April 17, 2012 12:44PM # Another Transparency Fail By [Tim Lynch](https://www.cato.org/people/tim-lynch) --- SHARE According to a [lengthy article](http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/convicted-defendants-left-uninformed-of-forensic-flaws-found-by-justice-dept/2012/04/16/gIQAWTcgMT_story.html) in today’s *Washington Post*, “hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.” The report says government officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might be responsible for convicting and incarcerating innocent people, but the defendants and their attorneys were never notified. That’s difficult to believe because the Justice Department has said many times that it is totally committed to the goal of making the Obama administration the “[most transparent Administration in history](http://www.justice.gov/open/).” Attorney General Eric Holder will certainly admit that something is amiss when his department is holding exculpatory information and keeping it under wraps—but maybe he believes this is proof that his department is underfunded. [Hardly](http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2010/02/doj-budget-request-for-fy-2011-suggests-it-is-not-tightening-its-belt.html). ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).