Fbi Getting Yet Another Black Eye Chemist To Testify For Simpson That Crime Lab Skews Results

An FBI chemist Thursday accused officials at the agency’s highly respected crime laboratory of pressuring forensic experts to commit perjury or skew tests to help secure convictions in hundreds of criminal cases.

The chemist, Frederic Whitehurst, had testified about his concerns last month at the conspiracy trial in the World Trade Center bombing in New York.

But the breadth of his accusations was not apparent until Tuesday, when lawyers for O.J. Simpson said they wanted Whitehurst to testify to the lab’s prosecutorial bias, and thus to cast doubt on one of the FBI experts called by the prosecution in the Simpson case.

Whitehurst’s lawyer, Stephen Kohn, said his client had complained about the handling of evidence in the World Trade Center case and in the 1991 trial of Walter Leroy Moody, who was convicted of the mail-bomb killings of a federal appeals court judge in Alabama and a civil rights lawyer in Georgia.

The prosecution of the case was led by Louis Freeh, now the director of the FBI. Kohn said the bureau’s rules on confidentiality barred him from elaborating on Whitehurst’s assertions.

FBI officials said Wednesday that the Justice Department inspector general’s office had begun a review of 250 criminal cases in which the lab had performed some kind of analysis, but so far had found “no evidence of tampering, evidence fabrication or failure to report exculpatory evidence.”

But other law-enforcement officials said Thursday that Whitehurst’s accusations had some merit, although they regarded most of them as overblown. They said he had pointed out sloppy work and failure to carry-out exhaustive tests that might have helped scientists better interpret test results.

Whitehurst’s accusations come at a tumultuous time for the bureau, which is defending its actions - and reputation - on several fronts, including its handling of the assault at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993 and a criminal investigation of cover-up accusations stemming from a bloody stand-off on a mountain in Idaho in 1992 when the wife of Randy Weaver was fatally shot by an FBI marksman.

They come at an awkward juncture for Freeh who, after an impressive rookie year in which he established himself as the government’s preeminent law-enforcement official, has suddenly found himself trying, without much luck, to close the books on old embarrassments and fresh wounds.

With opinion polls showing public support for the FBI eroding after congressional hearings into Waco, the accusations involving the lab are in some ways the worst blow yet.

It has been the bureau’s cutting-edge science shop, a cloistered group of about 200 experts protected from political influence and capable of amazing feats of detection through microscopic analysis of hair, fiber, paint, metal and chemical residues. On tours of the J. Edgar Hoover building, the lab remains a showcase attraction.

Several FBI officials said Thursday that Whitehurst had a reputation as an abrasive perfectionist who was quick to complain about failings in his colleagues or superiors. But Kohn said that Whitehurst had consistently received “superior” and “exceptional” evaluations in annual performance reviews.

Whitehurst, a 13-year veteran of the agency with a doctoral degree from Duke University, was the FBI’s top bomb residue expert for seven years. He was demoted in 1994, which Kohn suggested was retaliatory action, to be a trainee paint analyst. He first brought his complaints to his superiors in 1989.

FBI officials said Whitehurst had been transferred with no loss of pay because there had been several well-qualified explosive experts at the lab but fewer qualified people in the unit that analyzed a broad range of materials, including paint.

John W. Hicks, the bureau’s laboratory director at the time, said that when Whitehurst persisted in his complaints, they were reviewed within the lab and by the bureau’s disciplinary office.

Both reviews, Hicks said, concluded that the accusations were unfounded. He added that the Justice Department’s inspector general’s officer evaluated the lab’s performance in 1993 and judged its work to be satisfactory.