This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 20, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's not a few bad apples.

The Washington Post makes that much clear this week in a series on the mishandling of evidence in

high stakes criminal cases and then the mishandling of the legally

required notifications of those errors to defense counsel.

Tim Lynch, director of the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice, comments.

This week the Washington Post has a remarkable series on forensic science and the disclosure that the Department of Justice has

discovered problems with many of its criminal cases due to faulty science and their stunning finding is that hundreds

of people may be in prison around the United States based upon faulty forensic science that, which

means that innocent people, potentially hundreds of innocent people may be in prison or serving lifelong parole

due to faulty science and wrongful convictions.

And it's important to note how many levels of failure there are here.

You have the faulty science to begin with in achieving convictions.

Then you have the review process executed by the Justice Department of these cases when they were made known to the Justice Department.

And then their failure to adequately notify people, especially defense attorneys.

And then there's another failure that is prosecutors are supposed to give to defense attorneys exculpatory evidence even after the trials have

concluded yes that's right and that's one of the the headline of this

series with the post is like this veil of secrecy surrounding this information.

We know that there's been faulty science, there's been exaggerations in the courtrooms by lab technicians and lab chemists, but then how do we

act on this information if it's kept secret?

The prosecutors are part of the problem.

...