By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
WASHINGTON — The FBI’s theory about bullets sounded downright impressive at the time. That’s no longer the case. Just recently, three murder convictions were overturned because of the agency’s flawed science, the Associated Press reported.
The flap centers around the FBI’s now “discredited theory that bullets found at a crime scene could be linked to bullets found in possession of suspects,” the AP reports.
The AP reports that nearly five years after the FBI conceded that the science was flawed, the agency has yet to complete a review of almost 2,500 cases where the “comparative bullet lead analysis was used.”
To date, the FBI has found that the FBI science was used in 187 trials and it has notified prosecutors where the agency’s testimony “exceeds the limits of the science and cannot be supported by the FBI.”
The AP described the science by saying: “Comparative bullet lead analysis was based on the theory that lead bullets pick up trace elements such as copper, antimony, arsenic, bismuth and silver during manufacturing. When the soft metal is shaped into bullets and packaged, bullets in the same box would contain similar amounts of the trace elements, the theory went.”
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