A North Carolina man convicted of murder two decades ago with the help of now-discredited FBI scientific testimony took his quest for a new trial to the state’s Supreme Court yesterday with the court’s former chief justice arguing on his behalf, the Washington Post reports. Lee Wayne Hunt, who has been in prison for 22 years, was convicted in 1986 of the execution-style killings of a couple. The sole physical evidence linking him to the crime scene came from an FBI scientist, who testified that he used bullet-lead analysis — a chemical technique that compares the lead makeup of bullets — to match bullet fragments from the victims to a box of ammunition from his.
I. Beverly Lake Jr., who retired from the court last December, took Hunt’s case after learning about the problems with the FBI technique, disclosed in a joint investigation by the Post and CBS News’ “60 Minutes.” The investigation showed that the FBI did not alert defendants after it stopped using bullet-lead science in 2005, and it acknowledged that three decades of expert testimony about matching bullets was not scientifically supported.
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/27/AR2007112702344.html