In the Casey Anthony trial. In fact there is no nationl standard for any forensic testimony. The judge allowed in the smell test when it comes to death . And it had never been allowed in a court. And what about getting certified in forensics . You can do that online. If you want a certificate that says you are certified in forensics, this is the place to go to. Tonight ofrontline, correspondent Lowell Bergman joins with propublica in an investigation of one of the increasingly controversial tools of the criminal Justice SystemForensic Science. There is something that people need to understand about bad Expert Witness testimony and bad science it doesnt just put innocent people in jail, it leaves murderers on the street. Frontline is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. And by the corporation for public broadcasting. Major support for frontline is provided by the john d. And catherine t. Macarthur foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information is available at macfound. Org. Additional funding is provided by the park foundation, dedicated to heightening Public Awareness of critical issues. And by tfrontline journalism fund, with a grant from millicent bell, through the millicent and eugene bell foundation. Bergmacsi is the most watched drama series in the world, brimming with flash and glamour, where cuttingedge Forensic Technology always reveals the truth. siren wailing but Crime Scene Investigations in the real world are rarely so simple. on radio go ahead. County 51, can you advise the tow yard thats housing the 187 vehicle from the ninth . Case number 275. 104, you there . Negative. I need to know so i can. 104, give me just a momen. Im finishing up with a spanish interpreter. Bergman detective Joanna Grivetti leads the Crime Scene Investigation unit for the Police Department in richmond, california, one of the most dangerous cities in america. Everyone thinks that when you tell them that youre a csi, that youre like what they see on tv. The real csi is dealing with blood, getting dirty underneath a car, smelling things that you dont want to smell, seeing things that you dont want to see. You see the worst that humans are capable of doing to one another. Theres evidence that needs to be collected, domemented, processed. Its about taking the time to find the small things that are going to wind up being a big thing down the road. Bergman things like fingerprints one of the most widely used of all forensic techniques. For over a century, fingerprints have been used to identify criminals, from petty thieves to international terrorists. explosion, people shouting second explosion, screaming third explosion in 2004, a series of explosions in the subways of madrid killed or injured nearly 2,000 people. When the dust settled, the spanish authorities found several partial fingerprints on a bag of detonators. Now, at the time, the Spanish National police did not identify anybody to those prints, so they sent the prints to interpol, who then forwarded them to the fbi. Bergman melissa gische is a fingerprint expert at the legendary Fbi Laboratory in quantico, virginia. The examiner analyzed the prints. He ran them through the system. And in this case, the examiner found a match. Yes, in this case the examiner effected an identification. Bergman the fbis identification led them to a suburb of portland, oregon, where a young attorney was working in his office. I got an unexpected knock on the door. I cracked the door open and there was two individuals, a man and a woman, and they identified themselves quickly that they were fbi agents. Bergman the fbi examiner determined that this fingerprint found in madrid matched a print taken from Brandon Mayfield when he was in the military. They proceeded to push through rather forcefully, to handcuff me. It was just unbelievable. It was surreal. I mean one minute youre sitting there and youve taken your kids to school and youve said, have a good day and be a learning superstar, and youre working on your case in your office, and the next minute youre heading downtown in cuffs and people are searching you for blasting caps and detonators. Bergman for generations, the fbi and their fingerprint examiners have maintained that fingerprint identification is infallible. Routinely testifying that they are one hundred percent certain. And theres zero percent chance they could be wrong. Fingerprint examiners have been taught that theres only one person in the world who could have lefththis fingerprint. Theres no scientific basis for that. Wait a second. Theres no scientific basis for matching, like a partial fingerprint . The premise is that no two people have the same fingerprint. Thats the scientific premise. Is that true . I thought so. Has there ever been a Scientific Study to demonstrate that that is true . I dont think so. But even more important, how much alike do they have to be before you say that that fingerprint came from this person . What is the standard for how many points of comparison . What is the standard, judge . It varies from laboratory to laboratory and from witness to witness, often. And some will say, we need 16 points. No, seven. And what they all end up saying is that its really a matter of the individual experience and judgment of the fingerprint examiner. Bergman to make an identification, the fingerprint collected at the crime scene is examined for unique characteristics like ridges, loops and whorls. Those points are then compared with a known print. Once the examiner believes there are enough points of similarity, he declares it a match. Welcome to forensic identification. Papers a very good object to get prints from letters, bags. Bergman ken moses is a veteran fingerprint examiner who has investigated more than 17,000 crime scenes in his 40year career. I can see a lot of detail on those prints. When youre looking at this partial print versus the known print, when do you decide that its a match . How do you decide its a match . At some point, you are examining this evidence, and based on your training and experience, you make a leap of faith. You make a leap of faith . Its a point of decision making. Its where you go from doubt to no doubt. Thats a leap of faith. Bergman after mayfield was identified, the fbi learned he was a muslim, active in his community, which he maintains led to his arrest. Mayfield insisted he was not a terrorist and had never been to spain. The only evidence against him was that partial fingerprint. But at the Fbi Laboratory in quantico, the print was matched by a second examiner and then confirmed by the head of the fbis fingerprint unit. So three examiners would say that this was Brandon Mayfields fingerprint. In this case they did, yes. And i believe they provided an affidavit saying it was 100 . That is how they did testify, in that manner, yes. on radio a portland, oregon, man has been arrested by fbi agents. Officials are detaining mayfield in the county jail. Mayfields fingerprint was found on a plastic bag with bombrelated materials. He could be held indefinitely. It was a nightmare. You know, when youre there in your jail cell, alone, and youre just faced with your. Your own thoughts. Thats when the gravity of the situation really sunk in. Okay, so youre in the lockup, they say that youre a 100 match. Your lawyers get a fingerprint examiner, right . Yes. The one hope was that this fingerprint examiner would straighten it all out and wouldnt agree with these other three examiners whod said this is a 100 conclusive match. I received a call from portland a request which i get many times a week, to take a look at a print. Bergman ken moses was selected as the independent expert in the mayfield case. I didnt know what finger they had identified. So i had ten possibilities. So i started with the thumb, went to the index, went to the middle. No, no, no, no, no, no, boom. I come up with one, ah here is one with a couple of similarities, a couple of more, a couple of more. By the time i got to 15, i said, this looks like an identification. So then you got on the phone with the court, right . Thats right. And you testified. And what did you tell them on the phone . I said, ive examined the known print and concluded that the fingerprint is a positive match. Thats what i told them. He actually confirmed what the other three examiners had said. And from that point on, i kind of felt like the train to a Death Penalty had just pulled out of the station. Bergman mayfield says his own lawyers assumed that the print was his. Two weeks into his detention, he had to decide whether he would testify or exercise his right to remain silent. I was going to go to the hearing and tell the judge what it was i was going to do. I was either going to testify or not talk. And, um. You have to excuse me, because it was difficult. I waited and i waited and my attorney showed up, and he said, brandon, he said, we just learned, we just learned it ourselves, that the Spanish Police had identified this latent fingerprint as belonging to an algerian. And i looked at him and i said, you know, like, see . I told you. I told you it wasnt me. When you heard that it wasnt him, what did you think . Well, i knew that our profession had taken some sort of a quantum leap, because suddenly there were new rules involved. No time before in history had there ever been two fingerprints with 15 minutiae that were not the same person. Under our past standards, i was right. But i was wrong. I had made an error. And so had every other examiner that looked at the print. So therefore, when i heard that it was an error, i knew the ground had shifted somewhere and indeed it had. Weve been using this for a hundred years. We ought to have some serious amounts of science to support the claims that examiners make. Bergman jennifer mnookin, a law professor at ucla, is heading a study funded by the Justice Department on fingerprint identification. What matters here isnt, are your fingerprints really different from that guy over there . The real question is, is some part of your fingerprint sufficiently similar to some part of his that a competent examiner might mistake some part of your print for a part of somebody elses print . Well, thats exactly what happened with Brandon Mayfield. Bergman there had been other mistakes in the past, but the mayfield case highlighted the weak link in fingerprint identification the examiner. Running both prints through. Bergman unlike fingerprint analysis on television, machines do not make a match people do. The examiner is the instrument of analysis. There is no objective criteria. Its a subjective judgment of the fingerprint examiner. Bergman dr. Itiel dror, a cognitive neuroscientist based in london, is one of the worlds leading authorities on fingerprint analysis. He says that examiners can be influenced by bias. Were talking about bias thats unconscious . Absolutely. Were not talking about a conscious conspiracy to match up the suspect with the fingerprint. Absolutely, were talking about dedicated, hardworking, honest, competent forensic examiners. Bergman dr. Dror says this is cognitive bias. And in a study to show how strong that bias can be, he took real cases where examiners had found a match changed the descriptions of the crime and then asked the same examiners to analyze them again. I gave the same prints to the same examiner without their knowledge, and a large majority of the examiners said now its not a match. So, in over half the cases, they would disagree with their former opinion . Yes, it changed their perception and judgment, and over half said it is not a match. In the study that dr. Dror did, the examiners changed their mind. Over half of them. Four out of five. Same data, same examiner. Same examiner. Right. Completely different result. How can that be a science . Well, theres going to be, i think, variability any time theres a human involved in the process. So it sounds like you agree with dr. Dror when hes talking about cognitive bias. If youre asking me if i think that there is the potential for cognitive bias to come into play in a fingerprint examination process, i would say yes. Bergman after nearly a century of insisting in and out of court that fingerprint analysis is infallible, the fbi has now changed the way it testifies. Today, particularly since the mayfield case, you dont testify the way you used to testify, right . Right. I certainly wouldnt say 100 certain or zero error rate. I would want to explain any of those things if i was asked about them. So, there is no infallibility here. I would not testify to that, no. I think fingerprint evidence is accepted in the United States. I think it is a rare case when they get it wrong. And, you know, the critics can scream all they want, but, uh, itsits a very vital part of our criminal Justice System. He didnt go to jail or anything, all right . Bergman scott burns is the director of the National DistrictAttorneys Association, which represents state and local prosecutors, who handle the vast majority of criminal cases. Nobody ever asked me about the hundreds of thousands of cases every year where it does work and where good forensic scientists testify. We get it right most of the time. The mayfield case is the anomaly. It is the rare exception. And to hold that up as somehow representative of what goes on in courtrooms across america is just wrong. What is an anomaly is that they found out. Not that they made a mistake. How can he say that you get it right most of the time . How did he know that its not the tip of the iceberg . To say that mayfield is an anomaly in a single case is naive at best. The courts had been misled for a long time, because we had been told, my colleagues and i, by some experts from the fbi that fingerprint comparisons involved essentially a zero error rate, without our ever understanding thats completely inaccurate. Bergman harry t. Edwards is a federal judge on the u. S. Court of appeals for the district of columbia. Hes an authority on the Forensic Sciences. We caught up with him in new york, where he agreed to an exclusive interview. The National DistrictAttorneys Association and some of the more prominent fingerprint examiners that weve talked to, theyre saying things were fine, are fine, and fingerprints have worked fine in court for decades, if noaa century. If some people are saying it works because weve gotten convictions, that is to say nothing more than juries and judges have believed that experts knew what they were talking about, and so they bought it and they convicted. Thats not proof that the discipline is undergirded by serious science. Well, they say its based on practice, its based on years of experience, its based on. Thats valid, isnt it, your honor . No, no, of course not. If your experience or practice has been inaccurate or wrong for many years, it doesnt become better because its many years. Its just many years of doing it incorrectly. And the stakes are too high. When youre talking about prosecution, incarceration, the stakes are too high. Can you advise the 1020 on the 187. Bergman in richmond, california, detective grivetti is called to a homicide, the third shooting of the day. The coroner just arrived. woman wailing what wakes me up in the middle of the night is the wail of a mother when they find out that their child has been killed. And its that sound, not only does it keep me up at night, its what drives me to make sure that i dont hear it again. I want to find justice for these people. They deserve justice, their family deserves justice. Pretty sure there is a bullet in the tire somewhere. Yeah, i got it got it . Oh yeah. Beautiful. Oh look at that, oh wow obviously a hollow point bullet, and whats important is the characteristics that are left on that copper jacketing. It has the markings. Hopefully we can find something that will help us link that bullet to that gun. Evidence is extremely important in any investigation. Its going to help figure out what happened, how it happened, possibly why it happened. And it puts people in jail, it gets people out of jail. Bergman grivetti, and thousands of forensic investigators around the country, collect the evidence that is relied on to catch criminals. But questions are being raised about the scientific validity of some of the techniques they use. In an unprecedented report, the National Academy of sciences concluded that many Forensic Sciences have never been exposed to stringent scientific scrutiny. And do not meet the fundamental requirements of science. In addition to fingerprints, this includes analyzing blood spatter, matching hair and fibers. Or ballistic analysis, the matching of marks on a bullet casing to a gun. I think i, and probably many of my colleagues, assumed that the forensic disciplines were based on solid scientific methodology, and were valid and reliable. Bergman judge edwards was a primary author of the National Academy of sciences report. When you saw Forensic Science, did you have any reason to question it . No. You assumed that the work in putting the evidence together and in offering the testimony was proper. There could be mistakes, and you understood there could be challenges, but you didnt assume what we later uncovered, which was that there were systemic Serious Problems with respect to certain of the disciplines. Bergman one of the disciplines the report found to be among the most controversial was bite mark analysis, which produced a High Percentage of false positives. In the small town of brooksville, mississippi, a series of brutal murders tested the limits of this controversial forensic technique. Levon brooks remembers a day in september 1990 like it was yesterday. My brother came and told me, said, Police Looking for you. And i said, for what . And he said, i don