After the first World Trade Center bombing, Whitehurst testified that supervisors pressured him to concoct misleading scientific reports.
Months after the Washington Post revealed that lab technicians at the FBI mishandled evidence, resulting in at least three wrongful convictions, the Department of Justice has announced it will review of thousands of old cases.
A reporter at the Post had been working on a story about Donald Gates, a D.C. man released after DNA evidence proved his innocence, when he learned about Frederic Whitehurst (pictured), an FBI lab chemist who blew the whistle on the FBI Laboratory in the mid-1990s. Whitehurst said he watched colleagues contaminate evidence and, in court, overstate the significance of their matches.
After the first World Trade Center bombing, Whitehurst testified that supervisors pressured him to concoct misleading scientific reports. When he refused to testify that a urea nitrate bomb had been the source of the explosion, the FBI found another lab technician to testify.