Posted on 03/11/2002 6:54:53 AM PST by buaya
In 1993, when the Supreme Court demanded real scientific standards for expert evidence in federal courts, some critics correctly anticipated that several criminal identification techniques would be attacked in the courts with some success: microscopic hair comparison, bite mark analysis, handwriting comparison. Few, if any, predicted what is happening now: The bedrock forensic identifier of the 20th century, fingerprinting, has started to wobble.
In a pretrial hearing in a Philadelphia federal court in January, Judge Louis H. Pollak sharply limited the use of fingerprint evidence in a drug-related murder case. He found that there is no persuasive proof that the methods used by fingerprint analysts have been adequately tested in objective, controlled experiments.
The problem is that though fingerprints do seem to be unique identifiers, any print must be read and matched. The question - one that can only be answered by rigorous scientific inquiry - is how much of a match is required to say that a particular fingerprint is from a particular person.
Fingerprint experts had conceded that the process they use - matching large, evenly pressured prints taken from suspects at the police station to smaller, unevenly pressured prints from crime scenes - is ultimately subjective and bedeviled by inconsistent standards. The French, for example, require that two fingerprints match at 16 points before they can be accepted as coming from the same person; the Australians, 12; and the Swedes, 7. The F.B.I. refuses to state a number at all, relying instead on case- by-case judgments.
Judge Pollak, who is a former dean of the law schools at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, also noted "alarmingly high" error rates when fingerprint examiners took proficiency tests; in 1995 only 44 percent of 156 law enforcement examiners could correctly identify all five prints in the test, and in a 1998 study the number improved to only 58 percent.
In the coming murder trial, Judge Pollak ruled, fingerprint experts will not be allowed to express an opinion about whether fingerprints match, but will only be allowed to testify as to the points they see as similar.
As prosecutors quickly recognized, the judge's ruling calls into question the overall acceptance of fingerprint evidence in our courts. In a motion last month for reconsideration of the ruling, the United States attorney cautioned that the implications of the court's opinion "undermine not only the admission of fingerprint evidence . . . but all manner of forensic opinion testimony."
No one doubts that fingerprints can, and do, serve as a highly discriminating identifier, and digital photographic enhancement and computer databases now promise to make fingerprint identification more useful than ever before. But to what degree incomplete and imperfect fingerprints can be reliably used to identify individuals requires more scientific examination. And the criminal system needs forensic examiners who can pass rigorous proficiency tests.
Forensic science has rarely been subjected to the kind of scrutiny and independent verification applied to other fields of applied and medical science. Instead, analysts testifying in courts about fingerprint analysis, bite marks, handwriting comparisons and the like have often argued that in their field the courtroom itself provided the test. New York is the only state that regulates crime laboratories with standards even approaching those routinely used for clinical medicine.
As the National Institutes of Health finance basic scientific research, the National Institute of Justice should put money into verification and validation before a technique of identification is admitted in court. Academic centers should be established for research into these questions under the aegis of medical and law schools.
Independence and scientific rigor should be the norm for forensic science. Crime victims, the wrongly accused, and the public will all have more confidence in the system if forensic scientists and their laboratories are completely independent, not beholden to prosecutors or defense attorneys.
Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck are directors of the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.
This is an ACLU-type organization that is dedicated to helping criminals beat the rap by whatever means, That's why they wrote the article. The NY Times is generally sympathetic to those goals. That's why they printed the article.
The bottom line, however, is clear, If fingerprint evidence that would tie these defendants to the murder is not admitted by the trial judge, that judge's decision will be reversed on appeal. All judges are bound by the decisions of the US Supreme Court, and that Court has upheld the use of fingerprint evidence more than a generation ago.
This is a tempest in a teapot and a grossly (and deliberately) misleading headline.
Congressman Billybob
You no longer have to wear gloves
during criminal operations.
At least I hope that's what the dimbulbs amongst the criminal population think. Fingerprints at the scene are, and will remain, a key piece of circumstantial evidence. THE key? Hell no. Never were.
Not really. Try reading the link I provided to the article "The Myth of Fingerprints" and you will notice that this case is a direct result of the 1993 Supreme Court decision Daubert v. Merrell Dow.
I have been suspicious of fingerprints, and "forensic science" for quite some time. I became suspicious of fingerprints after noting all of the abandoned and inoperable fingerprint and palm-geometry readers at various secure facilities I visit in the course of my work. If fingerprinting is a science, then why don't these things work? They have been marketed since the early 1980s and yet I have yet to encounter one actually in day to day use.
Aside from fingerprints, the whole scam of "expert testimony" has smelled fishy for quite some time. I recall watching one of those Tv news magazine shows back in the early 1990s. The topic was insurance scams. They investigated one guy who claimed he was permanently paralyzed from the waiste down, from a seemingly minor fender-bender. The guy showed up in court, in a weelchair, looking sickly and forlorn. After he received a juicy court award, he and his wife went on vacation, and a TV camera crew followed him. They taped the guy bounding up a flight of stairs with a suitcase in each hand, dancing with his wife, and sailing. The wheelchair was nowhere in sight.
So who determined this guy was paralyzed? An "expert witness" testified to that. It turns out that the "expert witness" never physically examined the man in question; instead, he "analyzed" a set of doodles the man made on a notepad, and thus determined that the man was paralyzed for life.
Recently, there was a "60 minutes" story about a "bite mark" expert who has an uncanny ability to detect bite marks with UV lamps. But in many cases, the bite marks disappear immediately after this guy makes his "match;" hence, no one else can ever verify his findings.
Unless perhaps YOU were the one falsely accused. Then you might yourself be interested in any way possible to "beat the rap."
Very true. I understand that hundreds of wrongly convicted people have been exonerated by DNA testing. To me, this means that 1) the "forensic evidence" used to convict these people was bogus, or 2) DNA testing itself is unreliable.
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