This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 24, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The FBI Crime Lab is considered to be the gold standard for certain elements of criminal

investigations, but that lab has widely distributed some

forms of junk science and trained state-level crime labs in the use of that junk science.

And that's had big implications for criminal trials throughout the US.

Radley Balco discusses his recent peace and the Daily Beast

and how the FBI Crime Lab now looks to help prosecutors get around

questions about the credibility of their evidence.

When the FBI investigates a crime, they use a lot of experts, they use ballistics experts, people who know a lot about cars. I'm thinking back to my cousin

Vinny where the FBI crime lab expert was brought in to give testimony in that movie. So I guess what do we know about the

FBI crime lab and what do we know about the level of expertise, the level of at which it operates?

So you know if you ask the FBI or if you ask most people in forensics they'll say that the

FBI Crime Lab is you know one of the elite crime labs in the world.

Unfortunately, you know, it has had its its share of problems.

Probably one of the most notorious incidents was after the Madrid train bombings when the FBI Crime Lab

matched a partial print found at the scene of the bombings to a an Oregon

attorney named Brandon Mayfield and Mayfield was arrested and his life was kind of turned upside down and turns out he was innocent.

But that's just one case. There have been other scandals that have been far more far reaching, including two areas of

forensics that are going to touch on ballistics, which I take it we're going to talk about in

a minute, but that are related to ballistics.

And there's this field of friends, it's called pattern matching.

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