The FBI has disowned three kinds of forensic testimony and sent letters each time. Georgia’s crime lab read the 2015 hair admission, measured its own error rate at one in twenty, and told no one. The one court door that opened last year is one-shot. The other is closed by the four-year habeas deadline.
For two decades Georgia’s crime lab was run by a man who was not a physician or forensic pathologist, and built convictions on hair and fiber methods now known to be unreliable. At least 17 states reviewed such cases. Georgia didn’t — and the guilty went free while the innocent went to prison.
Maria Montalvo, Sheila Denton, Dasha Fincher: across arson, bite marks, and field drug tests, junk forensic science continues to convict the innocent. Georgia is the national outlier — and almost nothing in state law lets the courts correct the record.