Is Fingerprint Analysis a Science?

This seems to be a carefully worded conclusion, and I can certainly imagine some situations where a large number of reasonably good technicians would fail to get a perfect score on a test of this sort, while the percentage of correct identifications of finger prints would still be quite high.Let's also recall that in an adversarial proceeding, we would expect sloppy fingerprint determinations to be challenged by other fingerprint experts.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Eyewitness testimony as a whole is far less accurate than is circumstantial evidence.In my experience, fingerprint evidence has been extremely reliable. The implication that it is unreliable 44 per cent of the time appears to be a flawed one. Almost every bad finger print ID I've ever read about was based on fraud rather than scientific error.Dr. Adequate points out the truth that it can be expensive to challenge finger print evidence. I can agree with that, but generally, indigent defendants can force the state to foot the bill for challenging finger print evidence.

It is certainly possible that a juror could act in that way, but fingerprint evidence is not presented in the conclusory fashion you suggest. An expert testifies as to how/why a match was found. The expert is subject to cross examination about the match and the defense can put on rebuttal evidence.There is a lot more questionable evidence presented in trials. For example, the big story in Durham NC is a retrial of Michael Peterson for murder. One of the experts (Duane Deever formerly of the SBI) that testified for the state in the first trial was found to have hidden exonerating evidence and perjured himself regarding other evidence in multiple cases.

Can you support this? I don't see anyone here stating anything about the legal aspects. I see people raising questions and proceeding as if the questions have been answered.For example, someone asks if the experts are scientists, and nobody answers. The discussion continues as if the question has been answered in the negative.Is finger print evidence being misused in court? Are we aware of flawed testimony regarding fingerprints being the norm? Do we test the experts less rigorously than we test any other expert testimony. I haven't seen anybody do anything more than speculate. The closest thing to evidence I've seen here is reference to a study whose conclusions everyone seems to agree are flawed.If in fact, people who testify in court are scientists and their methodology, credentials, and the evidence from which they base their conclusions are tested in court in exactly the fashion as happens for ballistics scientist and evidence, then perhaps what you really have issues with is the legal system in general rather than finger print evidence in particular.So far I don't see any basis for singling out finger print evidence.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Which simply means that I'm asking why this thread has such a sloppy foundation.Or you could just assume that I'm an idiot as you seem to have done.There is plenty of literature out there on the reliability of fingerprint evidence. Some of the articles even have titles similar to the title of this thread. What's been presented here so far isn't even at the creation science level. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I'm referring to the study that led you to conclude that finger print evidence was less reliable than polygraph evidence. Whether or not your conclusion is correct, the study in question does not support the conclusion.The OP described an instance including bad identification by Scottish police. That's worth discussing. But is is rather poor support for the idea that finger IDs should not be used in court. I have no problem with the scope of the discussion. My issue is with the lack of academic rigor of the discussion.

Interesting. I don't believe I am the only one who is not addressing your point.I would certainly agree that the approach applied in the case was flawed. In correcting the flaw, it is possible to take different approaches to any type of forensic evidence. You can include science which is less than rigorous, but take precautions to allow a complete examinations of the limitations, or you can exclude all conclusions which fall below an extremely high degree of uncertainty.It might well be that judges allow in finger print evidence that they should not, but that's a different question that asking whether finger print evidence, when done correctly, is sufficiently reliable.Jon seems to advocate for excluding evidence that is not completely reliable. To my view, Jon's position would be completely impractical. For example, Jon would exclude all eye witness testimony. So if your brother goes buck wild with a baseball bat at Christmas dinner, not even the identifications of his fellow family members would be admissible in Jon's courtroom. To me that sounds quite silly.I did find the link to the final report. I haven't yet read much of it.

I took some time to read portions of the Fingerprint Inquiry Report, and I came away with a slightly different impression. Apparently there were court procedures for challenging fingerprint evidence, but apparently the use of the procedures was quite rare.From the report with reference to Ms. McKie's trial for perjury. Mostly from chapter 11.

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The defence position changed dramatically when Mr Wertheim examined the mark on 24 March 1999. That was less than three weeks before the start of the sitting of the High Court when the trial was scheduled to take place. From that point both
prosecution and defence were dealing with a situation that was unique, at least in Scotland.

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Also

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Equally, there can be no criticism of the Crown failing to instruct an external review of the fingerprint evidence at that stage. The conflict among the fingerprint examiners for the prosecution and the defence was a matter for the jury

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It seems that there were procedures for challenging fingerprint evidence, but that the prosecution was utterly unprepared for the reality that someone might actually want to do so.What I find fascinating about the perjury trial is that in the US, government witnesses are almost never tried for testimony that is demonstrated in court to be false. In cases where the evidence is primarily fingerprint evidence, among the more obvious lines of defense must be a bad identification.

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It is unlikely that, even with the benefit of more time to prepare, the SCRO witnesses would have been able to present their evidence in a more effective manner. The SCRO examiners were ill-prepared to meet the challenge. Fingerprint evidence having been for so long treated as routine evidence the SCRO examiners had neither the training nor the experience to equip them to justify their opinions.

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My impression is that the treatment of fingerprint evidence in Scotland may have become atrophied and sloppy through the lack of vigorous challenges, to the point where Ms. McKie was subjected to a trial based on accusations generally aren't even pursued. If my impression is a fair assessment, then perhaps we should be grateful that left leaning, bleeding heart lawyers here in the US put DA's through the wringer while defending people we'd consider to be criminal scum.The report doesn't challenge the idea that fingerprints are unique, but rather the idea that people are actually performing fingerprint analysis for the state are actually able to give relevant testimony on the identification based on their comparisons of fingerprint exemplars to non-ideal, perhaps incomplete and distorted impressions found at crime scenes. The two ideas are markedly different.I'd recommend reading Chapter 12 of the report which deals with the testimony and cross examination at trial.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Consider the following case currently on going in my current hometown.The murder conviction of Michael Peterson was recently overturned based almost completely on the fact that a state investigator was found to have lied about his credentials and the evidence in the murder trial, and committed other serious acts such as misrepresenting evidence and hiding exculpatory evidence in 34 other cases.While it may be difficult to show deliberate lying about the evidence, surely the perjury related to his credentials (e.g. claiming to have tested about blood spatter evidence in 200 cases when the actual number is more like 50) ought to be a slam dunk. Despite the fact that his testimony was found to be perjured, and the fact that the man no longer works for the state, the state district attorney says that she does not intend to prosecute.

Not really. The DA has expressed words concerning the general difficulty of proving intent in perjury cases.I suspect that the reasons might involve not wanting to completely trash evidence that the state will need in the retrial of Peterson, and a general reluctance to pursue perjury of state investigators.Edited by NoNukes, : Repair tags