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The highest court in Massachusetts just paved the way for another 40,000 cases to be reviewed, last week, after one rogue technician, now spending her time in state prison, fabricated years of laboratory results that led to convictions in criminal cases.
While that sounds ominous enough, even the FBI has not been immune to problems with laboratory analysis. After decades of investigations into allegations of misdoings, the agency finally announced, last month, that 2,500 cases are now under review -- a number that will almost certainly increase with further scrutiny.
READ MORE: "FBI Admits Flaws in Hair Analysis Spanning Two Decades"
But, how and why can this sort of thing continue to happen? According to Dr. Ashraf Mozayani, the executive director of forensic sciences at Texas Southern University, it's all about laboratory integrity.
"If the data doesn't have integrity then it's just nonsense," she told Forensic Magazine in an exclusive interview.
As a senior forensic science advisor for the U.S. Embassy, Mozayani recently visited Uzbekistan, and the capital, Tashkent, where she helped coordinate one of the first and largest regional forensic science conferences in the country. Her presentation, called "Data Integrity in...