Whitehurst, a respected expert in the chemistry of bomb-blast residues, played no part whatsoever in the Simpson case, and prosecutors will argue he should not be allowed to testify. Still, Whitehurst has already appeared for the defense in another high-profile case-the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine other defendants in the alleged plot to blow up U.N. headquarters and other targets in New York. He has been waging an internal war of cranky principle against the FBI lab since 1989. Apparently passed over for promotion and just recently demoted to new duties as a trainee in the paint-chip-analysis section, Whitehurst accuses the FBI lab of slipshod work and a persistent pro-prosecution bias: he freely uses terms like “perjury” and “fabrication of evidence.” Although some of his allegations seem overblown, his complaints are being taken seriously by the Justice Department. NEWSWEEK has learned that Justice now plans to assemble a blue-ribbon scientific panel to review the lab’s work.
FBI Director Louis Freer, already badly burned by allegations of a cover-up in the Ruby Ridge fiasco, rushed last week to order an internal review of hundreds of forensic-analysis cases that Whitehurst has charged were flawed. Sources say FBI scientists have examined nearly 300 cases with no sign of tampering or other misconduct. A Justice Department source said that Whitehurst has been filing angry memos on internal problems for years, and that some of his complaints have been trivial. But the same source, noting that Whitehurst has been right on some issues, said, “You can’t just write this guy off.”
Whitehurst wouldn’t let them if they tried. Proud, I prickly and obsessively persistent, he is regarded by his co-workers as something of an odd duck. He is married-to an FBI office work-er-and has a daughter. But colleagues say Whitehurst sometimes alarmed them by wearing two or even three holstered handguns around the lab. Once, testifying in a child-torture case, he demonstrated the effect of burn marks on the victim by taking out a cigarette lighter to scorch his own arm. “There were times,” says one lab veteran, “when you wondered what he might do.”
Eccentric or not, Whitehurst is known for his insistence on rigorous scientific analysis-even if science, in some instances, winds up undermining the prosecution’s case. He was so troubled by inconsistencies in a 1989 case that he took his doubts to the defense–which won an acquittal. In another case, he sent a 26-page critique to the Justice Department charging that two colleagues were insufficiently qualified to make some of the judgments they made under oath. And in 1993, when the FBI lab was doing critical forensic work in the World Trade Center bombing case, Whitehurst booby-trapped his co-workers with a scientific sting. The lab was trying to prove that traces of urea nitrate found in a storage locker allegedly used by the bombers could be linked to samples collected at the explosion site. Whitehurst argued that the bomb-site samples were contaminated by ruptured sewer pipes-and surreptitiously created a phony sample from his own urine and acetone. Confronted with proof of its sloppy methodology, the lab was forced to change its findings.
All four defendants in the World Trade Center bombing were convicted anyway. But Whitehurst was called as a defense witness in the related trial of Sheik Omar and his associates, where he testified about the trick he had played on the FBI lab. The jury will soon decide the outcome of the sheik case-and the verdict on Whitehurst’s allegations is pending as well.
