we have a story tonight about crime and unusually modern science in the late 1980s DNA testing brought a new level of scientific certainty to America's courtrooms convicting the guilty DNA evidence has helped put hundreds of violent criminals Behind Bars freeing the innocent DNA testing Prov they didn't do it and calling into question the forensic science that had sent many of them to prison in the first place the only physical evidence linking him to the murder has been discredited it's science but it's not as foolproof as you might think before DNA the criminal justice system had long relied on microscopic hair analysis A forensic technique whose impact is only beginning to become clear we started asking ourselves what do we [Music] know in 1981 Kirk odm saw how a few hairs could change a man's life I used to go jogging like every Sunday this particular Sunday morning as I was leaving out of the house the metrop police was knocking on the door the police had noticed odm a few weeks earlier when they were scouring the neighborhood for a suspect who broke into a woman's apartment and raped her at gunpoint the policeman said oh he looks a little bit like a composite sketch I saw of the rapist I told them that I was at home in bed and my moms can verify that but they didn't believe me the victim soon picked odm out of a lineup though her identification was called into question she only had a fleeting opportunity to see the perpetrator but the police had another piece of evidence a hair found on the victim's night gown they didn't give me any information they just wanted hair from my growing area they wanted hair from top of my head the police sent the hairs to the FBI's renowned crime lab there some of the nation's most experienced forensic scientists used high-powered microscopes to check more than a dozen characteristics from pigment distribution to scale patterns that told them whether a hair could have come from a suspect we would look at hairs all the time every day if you look at something every day routinely you get very good at noticing small differences Max ha would later join this Elite unit of hair and fiber experts some of the people that I worked with were fantastic they had such a Keen Eye such good discrimination they saw things that I just didn't think he could see the examiner's skills had been honed through Decades of scientific crime fighting at the bureau comparisons show that the standand of hair from the asent scalp is exactly the same as the hair of one suspect being held by police by the 1970s microscopic hair comparisons were an essential part of the the FBI Arsenal even a single hair May Supply evidence when odm's case came to trial in 1981 the FBI's analysis was clear it was explained to me that they matched the hair one hair was another the most important evidence came from the hair microscopists who said I can't say it's Unique but I can say the chances of it coming from anybody other than Kirk odm are small I could put myself in one of the Jewelers ples you know and say well yeah he must have did it it took just a few hours for the jury to convict odm he was sentenced to more than 20 years in prison 6 years into odm's prison term a revolutionary new technology burst onto the scene scientists say they can take one hair from a crime scene isolate its DNA and match it with a sample from a suspect at the FBI in one of the nation's foremost forensic Laboratories they're running extensive tests determining how the agency can take advantage of the new technology by the mid99s hair examined under a microscope at the FBI was often sent for a DNA test H remembers one day early on when he got a DNA report on two hairs his unit had found to be microscopically indistinguishable the results were jarring the hairs didn't come from the same individual um we start Ed talking about well what did we see why did we think it did match how good are we in a sense there's always that chance that you might be wrong you never really knew what that chance was H started tracking how often DNA showed that hairs that appeared microscopically indistinguishable actually came from different people and in 2002 published his results about 11% of the time mitochondrial DNA said no that hair actually came from someone else it kind of shook us up but it wasn't the only warning about the subjective nature of hair analysis which was also being done in state and city crime Labs across the country one FBI hair and fiber expert Michael Mone had already come under Fire Malone positively identified the victim's hair on a blanket a blanket that was never at the crime scene and scrutiny of other cases would follow now 12 years later the new DNA tests proved they're innocent if they stopped to think about it they would have known that what they were doing was scientifically invalid but no one did it just let it go since the early 90s Peter newfeld and the inocence project had been using DNA analysis to retest crime scene evidence in Old cases and free wrongly convicted prisoners and by 2012 the numbers were startling according to the Innocence Project nearly a quarter of the more than 300 people exonerated by DNA had been convicted in part by hair analysis so how did an accepted forensic technique lead to so many problems it's not like DNA where they can say one in 1.8 billion there aren't any statistics that's the essential dilemma that a hair examiner is in I can't put a number to it there was absolutely a disconnect between what I could say as a scientist and what the prosecutors or the defense attorneys wanted me to say while FBI lab reports typically stated that hair analysis wasn't a means of positive identification on the witness stand some examiners made it sound like it was by implying a near certain match or by using unsubstantiated statistics the manager of the Montana State Crime Lab testified there was a one in 10,000 chance that hairs found at the seam did not come from bromgard in Kirk odm's case the proc prosecutor explained that the FBI analyst had examined thousands of hairs during his long career and only rarely found hairs he couldn't tell apart if you have no numbers how can you use words like remote or extremely rare and that's what they were doing with great frequency saying things like uh I've worked a lot of cases or I've looked at thousands of hairs some of those phrases are the ones we were told to use and no one ever said don't say that that's not good science lay lawyers and lay judges and late jurors simply didn't understand it and accepted it as as God many jurors were primed to accept testimony about forensics like hair analysis having seen it used in crime fiction from Sherlock Holmes traces of on a few strands of hair to Modern TV dramas evenly distributed pigment granules same die job in other words both Ellen Wolf by 2012 hair evidence was making headlines for another reason three high-profile exonerations featured in a Washington Post investigation of flawed hair testimony and all three men had been convicted in part by hair analysis done by the FBI one of the men was Kirk Odum who had already served his entire sentence by the time he received the news three different crimes three different men all exonerated three different FBI examiners in fact in one of the three cases it was actually the chair of the FBI uh hair unit that's when the FBI began to really worry the FBI says it's now going through thousands of other cases from the days before DNA testing to see whether Witnesses or prosecutors exaggerated the significance of the FBI's hair analysis dozens of these people are currently on death row one execution was shut down hours before they were going to execute the man in Mississippi newfeld and the Innocence Project are working with the FBI in this Landmark review of more than 2500 cases I fully expect that in 90 to 95% of those cases the FBI will conclude that their own agents provided scientifically invalid erroneous testimonial even if that's the case it doesn't mean the convictions will be overturned other evidence may still uphold the original verdicts the FBI which wouldn't comment on newf feld's prediction says prosecutors and defense attorneys will review the evidence and help to determine if any other suspects were wrongfully convicted like Kirk odm who spent 22 years in prison I didn't get a chance to raise my daughter she barely knows me and that that really hurts DNA testing of the crime scene evidence not only exonerated odm it also led to another suspect who escaped prosecution because the statute of limitations had expired that man committed another sex offense just 2 weeks after odm was sentenced in each and every case where we've identified the real perpetrator with one exception okay he or she committed other serious violent crimes during those intervening years so you want to get it right and make it more scientific to make the system more reliable and ultimately more just it's that simple [Music] a