Evidence on trial

On 27 February, a court ordered the District of Columbia to pay $13.2 million to Santae Tribble, who spent 28 years in prison based on bogus science. After a taxi driver was murdered in Southeast Washington in 1978, a witness had seen the killer wearing a stocking mask. In a stocking found a block away, police found a hair that matched Tribble's “in all microscopic characteristics,” an analyst for the Federal Bureau of Investigation testified. Chances that it came from someone else were “one in 10 million,” a prosecutor told the jury. Tribble was convicted.

But a DNA analysis 31 years later showed that the 13 hairs in the stocking came from three different people, none of them Tribble, and from a dog. His incarceration wrecked Tribble's life: The judge in this year's decision found that it contributed to severe depression, heroin addiction, and HIV and hepatitis infections, according to The Washington Post. His story is just one of many. Forensic hair analysts have systematically overstated their evidence for decades, the Department of Justice has found, landing...