Political Quotes

“last week I came to the floor to talk about the FBI's extensive use of flawed evidence in thousands of cases. It is tragic just days later there is yet another scandal involving bad science used to send people to jail and some to death row. According to an internal investigation by the FBI and the Department of Justice, nearly 2,600 convictions and 45 death row cases from the 1980s and 1990s may have involved flawed forensic evidence. Specifically, these cases involved microscopic hair matches, a form of forensic science that has been discredited. The scope of this scandal, which is the focus of a front-page article in the Washington Post yesterday, goes well beyond the problems we have previously seen when it comes to forensic evidence. Even more troubling than the statistics outlined in the Post's story is that the FBI, after recognizing these egregious mistakes, stopped their full review after examining just a small fraction of these cases. The Department of Justice has rightly ordered the FBI to resume its internal review, but the FBI's conduct is inexcusable. Once again, we are reminded that our criminal justice system is not infallible and that we are all less safe when the system fails. FBI investigators should have redoubled their efforts to uncover these mistakes and rushed to tell those affected defendants. Instead it appears they dragged their feet and stopped their review. I intend to get to the bottom of this.…”