Where is Miguel de Cervantes?

"Madrid begins search for bones of Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes"

Historians and archaeologists hunt for writer's remains in city centre convent with approval from Madrid's archbishopric

by

Giles Tremlett

July 25th, 2011

guardian.co.uk

Historians and archaeologists plan to reveal the true face of the author of Don Quixote of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes, as they embark on a quest to find the lost bones of one of western literature's key writers.

The project to seek Cervantes' bones, which lie buried somewhere in the walls or floors of a convent in central Madrid, would allow forensic archaeologists to reconstruct the face of a man only known from a picture painted by artist Juan de Jauregui some 20 years after his death.

The bones may also reveal whether Cervantes, who is believed to have died of cirrhosis and was accused by rivals of being a notorious tippler, drank himself into the grave. "They may not just help us to discover what he looked like, but also why he died," said historian Fernando Prado.

"It is said that he was very ill late in life, but that is also when he was very productive as an author."

Prado's team have won the support of local authorities and Madrid's archbishopric to hunt for the remains of the creator of the would-be knight-errant Don Quixote, who famously tilted at windmills, and of his sidekick, Sancho Panza.

Experts said his bones should be easy to identify as they would bear the marks of wounds suffered during the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571.

Cervantes received wounds to his chest and arms during a battle which saw a Spanish-led fleet defeat their Ottoman enemies in the Gulf of Patras off western Greece.

"He received a blast from a harquebus in the chest and another wound that left him unable to use one hand," Prado said. "Those two things will have left some imprint on his bones."

Cervantes was buried in the convent after dying at his home nearby in 1616. His death came just 10 days before that of Shakespeare [see footnote].

Cervantes' bones went missing in 1673 when building work was done at the convent. They are known to have been taken to a different convent and were returned later.

What nobody knows, however, is exactly where within the convent complex they are to be found.

Those planning to search for his bones say they will use geo-radar technology to search for hidden niches in the convent's walls and to scan up to five metres below ground.

Prado hopes the work can be carried out by 2016, when there are plans for a joint global celebration to mark the anniversaries of the death of Cervantes and Shakespeare.

• This footnote was appended on 26 July 2011. To clarify: Cervantes and Shakespeare both died on 23 April 1616. However, Spain was using the Gregorian calendar at that time, and England the Julian. They are 10 days apart.

Miguel de Cervantes [Wikipedia]

The Literature Network

Astronomy--forensics

Ansel Adams' "Autumn Moon"

"Forensic Astronomer Solves Fine Art's Puzzles"

Astrophysicist Don Olson breaks down the barriers between science and art by analyzing literature and paintings from the past.

by

Jennifer Drapkin and Sarah Zielinski

April 2009

Smithsonian magazine

In painter Edvard Munch's Girls on the Pier, three women lean against a railing facing a body of water in which houses are reflected. A peach-colored orb appears in the sky, but, curiously, casts no reflection in the water. Is it the Moon? The Sun? Is it imaginary? Does it matter?

To Donald Olson, an astrophysicist at Texas State University, the answer to the last question is an emphatic yes. Olson solves puzzles in literature, history and art using the tools of astronomy: charts, almanacs, painstaking calculations and computer programs that map ancient skies. He is perhaps the leading practitioner of what he calls "forensic astronomy." But computers and math can take him only so far.

For Girls on the Pier, Olson and his research partner, Texas State physicist Russell Doescher, traveled to Asgardstrand, Norway, the resort town where Munch made the painting in the summer of 1901. By mapping the area and studying old postcards, the pair determined the exact location of the original pier (which had been torn down), the heights of the houses and the spot where Munch likely stood. They then retraced the paths of the Sun and the Moon across the sky at the time Munch was there.

They concluded that the setting Sun did not appear in that section of sky at that time, but the Moon did. As for the missing reflection, it was not an artistic choice, as some art historians had proposed, but a matter of optics: from the artist's perspective, the row of houses blocked it.

Reactions to the findings have varied. "Olson makes points that art historians have managed to miss, such as how Munch was a very careful observer of the natural world," says art historian Reinhold Heller, author of the 1984 biography Munch: His Life and Work. But Sue Prideaux, author of 2005's Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, offers only caustic praise. "I think that it's absolutely splendid that two such learned scientists as Don Olson and Russell Doescher bend their considerable brainpower to decoding Munch rather in the manner of crossword addicts. Photographic fidelity was never Munch's aim." Prideaux adds that Munch was interested in capturing the feeling of a moment and that objective details were of little consequence to him. As he himself once wrote, "Realism is concerned only with the external shell of nature....There are other things to be discovered, even broader avenues to be explored."

"You can't ruin a painting's mystique through technical analysis," Olson says. "It still has the same emotional impact. We are just separating the real from the unreal."

Olson, 61, began his scientific career exploring Einstein's theory of general relativity. He worked on computer simulations of the radiation near black holes and the distribution of galaxies. In other words, he spent his days inside a lab delving into topics that few people outside the lab understood. Then, one evening two decades ago, he and his wife, Marilynn, an English professor also at Texas State, attended a faculty party at which one of Marilynn's colleagues mentioned having difficulties with some passages in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales—they were loaded with astronomical references. Chaucer was no mere stargazer—he wrote an entire treatise on the astrolabe, an instrument used to calculate the positions of stars and planets—and sections of "The Franklin's Tale" deal in technical language with the prediction of a strange mammoth tide. Olson agreed to help decipher the passages. "I can remember exactly where I was standing in the room because that moment changed my life," he says of accepting that challenge.

Analyzing computer simulations of the positions of the Moon and Sun, Olson surmised that a phenomenon described by Chaucer—"And by his magic for a week or more / It seemed the rocks were gone; he'd cleared the shore"—occurred in 1340. That year, when the Sun and Moon were at their closest points to Earth, they lined up in an eclipse of the Sun; their combined gravity caused extremely high tides off the coast of Brittany.

"Most people see liberal arts on one side and sciences on the other, but I get to break those barriers down," Olson says, though he admits that he now gives relativity relatively short shrift. "I would love to know what happened before the Big Bang," he says, "but I don't think I'm smart enough to figure that out." He adds that he prefers "problems that are challenging but solvable."

Not long after Olson dealt with Chaucer, James Pohl, a history professor at Texas State and a former marine, came to him with a different sort of problem. Pohl had been studying the November 1943 Allied assault on the Pacific island of Tarawa, in which U.S. Marine landing craft were unexpectedly grounded on a coral reef about 600 yards offshore. The marines had to disembark and wade to the beach while exposed to heavy enemy fire. More than 1,000 were killed. Pohl wanted Olson to explain what had gone wrong.

Olson figured out that the marines' assault had taken place on one of two days that year when the Moon was farthest from Earth and also in its quarter phase, creating an unusually low tide. "When people have asked me who was to blame, I can tell them with confidence that the answer is no one," says Olson.

World War II war correspondent Robert Sherrod, who had been at the battle, presented Olson's conclusions at a reunion of Tarawa survivors and told Olson that the marines were gratified that there was a scientific explanation. And a military historian included the findings in his account of the battle.

While researching Tarawa, Olson came across another amphibious-landing mystery. In Julius Caesar's account of his invasion of Britain in 55 B.C., the general wrote that after seeing the enemy atop high cliffs (of Dover), he ordered his fleet to put ashore several miles away. But the exact location of where it landed has been debated by historians for centuries: historical descriptions seem to match a spot to the northeast, but currents that day would have taken the ships southwest.

Since coming across the puzzle 20 years ago, Olson has been collecting information about it, including a firsthand account of the battle by a Roman soldier. In 2007, Olson even sailed to the site himself to test conditions. That's when he figured out that Caesar had to have put in at a point to the northeast, near the town of Deal, as historical descriptions suggest. The date given in Caesar's history—or in the transcribed copies that remain—had to be wrong, and the landing must have taken place on August 22 or 23, not the 26th, as Caesar has it.

Olson published his Caesarean findings—one of the most recent of about 50 puzzles he has solved—in the August 2008 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine, whose readers (professional and amateur astronomers), he expects, check his calculations. (So far, he's not been found in error.)

Olson also investigated the sinking of the USS Indianapolis at the end of World War II. Two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine struck the heavy cruiser around midnight on July 30, 1945. The resulting explosion killed 300 sailors, and the ship sank in the Philippine Sea, casting 900 men into shark-infested waters. Only 317 survived to be rescued four days later. The Navy charged the ship's captain, Charles B. McVay, with negligence for failing to evade enemy fire. He was court-martialed and demoted, despite protests from men under his command that he was following standard procedures and testimony from the Japanese sub commander that McVay could not have escaped the attack. McVay committed suicide in 1968. He was exonerated in 2000 by a Congressional resolution that declared "the American people should now recognize Captain McVay's lack of culpability for the tragic loss of the USS Indianapolis and the lives of the men who died."

The case piqued Olson's interest. After reading survivors' accounts, researching weather conditions and analyzing astronomical data at the time of the attack, Olson concluded that the submarine had surfaced just when the Indianapolis was in the glittering path of the Moon's reflection, allowing the Japanese to see it silhouetted from ten miles away but obscuring the submarine from the Americans' view. And once it was spotted, "the ship was doomed," he says.

In addition to puzzles in history, literature and art, Olson also likes photographic puzzles, such as the one he posed to students in an Astronomy in Art History and Literature course he taught at Texas State: When did Ansel Adams capture his celebrated Yosemite National Park image Moon and Half Dome? Although Adams kept careful technical records—noting shutter speeds, f-stops, lenses and film—he rarely dated his negatives, to the frustration of art historians. In the case of Moon and Half Dome, Adams noted only that he had taken it in 1960.

After a field trip to view Yosemite's cliffs and using clues from the photograph—the amount of snow on the ground, the phase of the Moon and the depth of the shadows on the granite dome—Olson and his students concluded that the photograph had been taken at 4:14 p.m. on December 28, 1960. And since they also determined that the Moon and Sun would be in nearly identical places at 4:05 p.m. on December 13, 1994, dozens of Adams fans and even a couple of the photographer's relatives, including his daughter-in-law and grandson, went to the park on that day to shoot their own versions of the iconic photograph.

Olson and another group of students took on Adams' Autumn Moon, a panorama of Yosemite Valley that had been dated in various books to either 1944 or 1948. A series of photographs of the valley taken by a park ranger in 2004 helped them pinpoint where Adams likely took the picture, while weather records and the angle of the Moon helped narrow down the day. Shadows in a color photograph of the scene that Adams took two and a half minutes before he made the black-and-white exposure (based on the position of the Moon) gave clues to the Sun's location and the time of the shot. Olson determined that it had been taken at 7:03 p.m. on September 15, 1948.

He was then able to predict when the light and seasonal conditions would be virtually identical, and he and hundreds of Adams fans ventured to the spot at the appointed time. At 6:52 p.m. on September 15, 2005, Olson's colleague Doescher snapped a photograph that looks eerily similar to Adams' masterpiece. "In a project like this, the journey is its own reward," says Olson. "We not only got to walk in Adams' footsteps, we got to understand the circumstances under which he took the photograph. And the truth is, I think he was prepared. I think he knew that moment in nature was coming."

A starry sky in a work of art often catches Olson's eye—he is an astronomer, after all—and starts him thinking about how he might identify the stars and just when they were captured. "He brings the power of the stars to bear upon our understanding," says art historian Paul Tucker of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Tucker teaches Olson's work in his class because "pinpointing the time period or a particular moment can have real bearing on the meaning of a picture."

Olson has tackled three van Gogh paintings, including White House at Night, one of more than 70 that van Gogh created in Auvers-sur-Oise in the weeks before he committed suicide, on July 29, 1890. (He hasn't published any findings on van Gogh's Starry Night, saying it's "not simple" to identify the stars in the painting.) When Olson and several of his students traveled to the town, about 20 miles outside Paris, they discovered that the house identified in most guidebooks as the one in the painting didn't have the right number of windows and faced the wrong direction. Once they found the right house—after walking every street in town—it was relatively easy to deduce from celestial calculations and weather reports that the star in the White House painting was actually the planet Venus as it appeared above the house near sunset on June 16, 1890.

Olson delved into Munch's best-known work, The Scream, in 1995. About the time Munch painted it, in 1893, the artist wrote himself a note—which Olson read with the help of Norwegian dictionaries—about a walk he had taken at sunset years earlier, on which "a flaming sword of blood slashed open the vault of heaven—the atmosphere turned to blood—with glaring tongues of fire...and truly I heard a great scream."

In Oslo, Olson located the road featured in a sketch for the painting. Details in it—a cliff, a road with a railing and an island in a fjord—indicated to Olson that Munch must have been facing southwest when he drew it. Olson concluded that the painting's blood-red sky was no metaphor but the extraordinary aftereffects of the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia, which sent so much gas and ash into the atmosphere that skies were darkened or colored worldwide for many months.

Some Munch experts have challenged Olson's interpretation. Biographer Prideaux points out that Munch expressed contempt for realism in painting and "stated that his purpose was to paint the vision of the soul." Furthermore, "you'd hardly call the figure [in The Scream] realist, so why the sky?" And art historian Jeffery Howe of Boston College notes that Munch didn't paint The Scream until ten years after Krakatoa erupted. Howe admits that Munch "might have remembered the scene and painted it later," as the artist's note suggests, but Howe remains unpersuaded.

Olson insists his finding doesn't diminish Munch's creation. "How many people in Europe saw the Krakatoa twilights?" he says. "It would be hundreds of thousands, even millions. And how many people created a painting that people talk about more than a hundred years later? One. We think [our work] doesn't reduce Munch's greatness; it enhances it."

Olson now is working on an analysis of the skies in three other Munch paintings. After that, Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise. In the 1970s, John Rewald, an Impressionist scholar, asked whether the painting's sunrise might actually be a sunset. Tucker tried his hand at the problem in 1984, consulting period maps and photographs of Le Havre, where Monet painted the piece, and concluded that the artist had indeed captured a sunrise. But, he said, "I would be more than happy to be corrected, and if [Olson] were able to bring scientific [and] astronomical issues to bear, all the better."

Whatever his findings, Olson's forays into art and literature are likely to keep stirring the debate about the sources of great art. His work may not change the way we see Munch or Adams or Chaucer, but it does tell us at least a bit about their three-dimensional worlds. And from there, we can see where the true genius begins.



What about the Battle of Marathon?

Though this is probably a long forgotten story of the Marathon battle between the Greeks and Persians of 490 B.C. it is nevertheless a case where scientific investigation can shed some truth of past events. Historical accounts are detailed from the ancient texts of Herodotus and Plutarch and the story roughly goes like this. The victory of the battle was transmitted via a runner en route to Athens--one Pheidippides who ran nearly 25 miles in September, delivered his message of battle victory and warning of a sea surprise, and died on the spot. End of story--well, not quite. Apparently some individuals began to investigate the physiology of long distance running and astronomical events and came up with a new perspective. That the Battle of Marathon was not in September 490 B.C., but more likely in August 490 B.C. Poor Pheidippides most likely died from heat exhaustion as climate, season, and human endurance didn't mix well. Furthermore, moon phases [astronomy] was a significant factor for recent scholars and modern sleuths to formulate the dates of the events. It can get complex and best left to Tariq Malik's article "Marathon Man: Astronomer Sleuths Revise Date of Ancient Run" .



Astronomy, Homer, and justice

Van Gogh's mystery star at the White House

Forensic texts online

In conjunction to FBI telling a FIB? these may be read online from The National Academies Press:

Ballistic Imaging by Daniel L. Cork, John E. Rolph, Eugene S. Meieran, and Carol V. Petrie, [editors]

DNA Technology in Forensic Science from the Committee on DNA Technology in Forensic Science, National Research Council

Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence from the Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices, Wesley Skogan and Kathleen Frydl, editors, National Research Council

Forensic Analysis: Weighing Bullet Lead Evidence from the Committee on Scientific Assessment of Bullet Lead Elemental Composition Comparison, National Research Council

The Evaluation of Forensic DNA Evidence from the Committee on DNA Forensic Science: An Update, National Research Council

FBI telling a FIB?

Over the years, mostly through a plethora of crime programs, the FBI has come off as the repository of forensic justice...smoking guns were found everywhere, usually through DNA analysis, metallurgical spectral analysis, chromatography, computer wizardry, etc. Sometimes, justice is compromised and bad science abounds.

"FBI Lab in Serious Trouble"

A sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on

by

Ludwig De Braeckeleer

February 17th, 2009

OhmyNews

"My hope is that this report will provide an objective and unbiased perspective of the critical needs of our crime labs." -- Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama

In a few days, the National Academy of Sciences will release a report regarding forensic science in the US in general. The report takes a special look at the FBI forensic laboratories.

Scientists who worked on the report allege that the National Institute of Justice, a research arm of the Justice Department, tried repeatedly to block its release. Senator Shelby accuses the National Institute of Justice of having attempted to influence the panel.

According to people who have seen the current draft, the document is "a sweeping critique of many forensic methods that the police and prosecutors rely on, including fingerprinting, firearms identification and analysis of bite marks, blood spatter, hair and handwriting."

The report suggests that that Congress should create a federal agency to guarantee the independence of the forensic analyses.

It states that the Bureau forensic lab relies on untested theories conducted by poorly trained technicians who have no training in sciences and statistics.

A 2004 National Academy of Sciences report, sharply critical of the FBI's bullet-lead technique, had forced the agency to abandon this method.

Nationwide, it has been estimated that the technique has been used in more than 2,000 cases over the last four decades.

Several former FBI employees believe that a review of all cases where the lead identification method was used in testimony should be urgently conducted.

So far, the FBI has rejected such reviews on the basis that it would be very expensive. A sum of US$70,000 was mentioned. For comparison, a recent survey conducted by Boston attorney Juliane Barillo indicates that the compensation for a year of wrongful imprisonment averages about $1 million.

The new report also establishes that the FBI lab fingerprint identification methods are faulty, as spectacularly revealed in the case of Brandon Mayfield.

Since 2005, the nonpartisan Forensic Justice Project, run by former FBI lab whistle-blower Frederic Whitehurst, has tried to force the bureau to release a list of bullet-lead cases under the Freedom of Information Act. I asked Whitehurst if he thought the FBI labs would survive the criticism.

"The labs will survive of course. We need the labs out there. But they will not be the freewheeling pirates of pseudo science that they have been in the past. In reality the government does not need to form a whole new agency to protect its people. If a new agency is formed the FBI will compromise it by threats, blackmail and under-the-table dealings," Whitehurst told the author.

"What needs to happen is for the US government to require that any crime lab in the US be licensed to operate and that any protocols, audits, scientific papers, quality assurance, etc. that form the basis for the forensic opinions be made clear and open information available to the American people who pay the wages of the crime lab workers... Crime labs cannot operate in secret. Science in secret ceases to be science."

In academic circles, some experts have not hidden their anger toward certain programs and what seems to be an attempt to cover-up decades of fraudulent forensic sciences.

Clifford Spiegelman is a statistician at Texas A&M University. He reviewed the FBI's statistical methods for the science academy.

"They said the FBI agents who went after Al Capone were the untouchables," he said, "and I say the FBI experts who gave this bullet-lead testimony are the unbelievables."

"I'm sure that every defense attorney in the country is waiting for this report to come out," a person who read it says. "There are going to be challenges to fingerprints and firearms evidence and the general lack of empirical grounding. It's going to be big."

The author can now announce that the technical report regarding the bomb that exploded on board of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie is seriously flawed. Once corrections are made, a spectacular conclusion follows. The Lockerbie verdict is scientifically impossible. A summary of this new report, which was reviewed by top experts in the field, will be soon made available to our readers.

And, "comparative bullet-lead analysis" is questioned...

"FBI's Forensic Test Full of Holes"

Lee Wayne Hunt is one of hundreds of defendants whose convictions are in question now that FBI forensic evidence has been discredited.

by

John Solomon

November 18th, 2007

Washington Post

Hundreds of defendants sitting in prisons nationwide have been convicted with the help of an FBI forensic tool that was discarded more than two years ago. But the FBI lab has yet to take steps to alert the affected defendants or courts, even as the window for appealing convictions is closing, a joint investigation by The Washington Post and "60 Minutes" has found.

The science, known as comparative bullet-lead analysis, was first used after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. The technique used chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup.

In 2004, however, the nation's most prestigious scientific body concluded that variations in the manufacturing process rendered the FBI's testimony about the science "unreliable and potentially misleading." Specifically, the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence."

A year later, the bureau abandoned the analysis.

But the FBI lab has never gone back to determine how many times its scientists misled jurors. Internal memos show that the bureau's managers were aware by 2004 that testimony had been overstated in a large number of trials. In a smaller number of cases, the experts had made false matches based on a faulty statistical analysis of the elements contained in different lead samples, documents show.

"We cannot afford to be misleading to a jury," the lab director wrote to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in late summer 2005 in a memo outlining why the bureau was abandoning the science. "We plan to discourage prosecutors from using our previous results in future prosecutions."

Despite those private concerns, the bureau told defense lawyers in a general letter dated Sept. 1, 2005, that although it was ending the technique, it "still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis." And in at least two cases, the bureau has tried to help state prosecutors defend past convictions by using court filings that experts say are still misleading. The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which it performed the analysis.

For the majority of affected prisoners, the typical two-to-four-year window to appeal their convictions based on new scientific evidence is closing.

Dwight E. Adams, the now-retired FBI lab director who ended the technique, said the government has an obligation to release all the case files, to independently review the expert testimony and to alert courts to any errors that could have affected a conviction.

"It troubles me that anyone would be in prison for any reason that wasn't justified. And that's why these reviews should be done in order to determine whether or not our testimony led to the conviction of a wrongly accused individual," Adams said in an interview. "I don't believe there's anything that we should be hiding."

The Post and "60 Minutes" identified at least 250 cases nationwide in which bullet-lead analysis was introduced, including more than a dozen in which courts have either reversed convictions or now face questions about whether innocent people were sent to prison. The cases include a North Carolina drug dealer who has developed significant new evidence to bolster his claim of innocence and a Maryland man who was recently granted a new murder trial.

Documents show that the FBI's concerns about the science dated to 1991 and came to light only because a former FBI lab scientist began challenging it.

In response to the information uncovered by The Post and "60 Minutes," the FBI late last week said it would initiate corrective actions including a nationwide review of all bullet-lead testimonies and notification to prosecutors so that the courts and defendants can be alerted. The FBI lab also plans to create a system to monitor the accuracy of its scientific testimony.

The Post-"60 Minutes" investigation "has brought some serious concerns to our attention," said John Miller, assistant director of public affairs. "The FBI is committed to addressing these concerns. It's the right thing to do."

The past inaction on bullet-lead contrasts with the last time the FBI's science was called into question, in the mid-1990s, when 13 lab employees were accused of shoddy work and of giving overstated testimony involving several disciplines, including explosives as well as hair and fiber analysis. Back then, the Justice Department reviewed hundreds of cases in which FBI experts testified, and it notified prisoners about problems that affected their convictions. The government did so because prosecutors have a legal obligation to turn over evidence that could help defendants prove their innocence.

Current FBI managers said that they originally believed that the public release of the 2004 National Academy of Sciences report and the subsequent ending of the analysis generated enough publicity to give defense attorneys and their clients plenty of opportunities to appeal. The bureau also pointed out that it sent form letters to police agencies and umbrella groups for local prosecutors and criminal defense lawyers.

Even the harshest critics concede that the FBI correctly measured the chemical elements of lead bullets. But the science academy found that the lab used faulty statistical calculations to declare that bullets matched even when the measurements differed slightly. FBI witnesses also overstated the significance of the matches.

The FBI's umbrella letters, however, glossed over those problems and did little to alert prosecutors or defense lawyers that erroneous testimony could have helped convict defendants, one of the recipients said.

"Frankly, the letters that they sent them, you know, were minimizing the significance of the error in the first place," said defense lawyer Barry Scheck, whose nonprofit Innocence Project has helped free more than 200 wrongly convicted people. The letters said that "our science wasn't really inaccurate. Our interpretation was wrong. But the interpretation is everything."

The FBI said last week that the 2005 letters "should have been clearer." Scheck has now been asked to assist the FBI's review.

Since 2005, the nonpartisan Forensic Justice Project, run by former FBI lab whistle-blower Frederic Whitehurst, has tried to force the bureau to release a list of bullet-lead cases under the Freedom of Information Act. The Post joined the request, citing the public value of the information. But the government has stalled, among other things seeking $70,000 to search for the documents.

"By stonewalling and delaying the release, Justice has ensured that wrongfully convicted citizens are deprived of their right to appeal or seek post-conviction relief because the statute of limitations in many states has expired," said David Colapinto, the lawyer for the group.

As part of its review, the FBI will release all bullet-lead case files involving convictions.

The Scope of the Cases

Most of the estimated 2,500 instances in which the FBI performed bullet-lead exams involved homicide cases that were prosecuted at the state and local levels, where FBI examiners often were summoned as expert witnesses for the prosecution.

To compile an independent list, The Post and "60 Minutes" conducted a nationwide review, interviewing dozens of defense lawyers, prosecutors and scientific experts. The effort also included a sweep of electronic court filings conducted by four summer associates at the New York law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom.

In many of the cases that raise the most compelling questions, the inmates might have a hard time winning the public's sympathy. Some had criminal backgrounds and most were convicted with at least some additional circumstantial evidence linking them to gruesome crime scenes. But the common thread is that removing the flawed bullet-lead evidence has created reasonable doubt about guilt in the minds of legal experts, the courts and at least one juror.

In North Carolina, Lee Wayne Hunt, 48, remains in prison after being convicted 21 years ago of a double murder. Hunt was an admitted marijuana dealer, but has steadfastly denied involvement in the killings. The FBI testified that its bullet-lead analysis linked fragments from the victims to a box of bullets connected to Hunt's co-defendant. That was the sole forensic evidence against Hunt. State prosecutors recently conceded that the analysis should not be considered "scientifically supported and relied upon."

In addition, the attorney for Hunt's co-defendant, who committed suicide in prison, has since declared that his client carried out the murders alone.

Despite both developments, Hunt has been denied a new trial.

"What they're relying on here is technicalities to keep an innocent man in prison," said Richard Rosen, Hunt's attorney.

Another North Carolina case highlights the impact that FBI bullet-lead testimony had on local jurors. James Donald King faces execution after being convicted of killing his two wives. He admitted to killing his first wife, spent time in prison, was released on parole, remarried and then was convicted of murdering his second wife.

The court is considering whether to grant a new trial.

"If the state had not introduced evidence linking a bullet in Mr. King's car to the bullet fragments in the victim, there would have been reasonable doubt in my mind as to Mr. King's guilt," juror Michelle Lynn Adamson said in an affidavit supporting his appeal.

Other defendants have had mixed results:

* In Maryland, the Court of Appeals last year reversed the murder conviction of Gemar Clemons and ordered a new trial, concluding that the FBI's bullet-lead conclusions "are not generally accepted within the scientific community and thus are not admissible."

* In New Jersey, courts have reversed and reinstated convictions in cases involving bullet lead. The conviction of one defendant, Michael Behn, was reversed, but he recently was re-convicted on other evidence.

* Shane Ragland's conviction in the 1994 killing of a University of Kentucky football player was reversed after Kathleen Lundy, an FBI bullet-lead examiner, pleaded guilty to giving false testimony in his case about bullet-lead manufacturing. A few weeks ago, Ragland pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and is now free.

Ernest Roger Peele, a retired FBI agent who testified about bullet matching in 130 cases, stands by his testimony but said that sometimes the nuances of science get "lost in the adversarial nature of the courtroom." He said he would no longer tell jurors that bullets can be linked to specific boxes because of the science academy's findings.

Peele, who said he was frustrated that he was never contacted by the academy, added that his bullet matches were meant to be "a part of a puzzle" and never the only forensic evidence. "Is it possible there are innocent people in jail? Yes. Is it possible that bullet lead was part of that process? Yes."

The Origins of the Science

The FBI's bullet-lead analysis was created more than four decades ago to link suspects to crimes in cases in which bullets had fragmented to the point where traditional firearms tracing -- based on gun-barrel groove markings -- would not work.

So FBI scientists used chemistry to try to find matches. Their assumption was that bullets made from the same batch of lead would have the same chemical composition. U.S. bullet-makers recycle lead from car batteries and melt it down in huge amounts, and it was believed that each batch would produce bullets sharing the same trace elements.

The FBI first used the technique after Kennedy's assassination, hoping to determine whether various bullet fragments came from the same gun. In July 1964, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the commission investigating the assassination that the bureau's findings were "not considered sufficient" to make any matches.

By the early 1980s, the bureau was the only practitioner of the science and routinely used it to help state and local police link crime-scene bullets to those in a gun or a box owned by a suspect. There are few federal murder statutes, but the FBI routinely helps local law enforcement by providing forensic expertise in homicide cases.

In the mid-1990s, Lundy used the science to help prove that Clinton White House lawyer Vincent W. Foster committed suicide, internal FBI documents show.

In the early days, bullet fragments were subjected to neutron beams that would allow scientists to measure the presence and amounts of at least three chemical elements: antimony, arsenic and copper. If two bullets had similar measurements of those three elements -- the FBI allowed for a small margin of error -- they were declared a match.

In 1996, the bureau switched to a new method called "inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy," in which scientists identified and measured seven trace elements in the bullets, adding the elements bismuth, cadmium, tin and silver. The goal was to increase the precision of the tests. But at the same time that it was measuring more elements, the FBI doubled the margin of error for declaring matches.

"Not enough suspects were being caught in the new net using seven elements, so they chose to use a bigger net," said Clifford Spiegelman, a statistician at Texas A&M University who reviewed the FBI's statistical methods for the science academy.

The bureau conducted a study in 1991 that called bullet-lead analysis a "useful forensic tool" that produced "accurate" and "reproducible" matches.

The study, however, raised two concerns.

First, it found that bullets packaged 15 months apart -- a span that assumed separate batches of lead -- had the exact composition, potentially undercutting the theory that each batch was unique.

Second, it found that bullets in a single box often had several different lead compositions. That finding, it cautioned, should have "significant impact on interpretation of results in forensic cases."

Peele, the retired bullet-lead examiner, was the primary author of that study. He said he still felt comfortable having told jurors in the past that bullets from the same box could be expected to match, as long as his remarks were carefully qualified.

In the Hunt case, he testified that his match of the crime-scene bullets to those in the suspects' box was "typical of everything we examined coming from the same box or the next closest possibility would be the same type, same manufacturer, packaged on or about the same day."

Peele said that he always tried to tell jurors that some bullets in the same box might not match. Still, he said it was reasonable for jurors to conclude that matching bullets could have come from the same box. "I don't think it's misleading as long as it's fully explained," he said.

Some of Peele's colleagues went further. FBI examiner John Riley told a Florida jury: "It is my opinion that all of those bullets came from the same box of ammunition." A New Jersey prosecutor suggested that the bullets matched by the FBI were as unique as a "snowflake or fingerprint."

Today, the FBI regards all such testimony as inaccurate. "The science does not and has never supported the testimony that one bullet can be identified as coming from a particular box of bullets," said Adams, the retired FBI lab director.

A Challenge From Within

The FBI's about-face was prompted by a challenge from within its ranks.

William Tobin, an FBI lab metallurgist for a quarter-century, won accolades working on cases such as the crash of TWA Flight 800, in which he helped prove that the plane was downed by an accidental fuel-tank explosion, not terrorism. Shortly before he retired, Tobin was approached by a woman who believed that the bullet-lead science used against her brother, a New Jersey murder defendant, was flawed. Still employed by the bureau, Tobin was not permitted to help.

But when he retired in 1998, he decided to look further. Bullet matching had always been done by the lab's chemists, and as a metallurgist, Tobin wondered about their assumptions. Soon he joined with Erik Randich, a metallurgist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

By 2001, the two had finished a study that challenged the key assumptions that the FBI had been making about bullet lead. They found that bullets made from the same batch did not always match, because subtle chemical changes occurred throughout the manufacturing process. Tobin bought bullets at several stores in Alaska and found that a large number of bullets with the same composition and manufacturing date were often sold in the same community, suggesting that it was wrong to assume that a bullet match could be narrowed to one suspect.

"It hadn't been based at all on science but, rather, had been based on subjective belief," Tobin said in an interview. "Courts, and even practitioners, had been seduced by the sophistication of the analytical instrumentation for over three decades."

Soon, Tobin began appearing as a witness for defendants challenging FBI bullet-lead matches. Courts began to take notice, too, and the FBI suddenly faced a barrage of questions about a science that had gone unchallenged for three decades.

Adams asked the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 to examine the FBI's work, temporarily halting new bullet-lead matches. Two years later, the academy's findings stunned the bureau.

The panel concluded that although the FBI had been taking accurate bullet-lead measurements in its lab, the statistical methods and its expert testimonies were flawed.

The science "does not . . . have the unique specificity of techniques such as DNA," and "available data does not support any statement that a crime bullet came from a particular box of ammunition," the panel concluded. All the FBI could say going forward was that bullets made from the same batch "are more likely" to match in chemical makeup than those made from different batches. Adams soon declared that such testimony was so general that it had no value to jurors, and he ended the technique.
The FBI Response

The FBI went on the offensive to portray its decision in the best light.

In a news release dated Sept. 1, 2005, the bureau declared that it "still firmly supports the scientific foundation of bullet lead analysis" but that it was ending the technique because of the questions about its "relative probative value," the "costs of maintaining the equipment" and the "resources necessary to do the examinations."

The bureau also sent form letters to the more than 300 police agencies it had assisted with the science and to the umbrella groups representing local prosecutors and local criminal defense lawyers so they could "take whatever steps they deem appropriate."

The letters cited the academy's report but did not call attention to the magnitude of the FBI's internal concerns.

For instance, the letters stated that the impact of the academy's findings "on previously issued examination reports remains unaddressed." In fact, the FBI had conducted its own review to determine how often bad statistics led to mistaken matches.

In March 2005, the chief of the FBI chemistry unit that oversaw the analysis wrote in an e-mail that he applied one of the new statistical methods recommended by the National Academy of Sciences to 436 cases dating to 1996 and found that at least seven would "have a different result today." Marc A. LeBeau estimated that at least 1.4 percent of prior matches would change.

If the FBI employed other statistical methods the number of non-matches would be "a lot more," LeBeau wrote. In fact, when the bureau tested one method recommended by the academy on a sample of 100 bullets, the results changed in the "large majority of the cases," he wrote.

Despite the concerns, the FBI provided affidavits in at least two cases seeking to help prosecutors sustain convictions that were based on bullet-lead matches.

In one such affidavit introduced in Maryland, the FBI cited the academy's report but did not mention it faulted the bureau's statistical methods.

That omission concerns the chairman of the academy panel.

The affidavit "does not discuss the statistical bullet-matching technique, which is key and probably the most significant scientific flaw found by the committee," said Kenneth MacFadden, a private chemistry expert.

MacFadden and Spiegelman said they also believed the affidavit was misleading, because it estimates that the maximum number of .22-caliber bullets in a batch of lead was 1.3 million. The academy said the number could be as high as 35 million.

In a May 12, 2005, e-mail, the deputy lab director told LeBeau, "I don't believe that we can testify about how many bullets may have come from the same melt and our estimate may be totally misleading."

FBI officials said Friday they will stop using the affidavit.

"They said the FBI agents who went after Al Capone were the untouchables, and I say the FBI experts who gave this bullet-lead testimony were the unbelievables," Spiegelman said.