This article was produced in partnership with The Marshall Project. The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organisation that covers the US criminal justice systems. Sign up for their mailing list and follow them on Instagram. Gerald Delane Murray has watched as the case against him has crumbled over the past three decades, since Florida sentenced him to death for murder. DNA evidence was used by prosecutors to link
The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US legal justice system, collaborated to publish this article. Subscribe to their newsletters and follow them on Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram.
He has seen the case against Gerald Delane Murray fall apart in the three decades since Florida sentenced him to death row for murder. The state’s highest court twice threw out the DNA evidence that prosecutors used to connect him to the crime because it was handled but poorly. Murray admitted to the rape and murder, according to a jailhouse witness who later testified that he might have actually learned about the crime from watching” America’s Most Wanted.”
Murray and his attorneys then contend that the primary factor keeping him behind bars is a single piece of evidence: genital hair discovered at the scene of the crime. This is true after four separate trials and numerous appeals. Early in the 1990s, an FBI analyst examined the hair under a microscope and discovered that it was” consistent” with Murray’s hair, indicating that the two had some visual similarities. The agent testified at trial that it was “highly doubtful” that Murray’s hair came from someone else based on his experience.
Murray asserts, however, that this kind of testimony is absurd, and some scientists and attorneys concur. This is due to the fact that hair lacks the distinctive qualities necessary to distinguish a specific person, unlike DNA.
When I visited Murray in prison in remote Raiford, in north Florida, he told me that the scientific community believes it to be “beyond the bounds of science.”
Murray insists that he is not guilty. His attorneys are battling to get him a new trial, claiming that misleading and insufficient testimony was the basis for his conviction.
Murray remarked,” It comes down to a jailhouse rat and the micro hair analysis.” ” That’s it,” she said.
Because the case is still pending, a spokesman for the prosecution said they would n’t comment. They have previously claimed that Murray has previously had the opportunity to contest the hair evidence.
The use of “scientific evidence” to sentence people to prison for terrible crimes has come under increasing fire in courtrooms all over America. Blood-spatter patterns, arson analysis, bite-mark comparisons, and perhaps some fingerprint evidence have all proven to be unreliable.
The National Registry of Exonerations tracked 3,439 exoners, and 25 % of them involved fabricated or deceptive forensic evidence.
However, according to some experts, these exonerations are merely the beginning. Despite concerns about the criminal analysis of the evidence used against them, several more people are still in prison. When a field of forensics is questioned or perhaps discredited, cases are not always reopened. In hundreds of instances, hair analysts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation exaggerated their findings in reports and court testimony, according to government studies that have been under scrutiny for decades.
In 128 cases, according to a recent report by the exoneration registry, people were fraudulently convicted in part due to inaccurate hair analysis and testimony. The death penalty was given to fifteen of the defendants. Exonerees cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and lost nearly 2,000 years of their lives in prison. And there might be a lot more people behind bars who were found guilty based on hair-related evidence.
” I’m willing to hazard a guess that those 128 exonerees could represent between two and ten times as many wrongfully convicted people—because the process of exoneration is thus challenging.”
Simon Cole, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is the director of the registry and the study’s author, said,” I am inclined to speculate that—because the exoneration process is so difficult—those 128 exponerees could represent between two and ten times as many wrongfully convicted people.” He stated that many of them “are n’t ever going to be able to prove their innocence to the state’s satisfaction and become exonerated,” noting that it takes a lot of time, money, and legal assistance to overturn an order.
He advised reviewing every sentence involving hair analysis” to see what other evidence, if any, supported the conviction.”
The FBI, which conducted thousands of hair analyses, maintains that the method is accurate and that there were issues with inflated testimony. However, according to a spokeswoman, its policy since 2000 has restricted hair microscopy to initial screening that requires DNA support.
Nearly all of our bodies are covered in hair, from hardly perceptible peach fuzz to velvety locks, lanky mustaches, and wavy pubic strands. It sheds all the time. Up to 120, 000 hairs can be found on the regular individual head alone, and about 100 are lost each day. Hair loss can affect both people and clothing, which is why it is frequently used as evidence in criminal investigations.
According to a 2016 article in the Virginia Journal of Criminal Law, the second instance of hair use was in an 1855 US murder case. A cotton plantation manager in the Mississippi Delta was killed, and John Browning and his son were put on trial for it. The victim’s injuries included a broken neck. A rope that was tied into a harness and contained various blood drops and hairs was discovered after the Browning family’s home was searched. The victim’s hair appeared to match the color and length of the hairs, according to prosecution testimony. However, the Brownings were not found guilty by a state high court justice, according to the authors Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project and Tucker Carrington from the University of Mississippi Law School.
After the FBI published the 53-page” Microscopy of Hairs: A Practical Guide and Manual” identifying characteristics that can be used to compare hairs but are too little to see with the naked eye, the science of hair analysis advanced in the late 1970s. Agents underwent a year of training to learn how to distinguish between hairs found at crime scenes and samples taken from suspects. The agents claimed to be able to distinguish between an animal and a mortal strand by looking at traits like pigment distribution and structure. The person’s race, the area of the body where the hair originated, and whether it was pulled, cut, or fell out were additional factors that contributed to the creation of crime narratives.
Hair analysis was” not a good means of personal identification,” according to the manual. However, it also stated that it was uncommon for analysts to be unable to distinguish between two hairs when they were randomly selected from a population of people.
Legal experts claim that the manual omitted the fact that there have never been any clinical studies to demonstrate whether three, 300, or three million people share the same hair characteristics. Perhaps the hairs on a person’s head can vary; for instance, the black hair on his crown may look different from the gray hair at his temples. However, before the year 2000, hair microscopy played a significant role in more than 20,000 cases and resulted in innumerable convictions.
For decades, FBI agents trained hundreds of state and regional hair examiners in hair analysis, prompting worries that thousands more cases may have been tainted by false hair testimony.
In the 1990s, the “science” of micro hair analysis began to fall apart, and not only because DNA analysis entered the picture. Frederick Whitehurst, an FBI chemist, began writing down his worries about the crime lab’s shoddy work and working conditions. One of the most famous hair experts was hired by a Justice Department task force in 1999 to examine his work. They examined more than 150 cases and discovered issues with 96 % of them, some of which led to death sentences.
The review concentrated on cases from before 2000, when the FBI began using micro hair analysis in addition to mitochondrial DNA testing. This DNA analysis does n’t reveal a specific person, but it does reveal information about distant relatives. A significant report on the state of forensics was published in 2009 by the National Academy of Sciences, which emphasized” no medical support” for using DNA-free hair comparisons.
The Washington Post conducted an investigation in 2012 and discovered that the FBI did n’t frequently share its information with defense attorneys, despite the Justice Department’s review of its lab work. Yet after DNA tests cleared two men who had been found guilty in part based on testimony from various FBI hair analysts, the review did not include all of the task force’s work, according to a critical inspection conducted in 2014 by the inspector general.
The Innocence Project, a nonprofit constitutional organization, was co-founded by Peter Neufeld, who wanted to know how many cases had been tainted by poor hair testimony. In order to review FBI cases involving hair microscopy, he asked the FBI, Department of Justice, and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to work with his organization.
Following that review, the FBI made headlines by releasing a press release in 2015 acknowledging that almost all of the 28 examiners in the agency’s hair and fiber unit had provided unreliable testimony in almost all 268 convictions that had undergone scrutiny. Thirty-three of the defendants had received death sentences. Five people died while incarcerated from various causes, and nine had been put to death.
The announcement was referred to by legal experts as” a boundary in one of the nation’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of national courts for decades to keep false medical information from juries.”
In a letter to every governor, FBI Director James Comey requested assistance in gathering transcripts from prosecutors in cases where bureau hair examiners testified. Governors were likewise urged by Comey to support state and regional labs in keeping their FBI-trained examiners within the purview of science. Because there are n’t studies that show how many people have identical-looking hair fibers, Comey wrote,” Hair is not like fingerprints.” He emphasized the significance of making sure there “are n’t other innocent people in jail based on our work” in light of a string of DNA exonerations in cases involving hair analysis.
According to the exoneration registry, just 17 states attempted to conduct those reviews.
A source recently sent me a nine-gigabyte thumb drive that contained thousands of reports, papers, historical records, and criminal cases where micro hair analysis was used to influence convictions. I’ve spent hours reading through those pages and speaking with legal professionals who are comfortable with the cases. That gradually brought me to Gerald Murray.
Murray claims that on a September morning in 1990, while he was dozing off at his mother’s Jacksonville, Florida, home, Alice Vest was discovered dead and dressed, draped across her bed. According to his report, the 59-year-old woman had been stabbed more than 20 times, raped, and strangled to death with a curling iron cord that was also wrapped around her when the coroner examined her wounds.
Vest had spent the day shopping and drinking cocktails with her friend Linda Engler, according to a police report. According to Vest’s obituary, she was described as an attending church grandmother who oversaw the office of an accounting firm. That evening at 10:30, Vest called Engler to let her know that she had made it home safely. On Saturday morning, they were scheduled to speak once more.
Vest did n’t pick up the phone when Engler called.
According to police reports, someone broke the phone wires in Vest’s carport in the middle of the night and entered her house through a kitchen window. She had been attacked with anything an intruder could get her hands on, including a knife, scissors, candleholder, shattered liquor bottles, belts, and metal bars. Vest’s purse was strewn across the floor in the den, and some of her jewelry was missing, including a necklace that Engler claimed she had worn her entire life.
Detectives were directed to Murray and Steven Taylor, both in their early 20s, months afterwards by an anonymous phone call. Witnesses claimed that on the night of the murder, the men were up at the Corner Pocket, a neighborhood pool hall. Around midnight, a friend dropped them off close to Vest’s house on the exact street.
Criminal evidence presented by the prosecution matched Taylor to the victim’s close-by semen on a blouse. Taylor was found guilty of first-degree murder, burglary, and intimate battery by the jury. He was given a death row sentence on December 9, 1991, and he is still there.
Murray’s case has always been more nuanced.
Genital hair discovered on Vest’s body and on a white nightgown served as the state lynchpin. Murray’s pubic hair samples were examined by an analyst at the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, and it was found that they were minutely consistent with hairs present.
Murray was charged by a Florida great jury on April 9, 1992.
He escaped from the Duval County Jail seven months afterwards by crawling through an air conditioning duct. Before being apprehended again, he fled to Las Vegas and lived there for more than six months.
According to Slate, Bernie de la Rionda, who is on his way to becoming one of” America’s Deadliest Prosecutors,” claimed that Murray and Taylor had been working together when they broke in and tortured Vest during their 1994 trial. Murray, however, “attempted to be smarter than Taylor” by failing to leave his semen behind.
” After you consider all the evidence, you will only have one decision to make, and that will be the defendant is innocent of first-degree murder, burglary,” De la Rionda declared, adding that he was certain Murray was the murderer.
Jury members concurred.
DiZinno was questioned about the statistical likelihood that someone else might have hair with Murray-like characteristics during Murray’s 2003 retrial. DiZinno replied,” We ca n’t say what the probability is, but what I can say is that, based on my experience, it’s uncommon to be unable to distinguish between microscopic hair characteristics from two different individuals by side-by-side comparison.”
What did he mean by the word “rare”? DiZinno remarked,” I can recall perhaps once or twice in the eight years that I compared hairs and could n’t tell one from another.” ” That entails examining hundreds of cases and tens of thousands of hairs.” Therefore, that is where unusual originates.
Additionally, he affirmed that “hair comparisons are certainly a method of total positive identification.”
In 2008, DiZinno left his position as FBI crime lab director. He is currently 70 years older, residing in Virginia, teaching forensics at George Mason University, and working as a consultant in the field. He told me he had worked as a dentist before selling his business to pursue his dream of working for the FBI in 1986 when we spoke on the phone next June.
He investigated bank robberies, kidnappings, and extortions for three years before moving to the crime lab to complete his hair and fiber analysis training. He was given an evidence box in 1991 that contained comparison samples of head and pubic hairs taken from Gerald Murray as well as hair samples from the Vest murder investigation.
I questioned DiZinno about the veracity of his testimony during Murray’s trials. He informed me,” That is what I said and what we knew at the time.” ” Obviously, if mitochondrial DNA had been available to us at the time, I would have preferred to have it to confirm that.”
The prosecutor might never want you to say this, but I would often insist that it be kept in mind that hair comparisons cannot be used to identify a person personally.
The prosecutor may not want you to say this, but I would generally work in that it should be remembered that hair comparisons are certainly a means of personal identification, DiZinno said in his testimony.
But, jurors might not have understood that warning. Cole, the director of the exoneration registry, claimed that one of his study’s key findings was that cautions about the limitations of hair analysis were irrelevant. He claimed that even when the testimony was properly phrased, it helped convict innocent people. ” I suspect that this is because the jury assumed that the evidence must have been strong evidence of guilt, even though the expert avoided saying that directly,” when an expert witness testified that they were using science and the defendant’s evidence.
Numerous instances where hair imaging tipped the scales of justice were described in the registry’s report, frequently in conjunction with cultural bias, false confessions, false testimony from jailhouse snitches, and misidentified witnesses.
Many of the wrongdoings are similar to those of Anthony Broadwater, who was released from prison in 2021 after serving 16 years for the rape of Alice Sebold, a college student who wrote the memoir” Lucky” about her attack and the best-selling book and film” The Lovely Bones.” A genital hair taken from Broadwater after the assault was the only tangible proof used to convict her, who Sebold had misidentified. According to the registry’s review of the court transcripts, an FBI crime lab specialist compared it to pubic hairs pulled from Broadwater and found that they were” consistent” with being from the same person.
Prosecutors dismissed his conviction due to documented issues with the hair comparison and a police lineup. Broadwater filed a lawsuit against New York State, claiming that his unjust imprisonment was the result of police and legal misconduct. The state agreed to pay Broadwater$ 5.5 million in a settlement reached in March 2023.
According to the report, the defendant was Black in more than half of hair-related exonerations. Due to the lack of laws in 12 states that offer compensation for people who have been wrongfully convicted, a fourth of the 40 exonerees listed in the report have not been paid for their years spent in prison.
The Justice Department sent numerous prosecutors letters in 2013 as it was reviewing FBI hair testimony, informing them that statements made in the micro hair comparison analysis testimony or lab report in their case “exceeded the limits of science” and were thus irrelevant. The letter stated,” We ask that you decide what steps your office should take in light of this error.”
De la Rionda responded to the Justice Department after receiving a letter regarding DiZinno’s testimony, stating that the state continues to oppose Murray’d efforts to have the trial rescheduled. Even if the conclusions were proven, they do n’t warrant post-conviction relief, he wrote, adding that the prosecution disagreed with the DOJ’s conclusions. Despite retiring in 2018, de la Rionda is also pursuing Murray’s case, according to court documents. Requests for comment were never answered by him. Alice Vest, the victim’s daughter, did n’t either.
The Florida Supreme Court concurred with the prosecution that Muarray had previously had the opportunity to contest DiZinno’s testimony and that, in accordance with Florida law, an acquittal at retrial was not warranted by an FBI review of his testimony. The court noted that the FBI continues to use hair microscopy in a 2018 decision, stating that its actual science has not been discredited.
The Florida Supreme Court, according to Chris Fabricant, an Innocence Project attorney who just published a book about the legacy of junk science in the criminal justice system, “is improper on science, and right on the law.” According to him, the provincial government has publicly acknowledged that minuscule hair analysis should be regarded as “false evidence.”
Murray claimed that the revelations since his most recent trial in 2003 prove the hair analysis to be false when I visited him while he was on death row.
He sat across from me at a conference table in an empty room with violet cinder block walls while wearing an orange prison suit and chains. He recapped the reasons the Florida Supreme Court overturned his initial ruling, including worries about the accuracy of the DNA testing process and sample contamination. Before his next hearing, which resulted in a mistrial, the state underwent another DNA test, according to Murray. With that test, there were concerns about the evidence’s chain of custody as well as contamination once more. The past DNA evidence was rejected by the courts in the fourth and fifth trials because it had been handled so poorly.
Murray requested a second trial from the district court in September of last year, citing recently discovered evidence, including an FBI-hired risk management firm’s report on the reasons behind erroneous hair testimony. Murray stated in an email that he thought the FBI officials “turned a blind eye” and covered up their misconduct because they knew it would have an impact on earlier and recent cases.
The FBI noted that the most recent review “found no evidence of malicious intent on the part of examiners who made errors in reports or testimony,” despite the report’s findings that hair analysts lacked sufficient guidance on how to testify properly.
A judge will hear a motion to commute Murray’s sentence in part based on recently discovered evidence, the attorneys for Murray stated in an email.
Murray wrote in an email to me,” The juries were not informed about the issues with microscopic hair analysis and how the FBI themselves had repeatedly gotten their “matches” bad. He wrote,” All the juries heard was how the best law enforcement organization in the world was able to say that hairs were consistent with coming from me.” What would you consider if you were a juror? The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the US legal justice system, collaborated to publish this article. Subscribe to their newsletters and follow them on Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, and Instagram. He has observed the case against Gerald Delane Murray fall apart in the three decades since Florida sentenced him to death for murder. Prosecutors linked DNA evidence
This article was produced in partnership with The Marshall Project. The Marshall Project is a nonprofit news organisation that covers the US criminal justice systems. Sign up for their mailing list and follow them on Instagram. Gerald Delane Murray has watched as the case against him has crumbled over the past three decades, since Florida sentenced him to death for murder. DNA evidence was used by prosecutors to link
Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.. This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletters, and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook.. In the three decades since Florida sent Gerald Delane Murray to death row for murder, he has watched the case against him crumble. DNA evidence prosecutors used to link him to the crime was handled so badly that the state’s highest court threw it out—twice. A jailhouse witness who testified that Murray confessed to the rape and murder later said he may really have learned about the crime from watching “America’s Most Wanted.”. Now, after four separate trials and multiple appeals, Murray and his lawyers argue that the main thing keeping him behind bars is a single piece of evidence: pubic hair found at the scene of the crime. Back in the early 1990s, an FBI analyst looked at the hair under a microscope and found it “consistent” with Murray’s, meaning the hairs shared some visual characteristics. At trial, the agent said that in his experience, it was “highly unlikely” that the hair came from someone other than Murray.. But Murray says—and many scientists and lawyers agree—that this kind of testimony is nonsense. That’s because hair, unlike DNA, doesn’t have enough unique characteristics to identify a particular person.. “The scientific community says it’s ‘beyond the limits of science,’” Murray told me when I visited him in prison in rural Raiford, in northern Florida.. Murray maintains he’s innocent. His lawyers are fighting to get him a new trial, arguing that his conviction hinged on flawed and false testimony.. “It comes down to the microscopic hair analysis and a jailhouse rat,” Murray said. “That’s it.”. A spokesman for the prosecutors said they wouldn’t comment because the litigation is active. In the past, they have argued that Murray has already had the chance to challenge the hair evidence.. In courtrooms across America, “scientific evidence” used to imprison people for heinous crimes has been increasingly discredited. Blood-spatter patterns, arson analysis, bite-mark comparisons, even some fingerprint evidence have all turned out to be unreliable.. A quarter of the 3,439 exonerations tracked by the National Registry of Exonerations involved false or misleading forensic evidence.. But these exonerations are only the tip of the iceberg, some experts say. Many more people remain incarcerated despite questions about the forensic analysis of evidence used against them. Cases are not automatically reopened when a field of forensics is questioned or even discredited. That’s true of hair analysis, which has been under scrutiny for decades: Government studies have found that in hundreds of cases, hair analysts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation exaggerated their findings in reports and court testimony.. A new report by the exoneration registry found 128 cases in which people were falsely convicted at least partly because of flawed hair analysis and testimony. Fifteen of the defendants were sentenced to die. Exonerees lost almost 2,000 years of their lives in prison and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. And there may be many more people behind bars who were convicted because of bad hair evidence.. “I am willing to speculate that—because the process of exoneration is so difficult—those 128 exonerees could represent between two and 10 times as many wrongly convicted people.”. “I am willing to speculate that—because the process of exoneration is so difficult—those 128 exonerees could represent between two and 10 times as many wrongly convicted people,” said Simon Cole, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, who is the director of the registry and an author of the study. Many of them “aren’t ever going to be able to prove their innocence to the state’s satisfaction and become exonerated,” he said, noting that overturning a verdict requires very persuasive evidence, such as DNA, and a lot of time, money, and legal help.. All sentences that involved hair analysis should be reviewed, he said, “to see what other evidence, if any, supported the conviction.”. The FBI, which did thousands of hair analyses, continues to say that the technique is valid, and that problems involved exaggerated testimony. But its policy since 2000 has limited the use of hair microscopy to preliminary screening that must be backed up by DNA, a spokeswoman said.. From barely visible peach fuzz to velvety locks, wiry mustaches, and curly pubic strands, hair covers almost all of our bodies. It’s constantly shedding. The average human head alone contains as many as 120,000 hairs and loses about 100 a day. As hair falls out, it can transfer to people and clothing, which is why it so often becomes evidence in crime investigations.. The first reported use of hair in a US murder case was in 1855, according to a 2016 article in the Virginia Journal of Criminal Law. John Browning and his son were tried for the murder of a cotton plantation manager in the Mississippi Delta, whose injuries included a broken neck. A search of the Browning home revealed a rope tied into a noose containing several drops of blood and a few hairs. Prosecutors presented evidence that the hairs appeared to match the color and length of the victim’s hair. But according to the authors, Chris Fabricant of the Innocence Project and Tucker Carrington of the University of Mississippi Law School, a state supreme court justice found the evidence insufficient, and the Brownings weren’t convicted.. The science of hair analysis ascended in the late 1970s after the FBI published the 53-page “Microscopy of Hairs: A Practical Guide and Manual,” identifying characteristics—too small to see with the naked eye—that can be used to compare hairs. Agents trained for a year to learn how to discern the differences and similarities among hairs collected at crime scenes and samples plucked from suspects. By examining characteristics like pigment distribution and structure, the agents could purportedly determine whether a strand came from an animal or a human. Other characteristics helped form narratives about a crime: the person’s race, the area of the body where the hair originated, and whether it was pulled, cut, or fell out.. The manual said hair analysis was “not a positive means of personal identification.” But it also said that when two hairs were randomly selected from a population of people, it was rare that analysts couldn’t tell them apart.. What the manual didn’t say is that there have never been any scientific studies to show whether three, 300, or 3 million people have the same hair characteristics, legal experts say. Even the hairs on a person’s head can vary—the grays on a man’s temples, for example, look different from the black hairs on his crown. Still, hair microscopy became instrumental in more than 20,000 cases before the year 2000 and led to countless convictions.. For decades, FBI agents gave two-week hair-analysis training courses to hundreds of state and local hair examiners, raising concerns that flawed hair testimony may have tainted thousands more cases.. The “science” of microscopic hair analysis started unraveling in the 1990s, and not just because DNA analysis emerged on the scene. An FBI chemist, Frederick Whitehurst, started documenting his concerns about sloppy work and poor conditions in the agency’s crime lab. In 1999, a Justice Department task force hired independent experts to scrutinize the work of one of its most prolific hair experts. They reviewed more than 150 cases and found problems with 96% of them, including some that resulted in death penalties.. The review focused on cases before 2000 when the FBI started using mitochondrial DNA testing in addition to microscopic hair analysis. This DNA analysis doesn’t identify an individual but provides information about common relatives. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences released a landmark report on the state of forensics, emphasizing “no scientific support” for using hair comparisons without DNA.. Despite the Justice Department’s review of the FBI’s lab work, a 2012 investigation by The Washington Post found that the task force didn’t often share its information with defense lawyers. Nor did the review expand to all the FBI lab’s hair work, even after DNA tests exonerated two men who had been convicted in part by testimony from different FBI hair analysts, according to a scathing review of the task force’s work by the inspector general’s office in 2014.. Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization, wanted to know how many cases had been tainted by bad hair testimony. So he asked the FBI, Department of Justice, and National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to collaborate with his organization to review FBI cases involving hair microscopy.. After that review, the FBI made headlines with a 2015 press release admitting that nearly every examiner in the agency’s 28-person hair and fiber unit had given flawed testimony in almost all the 268 convictions that had been scrutinized. Thirty-three of the defendants had been sentenced to death. Nine had been executed, and five died of other causes while in prison.. Legal analysts called the announcement “a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries.”. FBI Director James Comey issued a letter asking every governor for help collecting transcripts from prosecutors in cases where bureau hair examiners testified. Comey also asked governors to encourage state and local labs to ensure their FBI-trained examiners were staying within the bounds of science. “Hair is not like fingerprints,” Comey wrote, “because there aren’t studies that show how many people have identical-looking hair fibers.” In light of a series of DNA exonerations in cases involving hair analysis, he expressed the importance of making sure there “aren’t other innocent people in jail based on our work.”. Only 17 states tried to do those reviews, according to the exoneration registry.. A few years ago, a source sent me a nine-gigabyte thumb drive containing thousands of reports, papers, historical documents, and criminal cases in which microscopic hair analysis played a role in convictions. I’ve spent hours combing through those pages and interviewing legal experts familiar with the cases. Eventually, that led me to Gerald Murray.. Murray says he was asleep at his mother’s house in Jacksonville, Florida, on a September morning in 1990 when a neighbor, Alice Vest, was found lifeless and naked, draped across her bed. The 59-year-old woman had been stabbed more than 20 times, raped, and strangled to death with a curling-iron cord, which was still wrapped around her when the coroner examined her wounds, according to his report.. Vest, whose obituary described her as a church-going grandmother who managed an accounting firm’s office, had spent the day shopping and sipping cocktails with her friend Linda Engler, according to a police report. Vest called Engler at 11:30 that night to let her know that she’d arrived home safely. They were supposed to speak again early on Saturday morning.. Engler called, but Vest didn’t pick up.. In the middle of the night, someone had cut the phone wires in Vest’s carport with a pair of garden shears and crept into her home through a kitchen window, police reports said. She’d been attacked with anything an intruder could grab: a knife, scissors, a candleholder, broken liquor bottles, belts, a metal bar. The contents of Vest’s purse were spilled across the floor in the den, and some of her jewelry was missing, including a necklace with a gold coin pendant that Engler said she’d always worn.. Months later, an anonymous phone call led detectives toward Murray and Steven Taylor, both in their early 20s. Witnesses said the men had been together at a local pool hall called the Corner Pocket on the night of the murder. Around midnight, a friend dropped them off near Murray’s house, on the same street as Vest’s home.. Prosecutors presented forensic evidence matching Taylor to semen on a blouse near the victim. The jury found Taylor guilty of all charges: first-degree murder, burglary, and sexual battery. On December 9, 1991, he was sentenced to death row, where he remains.. The case against Murray was always more complicated.. The state’s lynchpin was pubic hair found on Vest’s body and on a white nightgown. An analyst named Joseph DiZinno at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, had examined samples of Murray’s pubic hairs and determined that they were microscopically consistent with hairs at the scene.. On April 9, 1992, a Florida grand jury indicted Murray.. Seven months later, he crawled through an air conditioning duct and escaped from the Duval County Jail. He fled to Las Vegas, where he lived for more than half a year before being recaptured.. In opening remarks at Murray’s 1994 trial, Bernie de la Rionda—on his way to becoming one of “America’s Deadliest Prosecutors,” according to Slate—said that Murray and Taylor had been working together when they broke into Vest’s home and tortured her. But Murray “attempted to be smarter than Taylor” by not leaving his semen at the scene.. De la Rionda said he was confident Murray was the killer: “After you consider all the evidence, you will have but one decision to make, and that will be the defendant is guilty of first-degree murder, of burglary, and of sexual battery.”. The jury agreed.. At Murray’s 2003 retrial, DiZinno was asked about the statistical probability that someone else might have hair with characteristics similar to Murray’s. “We can’t say what the probability is,” DiZinno answered, “but what I can say is, based on my experience, it’s rare that we cannot distinguish between microscopic characteristics of hair from two different individuals by side-by-side comparison.”. How did he define the term rare? “I can remember maybe once or twice in the eight years that I compared hairs that I couldn’t distinguish between hairs from two different individuals,” DiZinno said. “That’s looking at hundreds of cases, thousands and thousands of hairs. So that’s where rare comes from.”. He also testified that “hair comparings are not a means of absolute positive identification.”. DiZinno retired in 2008 as director of the FBI crime lab. Today, he’s 70 years old, living in Virginia, teaching forensics at George Mason University, and doing forensic consulting work. When we spoke on the phone last June, he told me he’d had a career as a dentist before selling his practice to follow his dream of becoming an FBI agent, which he did in 1986.. He spent three years investigating bank robberies, kidnappings, and extortions, then transferred to the crime lab, where he trained to be a hair and fiber analyst. In 1991, he received an evidence box containing hairs from the Vest murder investigation and comparison samples of head and pubic hairs plucked from Gerald Murray.. I asked DiZinno if he stood by his testimony in Murray’s trials. “That is what I said at the time; that’s what we knew at the time,” he told me. “Obviously, I would have rather had mitochondrial DNA to confirm that, if it had been available to us then.”. “The prosecutor may not want you to say this, but I would always work in that it should be remembered that hair comparisons are not a means of personal identification.”. DiZinno said that he consistently provided an important caveat in his testimony: “The prosecutor may not want you to say this, but I would always work in that it should be remembered that hair comparisons are not a means of personal identification.”. That caution might have been lost on jurors, however. Cole, the exoneration registry director, said one of the major findings of his study was that warnings about the limitations of hair analysis didn’t matter. “Even when the testimony was carefully phrased, it contributed to the conviction of innocent people,” he said. “I suspect that this is because the appearance on the stand of an expert witness, who said they were using science and the evidence implicated the defendant, led the jury to think that the evidence must have been powerful evidence of guilt, even if the expert avoided saying that explicitly.”. The registry’s report details dozens of cases where hair microscopy helped tip the scales of justice—often in combination with racial bias, deceptive testimony from jailhouse snitches, false confessions, and mistaken witness identification.. Many of the wrongful convictions resemble that of Anthony Broadwater, exonerated in 2021 after spending 16 years in prison for the rape of a college student, Alice Sebold—author of the memoir “Lucky,” about her attack, as well as “The Lovely Bones,” the bestselling novel and movie. The only physical evidence used to convict Broadwater, whom Sebold misidentified, was a pubic hair collected from her after the assault. An FBI crime lab specialist compared it to pubic hairs tugged from Broadwater, and determined that they were “consistent” with being from the same person, according to the registry’s review of the court transcripts.. Documented problems with the hair comparison and a police lineup prompted prosecutors to vacate his conviction. Broadwater sued New York State, contending police and prosecutorial misconduct led to his wrongful imprisonment. In a March 2023 settlement, the state agreed to pay Broadwater $5.5 million.. In more than half of hair-related exonerations, the defendant was Black, according to the report. A third of the exonerees listed in the report — 40 people — haven’t received a penny for their years lost in prison, because a dozen states do not have laws that provide compensation for wrongfully convicted people.. In 2013, as the Justice Department was reviewing FBI hair testimony, the agency sent many prosecutors letters notifying them that the microscopic hair comparison analysis testimony or lab report in their case included statements that “exceeded the limits of science,” and were therefore invalid. “We ask that you determine the actions your office should take in light of this error,” the letter said.. After receiving a letter about DiZinno’s testimony, De la Rionda responded to the Justice Department, saying that the state continues to oppose Murray’s efforts to get a new trial. Prosecutors disagreed with the DOJ’s findings, he wrote, but “even if the conclusions were proven, they don’t warrant post-conviction relief.” De la Rionda retired in 2018 but is still prosecuting Murray’s case, according to court filings. He did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did the daughter of the victim, Alice Vest.. The Florida Supreme Court agreed with prosecutors that Muarray had already had the chance to challenge DiZinno’s testimony, and that the FBI review of his work wasn’t strong enough to produce an acquittal at retrial, as Florida law requires. In a 2018 ruling, the court said that the underlying science of hair microscopy has not been discredited, noting that it is still used by the FBI.. Chris Fabricant, an Innocence Project lawyer who recently wrote a book about the legacy of junk science in the criminal justice system, said the Florida Supreme Court “is wrong on science, and wrong on the law.” The federal government has publicly conceded that microscopic hair analysis should be treated as “false evidence,” he said.. When I visited Murray on death row, he said the revelations since his last trial in 2003 show the hair analysis is bogus.. Wearing an orange prison suit and shackles, he sat across from me at a conference table in a windowless room with blue cinder block walls. He recapped why the Florida Supreme Court reversed his first sentence: concerns about the validity of the way the DNA was tested and contamination of the sample. The state did another DNA test before his second hearing, which ended in a mistrial, Murray said. With that test, there were questions about the chain of custody of the evidence, and again, contamination. In the third and fourth trials, courts excluded the previous DNA evidence because it had been so mishandled.. Last September, Murray asked the district court for a fifth trial, citing newly discovered evidence, including a report from a risk management company hired by the FBI to analyze the causes of flawed hair testimony. In an email, Murray told me that he believes the report shows that the FBI officials“turned a blind eye,” and concealed its misconduct because they knew it would affect prior and current cases.. The FBI acknowledged in a press release the report’s findings that hair analysts didn’t have enough guidance on how to testify accurately, but noted that the latest review “found no evidence of malicious intent on the part of examiners who made errors in reports or testimony.”. Murray’s lawyers said in an email, a judge will hear a motion to vacate his sentence partly based on newly discovered evidence.. “The juries were never told about the problems with microscopic hair analysis and how the FBI themselves had gotten their ‘matches’ wrong multiple times,” Murray wrote in an email to me. “All the juries heard was how the top law enforcement agency in the world was able to say that hairs were consistent with coming from me,” he wrote. “What would you think as a juror?”
