the examination, they make note of all these characteristics
in like a known sample of hair, and then they
seek to compare that to the evidentiary hair.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
So it sounds scientific, I guess in a way. The
examiner takes some hair from the suspect's head, and they
know where that's coming from because it's the person that's
accused of the crime, right in front of them, sitting
in a jail cell. So they take that hair and
put it in a little bag and label it, and
(14:45):
they take that hair sample and compare it to what
you refer to as the evidentiary hair or the unknown
sample that was found at the scene of a crime.
And so they're looking at characteristics of the hair found
at the crime scene and and seeing if the person
that they claim committed this crime has hair that matches
(15:05):
these characteristics. But the problem seems to be that there
are so many different characteristics and variables and hair that
matching one hair to another, and you know, doing that
to try to find out whether it came from the
same person isn't as easy as some might think.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
In reading all of these transcripts from hair examiners, you know,
throughout decades until two thousand, they would tell you that
there's a range even in a person's own head of hair.
They don't all look identical.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
So where does hair microscop be really run into trouble?
Why isn't it reliable?
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Microscopic hair comparison doesn't rely on a chemical analysis or
a set of concrete standards to associate or to make
a comparison. It's what is known as a pattern and
matching discipline. So it's basically eyeballing it. It's a subjective
(16:09):
forensic discipline. In fact, in the words of one of
the FBI hair examiners, it's the most subjective of the
forensic disciplines. As another microscopic hair examiner said, you just
you know, sometimes you get a feeling about a hair
and you know, it just bowls you over and you
just look at it. And so that's why there won't
(16:30):
be a database. You can't make a database of that
type of subjective feeling about hair.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yeah, I get it. I mean, you could make a
database of people's subjective feelings about hair, but it's not
going to tell you very much. But it really begs
the question why were prosecutors using this to try to
get convictions. If it's so subjective and so speculative, why
were they using it at all.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Generally they would start out operating on the you know,
the trans for principle that if your hair falls out
and you are in a location or you're near someone,
hair can transfer to another person or to the place
that you're in close proximity to. So it could give
evidence of someone's presence in a certain location or with
(17:18):
a certain person. When that is one of the few
pieces of evidence you have, obviously you want to pursue that.
And a lot of these cases, not all, but a
lot of them were in pre DNA times, so this
would be very powerful evidence when you can't just DNA
(17:38):
test something. So what you had is the hair.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
But DNA testing had come out in the nineties, so
why wasn't it being used on hair evidence? Why were
prosecutors still an FBI examiners for that matter, still using
this hair comparison analysis.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
When we think of DNA testing, that's nuclear DNA testing.
And the problem with hair and why this happened was
because unless there was tissue at the root of the hair,
like if you yank your hair out and it may
or may not have some tissue at the root. Unless
there was tissue there that could be tested with nuclear DNA,
(18:18):
you couldn't do a DNA test on hair. All you
could do is eyeball it under a microscope. Until mitochondrial DNA,
you know, a different type of DNA testing allowed testing
of the hair shaft to give a result. So in
all those decades that was not there, that technology wasn't
(18:39):
being used, and it wasn't until around two thousand that
even you know, the FBI lab started using that in
all the cases, and that is when they could actually
look at the hair and say conclusively, no, it wasn't
from this individual.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
I want to talk about three cases that all occurred
around the Washington, DC area. One was Sante Tribble, who
we mentioned earlier, where a dog hare was mistaken for
a human air. Now another case was the case of
Donald Eugene Gates, and Donald Gates was accused of raping
and killing a girl in a park. Now, during his trial,
(19:27):
an FBI special agent testified that Donald's hair was quote
microscopically indistinguishable end quote from hairs found on the victim's body,
and based on that that the hair from the crime
scene probably belonged to Donald Gates. And so Donald was
convicted and sentenced to twenty years to life in prison.
(19:51):
And then there's yet a third case, and that is
the case of an eighteen year old named Kirk Odom.
Now this one was, you know, another sort of mind
bending example of this junk science being applied, because here
you have mister Odom just walking down the street one day.
He's on his way to go see his infant daughter
(20:13):
at his house, and a cop stops him on the
street and says, you know, you look like the guy
in this picture. And the picture was a sketch that
had been drawn based on a description given by a
woman that had been attacked blindfolded and raped by a
stranger with a gun, and the victim only got a
brief look at her attacker, but the officers drew the
(20:36):
sketch based on what she described, which was basically a
young black man. Based on that, the officer arrests Kirk Odem.
And you have another example of an FBI agent testifying
at a trial. And here the agent gets on the
stand and says kirk Odom's hair matches essentially hair found
(20:59):
on the victor's nightgown. And they used the same sort
of language that is indistinguishable from Kirk's hair. Kirk spent
over twenty two years in prison. So what happens next
is mitochondrial DNA testing finally becomes available, right, that's the
DNA testing of hair. And all three of these men's
(21:20):
hair was tested, and what do you know, none of
their DNA matched any of the hairs that were found
at the scenes of these crimes. And at this point,
the FBI couldn't hide behind this anymore. So tell us, Vanessa,
what happens next.
Speaker 3 (21:36):
Well, I was lucky enough to be working with an ACDL.
When NACDL joined in work in a partnership with the FBI,
the Department of Justice and the Innocence Project to conduct
a review of the FBI hair examiner's cases from you know,
whenever they started, when the earliest we could find up
(21:58):
to about two thousand, and that came about for a
couple reasons, one of which was the National Academy of
Sciences Report on Strengthening Forensic Science, which looked at patterned
and matching disciplines, including specifically hair comparison, and said, you know,
it just doesn't have a sufficient foundation to be used
(22:19):
for identifying people.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
So the NACDL is working with the FBI and you
start going through all of these old cases. You're reading
the transcripts, and these are trials where hair evidence was
used to get a conviction. So what did you find.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
Part of the frustration that the lawyers had and that
we all had reading these transcripts back to back was
the continued nature of the same statements that were unscientific,
and so we called them error type one, two and three.
And in Layman's terms, air type one is basically where
(22:58):
they're making a one to one association between a person
and a hair, which can never be done with microscopic
hare comparison. So that's when an examiner either states or
implies that the evidentiary hair can be associated to a
specific individual to the exclusion of all others, and that
(23:18):
would include statements indicating that hair is unique. Sometimes an
analogy of a fingerprint was used in testimony. Well, it's
not exactly like a fingerprint, but it kind of is,
and that's why we can say that this hair came
from this person. So that's that one to one association,
and that is absolutely incorrect. You can't say hair is
(23:41):
unique and use it to associate people. You know, you
shouldn't have to say it's like this or it's like that.
You should just say what it is. And if what
it is isn't enough, then it shouldn't be used to
connect the hair to a person. That wasn't really the
most common type of error or scientifically invalid statement we saw.
(24:04):
It was usually what we call air two and what
I'm talking about. There are statements like, well, it would
be rare if two hairs that looked this similar came
from two different individuals, And those were the things we
were looking for in the review, and unfortunately found that
(24:25):
in the majority, the vast majority, over ninety percent of
cases where FBI examiners gave testimony, the conclusions were exaggerated,
and there were scientifically unsupported statements in the testimony.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Look, I always knew this was bad, but ninety percent
of the cases, I mean, that's just an insane statistic.
And you know, our listeners really need to remember that
these weren't just any experts coming in to give testimony.
This is the FBI. This is, you know, an organization
that has a reputation for having a attained higher knowledge,
(25:01):
you know, knowing more than just everyday people.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
When an FBI examiner comes in, especially in a state case,
great weight is given to what they say. It is
very impressive to have the FBI show up and explain
a discipline and tell you what something means in their experience.
And that's what happened. In some cases, an FBI was
(25:29):
asked to do hair examination when the local examiners couldn't
make an association, which makes the whole thing even more
questionable because the inquiry should end there. You shouldn't be
able to try to find someone else who will give
you the answer that you want. Also, they found that
the FBI hair examiners kept their identity as law enforcement
(25:51):
agents first and foremost, and they found that instead of
acting like impartial scientists, the FBI lab culture at the
time embraced the agent examiners acting like more like detectives,
and that that approach should have been pulled back. And remember, no,
you're independent. This is scientific. You're not part of the
(26:14):
law enforcement investigative team. You're a scientist.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
So, Vanessa, you read transcripts from a ton of cases,
a lot of testimony. Were there any that really stood
out to you where you sat back and said, Wow,
this is really bad.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
A couple of things where I thought I could not believe.
This was the case where the examiner said that he
had significant experience, you know, examining pubic cares from people
from Mexico, and therefore he could exclude people from Mexico
from having contributed the pubic care in the case at hand.
(26:50):
Obviously that was because the alternate suspects other than the
defendant were from Mexico. So that was entirely made up.
I mean, I can't even there's no point trying to
be nice about it. That's not a thing anybody can
ever say, and it was just made up. You can't
say that a hair came from an individual of a
(27:12):
particular racial group. They can look at the hair and
talk about some of the ancestral origins and some of
the classifications into groups at a huge broad level, which
really wouldn't have value and you know, crime investigation. But
they absolutely can't say that it did or did not
come from a person from a certain country. So that's
(27:36):
you know, that's pretty ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
So after you review the transcripts from a case, and
let's say you determine that you know, an expert or
a so called expert came in and gave testimony and
said that were just outside the bounds of science, and
there was a conviction. What happened next? What were the
next steps of the review?
Speaker 3 (28:09):
I seek to assist folks in finding counsel and hooking
them up with lawyers who could assist them to pursue
any claims they might have. If that type of evidence
was used in their case, they would do the DNA
testing on the hair, or if no hair could be
found after all these years, because these are old cases,
(28:31):
they would do testing on other biological evidence as long
as a chain of custody could be established.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
So look, I just have to say, and if this
is a shameless plug so be it. The NACDL is
just it's a remarkable organization because you're not only exposing problems,
which you certainly did here, but it goes that extra
step to helping people that you know, have been the
victim of a wrongful conviction or the victim of of
(29:00):
you know, testimony that goes outside the bounds of science,
and getting them help and hooking them up with lawyers.
So you must, Vanessa, have had an interesting experience from
all these cases. What is your biggest takeaway from this work?
Speaker 3 (29:16):
No matter how much you want a conviction or how
much other evidence you think you have of guilt, it's
never appropriate to admit unsupported science and the idea that
using certain techniques are needed as tools to quote unquote
catch the bad guys, which is still a conversation that's
(29:39):
going on with forensic science today. That's the fear that
law enforcement won't have the tools they need to catch
people or to convict people. And the appropriate response should be, well,
those tools have to be scientifically valid and they have
(29:59):
to be science typically sound.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
So can't this model that the NACDL and the FBI
employed here, which is re reviewing cases and exposing problems
and helping right these wrongs. Can't this model be applied
to other disciplines of junk science? It just seems so effective.
Then you're able to help so many people.
Speaker 3 (30:21):
As a result of the FBI hair Review and other
movements to make sure forensic science was more reliable for
the courtroom, there were plans in the Department of Justice
in the last administration to do similar reviews of other
pattern and matching disciplines, to take a historical look back
(30:44):
and see if in some other disciplines in the FBI
lab that were susceptible to similar errors, if similar errors
had occurred, and like the hair review, to find those
and identify them and provide notification and give a means
for folks to address those potential scientific overstatements.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
All right, So the way you say that evans when
you say there are were plans in the Department of
Justice to do this historical look back, makes me have
the sinking suspicion that maybe it didn't pan out.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
What happened that, along with several other plans, was rolled
back by then Attorney General Sessions. Under the new administration,
it has become a little harder. We have to be
extra vigilant when you're dealing with the situation where plans
for progress were abandoned. So while a lot of progress
(31:46):
has been made, there's a lot to be done. You know,
cases are still litigation. Cases still need to be litigated.
So yeah, the struggle continues.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
You might be listening to this wondering what you can
do to help. Thanks to the work that Vanessa is
doing with the NACDL, many individuals have been exonerated. But
being exonerated means moving from a life of injustice and
hardship in prison to another kind of very difficult life
outside of prison. Take for example, Drew Whitley. In nineteen
(32:24):
eighty nine, the manager of McDonald's was murdered in Pennsylvania.
Another McDonald's employee was there when the crime occurred. The
witness could not see the face of the perpetrator because
he was wearing a ski mask, but he claimed nonetheless
that the person that committed the crime had been Drew Whitley,
his neighbor. Investigators found a hair on a ski mask
(32:46):
which was found near the crime scene. They compared it
to Drew's hair and claimed that it matched Drew. Whitley
was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. After fighting
for years, Drew was finally able to get the hairs
from the crime I'm seeing tested for mitochondrial DNA. The
hairs did not belong to him, and he was exonerated
(33:06):
in two thousand and six. The trauma from his wrongful
conviction remains. He's always looking over his shoulder with the
constant and perhaps justified worry that a police officer will
bring him back to prison for no good reason at all.
Something that strikes me about a lot of these men
who have been convicted based on hair comparison evidence, like Drew, Whitley,
(33:29):
and Kirk Odom, is that many of them have shaved
their heads after their release. I can't help but to
wonder if it's because of this fear that someone will
find their hair where it shouldn't be and the nightmare
will begin all over again. After serving seventeen years for
a crime he didn't commit, dru was finally released, but
(33:51):
he didn't receive any compensation from the state. So here's
someone that lives a literal nightmare, struggling behind bars to
prove his innocence, and now he has to struggle to
survive on the outside. Right now, fifteen states in this
country don't offer any compensation to exonerreies. The thirty five
(34:12):
states that do differ widely in the amounts that they offer,
and it's often difficult to satisfy all of the procedural
requirements to qualify for the money. As you can imagine,
there are always loopholes, and the states often exploit them.
Money can't give back the years of someone's life that
they were robbed of, but compensation does help. It eases
(34:34):
an exneries path forward and healing and living a more
comfortable life. The Innocence Project is fighting to hold states
accountable for compensating wrongfully convicted individuals. Until all states enact
legislation to compensate the wrongly convicted, that fight will continue.
The Innocence Project has set up a fund to support exonreies.
(34:56):
The fund is currently expanding to cover those exoneries who
are facing job loss or economic hardships due to COVID nineteen.
You can donate to this fund by going to Innocenceproject
dot org slash Exonery dash Fund DASH twenty twenty. You
can also support the amazing work that the NACDL is
(35:18):
doing by donating to the NACDL Foundation for Criminal Justice.
You could find out more about that at NACDL dot org.
Next week, we'll explore the junk science of shoe print
(35:39):
and tire track evidence. Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
Company Number One. Thanks to our executive producer Jason Flahm
and the team at Signal Company Number One executive producer
Kevin Wartis and senior producers Karen Kornhaber and Britz Spangler.
(36:00):
Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow
me on Instagram at dubin Josh. Follow the Wrongful Conviction
podcast on Facebook and on Instagram at wrongful Conviction and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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