One day on the job and already dealing with civil unrest in Baltimore, Attorney General Loretta Lynch on Tuesday found herself on the receiving end of a high profile lobbying campaign launched by eight liberal lawmakers.
The group, which includes top Senate Judiciary Committee Democrat Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), is calling on Lynch to correct two decades of wrongs caused by FBI forensic teams’ systematically faulty testimony in hundreds of cases that resulted in convictions.
“Simply informing incarcerated individuals is not enough,” the Senators noted, adding that “as long as these prisoners face nearly insurmountable barriers to effectively challenging their convictions, the Department’s job is not done.“
They demanded the department immediately “consider every tool available” to assist those wrongly convicted that can still be helped, and “to strengthen the science and standards underpinning forensic science.”
Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Christopher Coons (D-Del.), and Al Franken (D-Minn.) joined Leahy in voicing their concerns about the programmatic errors, which were revealed last week in an FBI study.
The bureau discovered that in 268 cases involving forensic hair analysis, its agents gave unsound testimony that favored the prosecution in 95 percent of those trials, including dozens of death penalty proceedings that resulted in several executions.
The FBI’s review was initiated in 2012 following press reports that year, which alleged that the DOJ was aware of problems with the bureau’s approach to forensic analysis.
The FBI’s flaws in the lab and on the stand could still affect many more people, too. The Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers are assisting in the audit, which still has 1,200 cases left to examine. According to the Washington Post, in 700 cases, “prosecutors have not responded to requests for trials transcripts or other information.”
In their letter on Tuesday, Senators told the Justice Department to pursue those trial records with the same zeal it used to prosecute people.
“When the Bureau seeks information needed to convict a guilty individual, it rightly moves heaven and earth to achieve its goal,” they wrote. “The Bureau should be no less zealous in working to ensure that a conviction does not rest on unreliable or flawed evidence.”
