Mecklenburg County District Attorney Andrew Murray filed legal papers on February 16th dismissing the indictments against Timothy Bridges, who wrongly served over 25 years for a rape and burglary, based in large part on the erroneous testimony of an FBI-trained state hair analyst who claimed that Bridges’s hair linked him to two hairs found at the scene. Bridges was released on October 1, 2015, after prosecutors consented to vacating Bridges’s 1991 convictions. Bridges’s legal team, which included lawyers from the Innocence Project and North Carolina Prisoner Legal Services, also uncovered evidence that police failed to turn over to the district attorney’s office before trial. Post-conviction discovery materials showed that police paid informants and made other threats or promises to the informants, which was contrary to their testimony at trial. Subsequent DNA testing on crime scene evidence also excluded Bridges . . .

Bridges’s case “is one of the first cases to be litigated involving erroneous microscopic hair testimony proffered by an FBI-trained state examiner,” said Chris Fabricant, Director of Strategic Litigation for the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law. “We would like to commend District Attorney Andrew Murray for seeking to restore justice for Mr. Bridges, and we hope other prosecutors around the nation will follow D.A. Murray’s lead in how to handle the many cases where errors have been identified, including in those cases which a state analyst, rather than FBI analyst, testified. D.A. Murray fully appreciated the significance of the erroneous scientific evidence and agreed that introduction of the hair evidence was a due process violation and vacated the convictions even before the DNA testing supported Mr. Bridges’s innocence.”