Move along, nothing to see here...

Unless you like being angry, in which case this won't be news to you. You probably already know.

And of course if you don't like being angry, if you like believing that the good people of the federal government are on your side, citizen, and when they do inexplicably evil things it's only because they've got more information, well, then this won't be news to you either. La la la, I don't hear you...

Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

And there's your answer, of course, right in the first few paragraphs of this long and detailed article. We wouldn't want people getting the idea that all those lies we've been told about the Big G's awesome and infallible forensic power is ... rather less than true, as it turns out. Better that a few members of the flock spend their days trapped unjustly behind wide doors that cast narrow shadows, than that the whole flock lose faith in its shepherd.

After all, what are sheep for? If you can't shear'em, you butcher'em. And they'll go right on believing you're there to protect them, even as the knife falls.

H/T to Firehand.