Government Failure: "Evidence Of Injustice"

FBI's Bullet Lead Analysis Used Flawed Science To Convict Hundreds Of Defendants

(CBS) -- Aside from eyewitness testimony, some of the most believable evidence presented in criminal cases in the United States comes from the FBI crime laboratory in Quantico, Va. Part of its job is to test and analyze everything from ballistics to DNA for state and local prosecutors around the country, introducing scientific credibility to often murky cases.

But a six-month investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post shows that there are hundreds of defendants imprisoned around the country who were convicted with the help of a now discredited forensic tool, and that the FBI never notified them, their lawyers, or the courts, that the their cases may have been affected by faulty testimony.

The science, called bullet lead analysis, was used by the FBI for 40 years in thousands of cases, and some of the people it helped put in jail may be innocent.

As correspondent Steve Kroft reported on tonight's "60 Minutes," one of them is Lee Wayne Hunt, who is now serving a life sentence for murder in North Carolina (pictured above).

Do a Google Search for "market failure" and you'll get 1.33 million hits. Do a search for "government failure" and you'll find 615,00 links. One might think that market failure happens twice as frequently as government failure.

After serving 22 years and 6 months in jail based on the testimony of two questionable witnesses and what turned out to be erroneous ballistics testimony from the FBI lab, I think Lee Wayne Hunt and the hundreds of other falsely convicted felons are a little more concerned about government failure that any failure the market might pose for them.

See a related Washington Post article "FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes."