At the end of June, Santae Tribble died at age 59 after battling a long illness. He spent 22 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and was able to enjoy just eight years of freedom after being exonerated, but his fight for justice had a lasting impact on many.
Santae was wrongfully convicted largely based on the FBI’s misuse of hair microscopy. An FBI analyst at the trial concluded that one of the hairs from the crime scene “matched” Santae’s and that there was only “one chance in 10 million” that the hair could belong to someone else.
But we now know that these analysts grossly exaggerated the significance of their findings — and not just in Santae’s case, but in hundreds of others. Their statements led to many wrongful convictions. Santae’s case and several others were brought to light by the work of the D.C. Public Defender’s office.
Because of their work and Santae’s case, the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers began pressing the FBI and Department of Justice to correct the falsehoods, notify affected defendants, and review past cases.
The FBI identified 3,000 of its cases that used microscopic hair analysis. After reviewing the first 268 cases, the FBI found that its examiners had given erroneous statements that wrongly implicated the defendant in at least 90% of these cases. Ninety. Percent. So far, 16 people who were wrongly convicted based on the FBI’s misuse of hair analysis have had their convictions vacated.
Santae wasn’t an Innocence Project client, but we continue to be motivated by his life and memory. To substantially reduce the likelihood that others will experience the same injustice as Santae, we must continue to question and demand more from the government institutions that deprived him of so much of his life and freedom.
The Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. www.innocenceproject.org
