Whither Fingerprints?
Fingerprint evidence has been around for a century, and in court, no other type of evidence carries the same air of unassailability. Even though DNA evidence has gone through thorough testing and surmounted significant challenges in the two decades it has been around, it still does not have the same status of fingerprint evidence. Most “experts” in the field will tell you it is a 100% accurate method of identifying people. The only errors made in fingerprint evidence can be attributed to sloppy work. Recent headlines regarding the US government’s case against a terror suspect/attorney falling apart in the face of just such an “error” has brought to issue into the limelight.
One problem with fingerprint evidence was that it developed its unassailable status before courts adopted more stringent tests for the reliability of expert testimony. There are few statistical studies supporting the main claim of fingerprint evidence: that each person on the face of the earth has distinct prints, such that a qualified technician can identify which print came from which person, without error. The lack of scientific support for the field has not kept it out of court, yet. When three of the best (FBI technicians) make such a glaring (and public) error, significant challenges cannot be to far off in the future.
My prediction is that someone will get the money (maybe from the embarrassed US Justice Department) to do the studies necessary to support the science, and fingerprint evidence will prevail. The bigger problem with fingerprint evidence will be its use in the modern era, where great volumes of fingerprint cards are combined into huge databases, and used in the field to determine who particular people really are.
The New York Times has a story that I think will become all to common:
In front of the immigration judge, the tall, muscular man began to weep. No, he had patiently tried to explain, he was not Leo Rosario, a drug dealer and a prime candidate for deportation.
He was telling the truth. He was Rene Ramon Sanchez, an auto-body worker and merengue singer from the Bronx who bore not even a passing resemblance to Mr. Rosario, a complete stranger 12 years his junior and a half-foot shorter.
“Why don’t you get his photo then?” Mr. Sanchez cried out in Spanish, pounding a fist into his palm. “And compare my fingerprints with his?”
The judge, Alan L. Page, had been told the prints were the same. “The general rule is, the prints don’t lie,” Judge Page had said earlier. “If you got the same prints that Leo Rosario has, you’re Leo Rosario. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
So Mr. Sanchez, in late 2000, was sent back for another week in a grim detention center in Lower Manhattan, severed from his family and livelihood, because his fingerprints had been mistakenly placed on the official record of another man.
Remarkably, this was not the first time Mr. Sanchez had paid for that mistake. He had been arrested three times for Mr. Rosario’s crimes, and ultimately spent a total of two months in custody and was threatened with deportation before the mistake was traced and resolved in 2002.
