Peter J. Neufeld

On the morning of May 22, 1983, Virginia State Police agent Curtis Reese Wilmore and Culpeper police officer Harlan Lee Hart went to Fauquier County to question Earl Washington Jr. Washington had been arrested there the day before for breaking into an elderly neighbor’s apartment and beating her with a chair, and under questioning after that arrest he had confessed to several crimes, among them the rape and murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams, 19, who had been stabbed 38 times in her Culpeper apartment on June 4, 1982, and left for dead with her two young children in the apartment.

Wilmore wrote out a statement of the interview by hand, and it was later typed. In it, Hart asks whether Washington left any of his clothing in the apartment, and Washington answers, “My shirt.” Shown a shirt, Washington says it is the one he left; asked what makes it stand out, he says, “A patch had been removed from the top of the pocket.” Wilmore later testified that he had sent Hart to the car for the shirt, “since we had a shirt we had been working with,” and had held it in front of Washington before asking what made it different. That the killer had left a shirt in the apartment had not been made public, and Wilmore wrote in his report that Washington “gave pertinent information about the crime that no one knew with the exception of himself.” At Washington’s capital trial, the prosecutor told the jury in his opening statement that Washington had “told [Wilmore and Hart] a number of different things that could only have been known by somebody who actually had committed the offense.” The jury convicted him, and on January 20, 1984, it returned a sentence of death.

On December 1, 2004, twenty-one years after that interview, Peter J. Neufeld, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, argued in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that Wilmore could be held liable for his account of the shirt. Washington had sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in September 2002; his lawyers included Neufeld’s civil-rights firm, then called Cochran Neufeld & Scheck, and Robert T. Hall of Reston, Virginia. Against Wilmore, he claimed that the police had raised the shirt first and that Wilmore then reported it as knowledge Washington had volunteered.

Wilmore’s Unease and a Limited Pardon

Under questioning, Washington had not known the race of his victim, the address of the apartment where she was killed, or that she had been raped. With an execution date set for September 1985, Marie Deans, an anti-death-penalty activist, found Washington lawyers, and a law firm secured a stay nine days before he was scheduled to die. Hall began working on the case that year. “For nine years,” Hall said later, “I waited to see if I’d get an invitation in the mail to his execution.”

In May 1993, Wilmore and Hart met with Assistant Attorney General John H. McLees Jr. and told him that “they had been troubled for years that Washington’s sentence was based only on his own confession without any corroborating physical evidence . . . especially because of Washington’s limited mental abilities.”

Wilmore contacted McLees again that October, and the two discussed the case at some length. McLees recorded in a memorandum that Wilmore felt very uneasy about how the record showed Washington’s confession had been obtained, “particularly with respect to the incriminating shirt found at the scene which Washington identified as his,” and that Wilmore “felt like either he or Hart must have mentioned the shirt to Washington before Washington said he left the shirt at the scene, and that his testimony in the record did not accurately reflect that the shirt had been first mentioned by the police.” When McLees called the next day to ask whether Wilmore had been trying to tell him that he knew his testimony was inaccurate or had omitted material facts, Wilmore, McLees wrote, said he “felt like he must have asked Washington something about the shirt, and that the transcript just did not read right. It did not ‘go down’ exactly as he said in the statement.”

Governor Douglas Wilder had ordered DNA testing in 1993, and Jeffrey Ban of the state crime laboratory performed it. Late that year the testing indicated that semen recovered from Williams carried a genetic marker that neither she, her husband nor Washington possessed, although Ban reported that he could not eliminate Washington as a potential source of semen. On January 14, 1994, Wilder, saying the results raised a “substantial question” about Washington’s guilt, issued a conditional pardon that commuted the death sentence to “life imprisonment with the right of parole.” Wilder also stated that a review of the trial evidence, including the confession, “reveals that he had knowledge of evidence relating to the crime which it can be argued only the perpetrator would have known.”

In 2000 Governor James Gilmore ordered the laboratory to test the evidence again, and Ban did the work. He reported a genetic profile on a blue blanket from Williams’s apartment that did not belong to Washington, and the state’s DNA database matched it to Kenneth M. Tinsley, a convicted rapist serving a life sentence in Virginia. That October, Gilmore granted Washington a pardon for the capital murder conviction on the ground that “a jury afforded the benefit of the DNA evidence and analysis available to me would have reached a different conclusion regarding the guilt of Earl Washington.” The pardon rested on reasonable doubt. Washington was released from prison to parole supervision in February 2001, after nearly 18 years behind bars.

Fabrication in an Investigating Capacity

Wilmore had died in 1994. He had been a state employee when he questioned Washington, so Virginia paid for the defense, and William Gray Broaddus of McGuireWoods, who had been Virginia’s attorney general in 1985, argued for Wilmore in the Fourth Circuit. The district court had refused Wilmore qualified immunity on the fabrication claim, reasoning that Washington had produced evidence that Wilmore possessed nonpublic information about the crime and falsely represented that Washington had volunteered it, and the defense appealed.

Wilmore’s lawyers argued that the claim was a rephrased Brady v. Maryland claim for nondisclosure of exculpatory evidence. In their view, Washington’s claim was simply that Wilmore had failed to disclose that Washington’s apparent knowledge of the shirt came from leading questions, and the use of leading questions does not violate a suspect’s constitutional rights. They also argued that the district court lacked jurisdiction under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine because a judgment for Washington would imply that his state convictions were invalid.

Chief Judge Wilkins, writing for the court with Judge Motz joining, rejected both arguments on April 28, 2005. The right at stake was “the right not to be deprived of liberty as a result of the fabrication of evidence by a government officer acting in an investigating capacity.” Washington was complaining of “the creation of false evidence,” the court said, and his claim differed from one for “the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence.” The right had been clearly established in 1983, when Wilmore questioned Washington; the court relied on Miller v. Pate, in which the Supreme Court said in 1967 that “the Fourteenth Amendment cannot tolerate a state criminal conviction obtained by the knowing use of false evidence.” Taking the facts in Washington’s favor, the court read the “pertinent information” in Wilmore’s report as the shirt and held that Washington had offered enough evidence that Wilmore falsely represented him as having volunteered it.

Wilmore had not challenged causation on appeal, and the court pointed to the prosecutor’s opening statement and to the conditional pardon’s reliance on Washington’s apparent knowledge of the crime. On jurisdiction, the court held that Washington challenged “one aspect of the means by which that conviction was achieved,” and that no state proceeding could have decided whether Wilmore told the truth about the shirt: “A criminal jury decides the question of a defendant’s guilt or innocence; it does not make particularized findings regarding the credibility of individual witnesses.” Judge Shedd, concurring, wrote that “if any concept is fundamental to our American system of justice, it is that those charged with upholding the law are prohibited from deliberately fabricating evidence and framing individuals for crimes they did not commit.” The fabrication claim went back to the district court for trial. “The upshot of this decision is that Earl Washington will have a trial against Curtis Wilmore,” said Debi Cornwall, a staff attorney at Neufeld’s firm who had been on Washington’s brief.

A Phantom Profile at the State Crime Laboratory

In the 2000 testing, Ban also reported that he could not obtain a genetic profile from a slide made from the vaginal swab, although a medical examiner had testified at Washington’s trial that the slide held an abundance of sperm. His conclusions identified a nonexistent male as the source of the semen in Williams’s body, and the Innocence Project said later that this phantom profile kept Gilmore from pardoning Washington on grounds of actual innocence.

Washington’s civil lawyers, Cochran Neufeld & Scheck among them, retained Dr. Edward T. Blake of Forensic Science Associates, who tested duplicate slides in 2004. Blake said his tests isolated only Tinsley’s genetic profile and eliminated Washington. In his report he called Ban’s work “logically incoherent” and wrote, “The result is so nonsensical and so covered with red flags that it should never be published.” When an expert hired by Washington’s lawyers questioned another round of the laboratory’s tests, Paul Ferrara, the laboratory’s director, dismissed him as a “hired gun” and rebuffed calls for an outside review. Several months later three other DNA experts, not paid by the defense, reviewed Ban’s reports at a Virginia newspaper’s request and agreed that the work was troubling and warranted further scrutiny, and Ferrara again balked. He had repeatedly refused the Innocence Project’s demand for an external audit when, in the fall of 2004, Governor Mark Warner ordered one. In an interview the following spring, Ferrara said, “I’m not going to admit error when there is none.”

The American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board conducted the audit and in 2005 found those conclusions “incorrect.” Ban was the laboratory’s senior DNA analyst and was responsible for DNA testing in many of Virginia’s capital prosecutions. The laboratory’s technical reviewer had missed the errors, and so had the laboratory’s own internal audit the year before. The auditors identified “pressures from outside the laboratory and excessive managerial influence from within the laboratory” as one possible cause of the false results, and Ban had remarked about the case that “inconclusive results were not an option.” The auditors recommended suspending Ban from all cases involving low-level DNA samples or mounted slides, suspending him as a technical leader until corrective actions were complete, extending the audit to his cases from about 2000 forward, and examining at least 50 cases across the Virginia system.

“This laboratory that touts itself as the best DNA laboratory in the country generated erroneous test results in a capital case, twice, using two different DNA methods,” Neufeld said in May 2005. He asked for oversight written into law: “This audit provides compelling evidence that crime labs cannot police themselves, and that only with the statutory requirement that they be subject to independent, expert oversight can we have faith that appropriate controls are in place.” The Innocence Project said the laboratory’s mistake had kept Washington in prison an additional seven years.

Five Women and Four Men in Charlottesville

The fabrication claim was tried against Wilmore’s estate in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, before Judge Norman K. Moon, in the spring of 2006. Washington could not sue the Virginia State Police, which has immunity as a state agency. Neufeld represented him with Hall, who by then had been Washington’s lawyer for 22 years, and Cornwall; the team also included Barry A. Weinstein, a lawyer from Elkins, West Virginia, and Steve Rosenfield, one of what Neufeld called a “ragtag of volunteers.” Neufeld and his team asked law students at the University of Virginia to research what evidence from the 1984 trial should be admitted, which parts of the criminal trial bore on the civil case, and what damages the jury could consider. “The research played a very significant role on the admissibility issues involving very important pieces of evidence,” Neufeld said. Another dozen students worked with a jury consultant, helping the lawyers decide whom to pick from 70 juror questionnaires.

During jury selection, the estate’s lawyers sought to use a peremptory strike on the only Black person left in the jury pool, a woman who worked for the University of Virginia Police Department and had once been a corrections officer. Moon refused to allow it. “I just can’t believe that she would have been stricken if she were white with all those credentials,” he said.

Hall and Neufeld had brought the suit in part to win Washington a clear exoneration. The parties stipulated in court that Washington was innocent; Neufeld said it was the first time the state had publicly acknowledged his innocence. With innocence conceded, Moon instructed the jurors that they could award damages only if they found that Wilmore had deliberately fabricated evidence against Washington and that the fabrication had caused his conviction and death sentence.

Richard Leo, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies false confessions, testified that a person with a mild intellectual disability “can demonstrate compliance and be easily led in the face of police authority.” Hall and Neufeld presented evidence that time on death row differs in kind from other prison sentences, and Washington’s experts testified that his years there had been far worse than time in the general prison population would have been. His family members testified that he had finally told them not to come see him in prison because he found the visits so upsetting. Marie Deans testified about talking with Washington in the room next to the electric chair, with the chair visible through an open door.

In his closing argument, Neufeld asked the jurors, “What is one of the worst nightmares you can imagine?” “For Earl Washington,” he said, “it wasn’t a nightmare—it was a reality.” He laid out the “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that Wilmore had fabricated the confession, pointing to details in it that had never been made public. “The bloody shirt is what caused his conviction,” he told the jury. Broaddus, closing for the estate, noted that Wilmore’s report recorded facts Washington had gotten wrong, among them the victim’s race and the location of her apartment, and he defended the use of leading questions in interrogations. “Why would a respected law official jeopardize his reputation?” he asked. “He is the victim of a fabrication,” Broaddus said of Washington, “but it is his own fabrication.”

After a two-week trial and six hours of deliberation, the jury of five women and four men found on May 5, 2006, that Wilmore had fabricated the confession that sent Washington to death row, and it awarded Washington $2.25 million against the estate. Cornwall was sitting next to Washington when the verdict was read. Neufeld called the verdict “obviously the most powerful proof imaginable that false confessions can put innocent people on death row.” Washington, reached by telephone, said, “I feel great. I’m really happy.” He had turned 46 two days before the verdict. Outside the federal courthouse he remembered 1985, when he could hear the electric chair being tested for his execution. “I was scared to death,” he said.

The Estate’s Appeal, a Settlement and an Absolute Pardon

The estate moved for a new trial, arguing that Moon had been wrong to refuse the strike and that it had wanted the juror off the panel because of her questionnaire answers, before it knew her race. Neufeld said the estate’s lawyers had not wanted anyone on the jury who was Black. “It is unconscionable when lawyers continue to play the race card to unfairly improve their hand,” he said. “Judge Moon saw it for what it was and correctly put a stop to it.” That August the court denied the estate’s motion for a new trial, and the estate appealed.

In September Neufeld complained of “the hypocrisy of the state willing to continue to shell out money to defend” Wilmore “but not spend a penny to compensate Washington,” and said Washington’s lawyers would ask Governor Timothy M. Kaine to end the litigation, pay the damages the jury had awarded, and amend the 2000 pardon from one based on reasonable doubt to one premised on actual innocence.

In March 2007 the state agreed to pay Washington $1.9 million to settle the case, subject to Moon’s approval; the settlement took the place of the judgment and ended the estate’s appeal. Washington’s lawyers set up a trust fund to manage the money. He was living in Virginia Beach and working as a maintenance worker, and he had no plans to retire.

Kenneth Tinsley, serving life in prison for a 1984 rape, pleaded guilty in 2007 to the rape and murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams. Later that year Governor Kaine issued Washington an absolute pardon, which acknowledged that he had been wrongfully convicted of murder and rape. In issuing it, Kaine stated that “Mr. Washington was and is innocent of the crimes against Mrs. Williams.”

Halsey v. Pfeiffer: Wilmore in the Third Circuit

In November 1985 Frank Pfeiffer, an investigating officer, and Raymond Lynch, who was in charge of the Major Crimes Division of the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, questioned Byron Halsey in Plainfield, New Jersey, about the murders of two children. Halsey was 24, had a sixth-grade education and was “not a good reader.” He spent more than 12 hours at the police station on November 15; the next afternoon, after a polygraph, Pfeiffer questioned him for about two hours, and then Lynch joined in for six more. Assistant Prosecutor David Hancock waited outside the interview room for the officers to slide each finished page of what appeared to be a summary of Halsey’s oral confession under the door. Halsey was convicted and sentenced to two life terms plus 20 years. In 2006 DNA testing excluded him, and after 22 years New Jersey released him, the Third Circuit later wrote, “because it had been established beyond all doubt that he had not committed the offenses.”

Neufeld’s firm sued for Halsey in 2009 and litigated the case with the Philadelphia civil-rights firm Kairys Rudovsky Messing & Feinberg. David Rudovsky argued the appeal in the Third Circuit on December 18, 2013, and Neufeld, Emma Freudenberger and Anna Benvenutti Hoffmann were among Halsey’s counsel. On April 24, 2014, the court, in an opinion by Judge Greenberg, held that “if a defendant has been convicted at a trial at which the prosecution has used fabricated evidence, the defendant has a stand-alone claim under section 1983 based on the Fourteenth Amendment if there is a reasonable likelihood that, without the use of that evidence, the defendant would not have been convicted.” Among the decisions the court cited was Washington v. Wilmore. Greenberg wrote that “no sensible concept of ordered liberty is consistent with law enforcement cooking up its own evidence,” and, on the malicious-prosecution claim, that “Hancock charged Halsey precisely because he thought Halsey had confessed.” The court held that Halsey’s fabrication, malicious-prosecution and coercion claims against Pfeiffer and Lynch could go to a jury. In May 2015 Halsey settled his lawsuit against the detectives from Plainfield and the Union County Prosecutor’s Office for $12.5 million.

Donald Gates and an Informant Called Bear

On June 22, 1981, Catherine Schilling, a 21-year-old Georgetown University student, was found raped and murdered in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. She had been shot five times in the head. Police arrested Donald Gates, then 30, on July 20 for failing to appear in court in an unrelated case, and he gave a hair sample during processing. An informant, Gerald M. Smith, known as Bear, told detectives that Gates had confessed to him and later picked out Gates’s photograph; Smith was paid $50 for the tip, $250 for picking out the photograph and $1,300 in all. At trial in D.C. Superior Court, the jury heard Smith’s account of the confession and heard FBI examiner Michael Malone testify that Gates’s hairs were “microscopically indistinguishable” from hairs found on Schilling’s body. Gates was convicted on September 16, 1982, and sentenced to 20 years to life.

Gates spent 27 years in prison and was moved among at least eight federal prisons; his father, his mother and two of his three brothers died while he was inside. In 2009, with the help of the judge who had presided over his trial, he obtained a DNA test that established his innocence, and Sandra Levick of the D.C. Public Defender Service helped win his exoneration. He was released on December 15, 2009, with $75 and a Greyhound bus ticket to Ohio, and in May 2010 retired Senior Judge Fred Ugast granted him a certificate of actual innocence. In 2012 federal prosecutors traced genetic evidence from the scene to a convicted offender who had worked as a temporary janitor in the building where Schilling worked and who had died the year before.

Neufeld, Nick Brustin and Alexandra Lampert of Neufeld Scheck & Brustin, with Jeffrey S. Gutman of Washington, D.C., represented Gates in Gates v. District of Columbia, a federal civil-rights suit before Chief Judge Richard W. Roberts against the District, retired and current members of the Metropolitan Police Department, and Smith. The police defendants moved for summary judgment, arguing that Gates had offered no affirmative evidence for his claims, that claims three decades old were barred by laches, and that they were entitled to qualified immunity. On August 29, 2014, Roberts denied the police defendants’ motions. Gates had testified in deposition that he never met Smith or confessed to him, the police defendants had given conflicting accounts of when each learned Gates’s name from Smith, and sorting out those contradictions belonged to a jury. “If any defendant fabricated Smith’s identification or Gates’ confession,” Roberts wrote, “the defendant would have violated clearly established constitutional rights.” Laches was unavailable, he held, because a congressionally mandated statute of limitations governed the claims.

At the month-long trial in the fall of 2015, lawyers for the District argued that the police had done nothing unconstitutional. Maureen Dolan, a former paralegal at the law firm where Schilling worked and the last person to see her alive, had told homicide detectives about a substitute janitor who had hovered aggressively around Schilling, and on November 4 and 5, 2015, she testified that on the night of the murder she had left the office and seen the janitor stand outside the building and watch Schilling walk toward the park. Gates’s lawyers said the police never gave that lead to the defense. W. Louis Hennessy, then a junior homicide investigator and later a Calvert County, Maryland, judge, had warned that Smith was treacherous and totally unreliable. Hamilton “Phil” Fox, Gates’s criminal defense lawyer, testified that he never learned that Smith’s story had prompted authorities to drop a charge that Smith stole $400 from police, a charge that, given Smith’s criminal record, put him at risk of an extended prison term.

The jury deliberated for less than seven hours. It found that detectives had fabricated all or part of the confession Smith attributed to Gates, that Ronald S. Taylor, the lead detective, had violated Gates’s right to a fair trial by feeding Gates’s name and other details to the informant, that Taylor and Detective Norman Brooks had conspired and withheld information, and that Taylor had ignored Hennessy’s warnings. Leaving the courtroom, Gates, who was living in Knoxville, Tennessee, said, “It feels like the God of the King James Bible is real, and he answered my prayers.” The next day, November 19, 2015, hours before the jury was to deliberate on damages, the District agreed to pay Gates $16.65 million. Gates had already received nearly $1.4 million from the federal government, under a law granting $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment to innocent people who waive claims against federal officials.

“When the police framed me for murder they took away my life, and I’ll never get that back,” Gates said. “There are a lot of things I missed, and I try not to dwell on it. But today, at least I have some justice.” Neufeld called for an audit of other murder cases the two detectives had worked on and said Gates’s lawyers would ask the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office to investigate whether Taylor should face perjury charges over his testimony at the civil trial. “There is no doubt at this trial that the jury determined that he lied to them, and when you lie in a federal court under oath on a material matter that’s perjury,” he said.

In 2013 the Justice Department and the FBI, working with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, announced a review of cases in which FBI examiners had reported or testified on microscopic hair comparison, the discipline in which Malone had testified at Gates’s trial. By April 2015 the reviewers had found erroneous statements in 257 of the 268 trials in which examiners had given testimony used to inculpate a defendant, and 26 of the 28 examiners had given testimony or laboratory reports containing erroneous statements. Defendants in at least 35 of the cases had been sentenced to death, and errors appeared in 33 of them. Nine of those defendants had been executed, and five had died of other causes on death row. “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster,” Neufeld said.

Validation Upstream of the Court

Neufeld was a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society in the Bronx, where he and Barry Scheck became friends in the 1970s, and the two began studying and litigating forensic DNA testing together in 1988. In 1992 they founded the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. In 1998, with Johnnie Cochran, they began seeking redress for people harmed by police misconduct, and in February 2000 the three founded the civil-rights firm then called Cochran Neufeld & Scheck.

In February 2006, three months before the Washington verdict, Neufeld told an audience at the University of Virginia School of Law that the entire interrogation process should be videotaped, and said, “Let’s start treating forensic science the way we do clinical science in the U.S.” In 2024 he blamed politics and money for the difference between clinical laboratories, which federal rules govern, and forensic laboratories, which had little or no regulatory oversight: the population most affected by forensic science, he said, “doesn’t have the same clout.” Brandon Garrett, a Virginia law professor who had once worked for Neufeld and who connected law students with Washington’s legal team, became his co-author on a study of the forensic testimony given at the trials of people later exonerated by DNA.

The study began when the National Academy of Sciences committee examining the needs of the forensic science community asked Garrett to present at one of its public hearings. Garrett and Neufeld then spent over a year compiling and analyzing trial transcripts. They sought the transcripts of all 156 exonerees whose trials had included testimony by forensic analysts, located and reviewed 137, and found that in 82 of those trials, or 60 percent, analysts called by the prosecution had given invalid testimony, with conclusions that misstated empirical data or had no empirical support. The invalid testimony came from 72 analysts employed by 52 laboratories, practices or hospitals in 25 states. The disciplines included serology and microscopic hair comparison and, in some trials, bite-mark, shoe-print, soil, fiber and fingerprint comparison; several trials involved DNA testing. Defense lawyers rarely cross-examined the analysts about invalid testimony or obtained experts of their own, and in the few cases where it was challenged, judges seldom provided relief. The Virginia Law Review published the article, “Invalid Forensic Science Testimony and Wrongful Convictions,” in March 2009. The Academy had released its report, “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward,” the month before, and Neufeld called it “a major breakthrough toward ensuring that so-called scientific evidence in criminal cases is solid, validated and reliable.”

On September 9, 2009, Neufeld testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing on strengthening forensic science in the United States. The Innocence Project had by then helped exonerate 242 people, 17 of whom had been on death row, and its research into those cases had found that “unvalidated and/or improper forensics was the second-greatest contributing factor to those miscarriages of justice.” He told the committee that hair microscopy, bite-mark comparison, latent-fingerprint comparison, firearm and tool-mark analysis, and shoe- and tire-print comparison had never been validated well enough to let an examiner say that a particular defendant was the source of trace or impression evidence from a crime scene, and that a technique’s validity had to be settled before any particular piece of evidence was offered in court. He said the Innocence Project supported the Academy’s primary recommendation, a National Institute of Forensic Science, and quoted the Academy’s conclusion: “The entity that is established to govern the forensic science community cannot be principally beholden to law enforcement.”

He told the committee about Roy Brown, who spent 15 years in prison for a 1991 murder after a local dentist testified that seven bite marks on the victim’s body were “entirely consistent” with him, although a leading forensic odontologist had examined the marks before trial and excluded him; DNA testing freed him in 2007. Brandon Mayfield had been arrested as a material witness after the March 2004 Madrid bombings; several FBI examiners matched his print to prints on a plastic bag that held explosive material and swore in affidavits that they were “100% certain.” When Spanish police arrested the real source of the print, the FBI at first blamed a poor digital image. “Obviously, the two FBI experts could not have been 100% certain if the image was poor,” Neufeld said.

From 1995 to 2016 Neufeld served on the New York State Commission on Forensic Science, which regulates the state’s crime laboratories. In July 2012 he testified again before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said that, in the Innocence Project’s view, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology would be the most appropriate home for the rigorous scientific research and standard setting that needed to be done. In 2013 the Justice Department, in partnership with NIST, established the National Commission on Forensic Science as a federal advisory committee. Neufeld served on it from 2014 until its charter expired on April 23, 2017.

Neufeld is now of counsel to the firm, renamed Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann & Freudenberger in 2023, and special counsel to the Innocence Project. In a conversation with Scheck published in the winter 2026 issue of the American Bar Association’s Criminal Justice magazine, he traced the most entrenched and intractable cause of wrongful conviction to “our nation’s history of racism, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration.” He described recent legislative fights: “Last year we fended off efforts to repeal discovery expansion laws enacted to reduce the risk of wrongful convictions. This year, some states are attempting to create more obstacles to vacate convictions based on newly discovered evidence of innocence.” He also turned to police technology: “Law enforcement rushes to adopt new tools that rely on artificial intelligence to expand the surveillance state without adequate guardrails and external oversight to assess reliability, uncover implicit bias, and quantify any adverse impact on personal privacy and marginalized communities.” “Ultimately, our success will depend on our ability to win over the public,” he said, “replacing retribution with compassion and fear with optimism.”