a good place
I have to admit, my concept of county law libraries has been formed by exposure to a very limited sample. In most counties, the library is seldom more than a small room in the courthouse where you can generally find the Indiana code and cases. My local library, here in Wayne County, is actually one of the most extensive I have seen. Or, at least it used to be. When I got out of law school, the local library had four rooms with all the regional reporters, all the federal reporters, plus the Indiana and US Codes, plus all the A.L.R’s, and lots of other secondary material. Recently, most of the book subscriptions have been terminated, leaving the bulk of the library with little more than decaying pulp. The replacement is a pair of computer terminals with Westlaw access, but not full access, just the federal and Indiana materials are on the plan.
I seldom use county law libraries, typically only when I am in trial and need to check on something fast.
I do not know what is going on in Stark County, Ohio. Maybe every county in Ohio has a well run and well funded law library, or maybe the folks in Canton are just made of different stuff. Whatever the cause, I am truly impressed by the Stark County Law Library. Introduced to me through its excellent blog. I check the blog daily, and I am often rewarded with relevant and needed links and insight.
Yesterday, they pointed me to Child Support Guidelines.com, a great site where different guidelines from around the nation are compiled, and links to online calculators are provided. This is a great help to those trying to figure out where to file a divorce.
Today was no exception. They linked to a Kansas City Star piece by Edward Humes of The Orange County Register on the current status of fingerprint identification. The piece focuses on Simon Cole, a social sciences professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has been a driving force behind the move to reexamine this “science:”
Cole’s consuming interest in fingerprint evidence developed five years ago, the inadvertent consequence of a study he conducted at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He had been investigating why jurors, lawyers and judges found fingerprint examiners with only a few months of training so overwhelmingly credible, while DNA experts with far more impressive training were being picked apart on the stand. “I found that you just couldn’t do that with fingerprint examiners,” Cole recalls. “They were essentially unassailable.”
At the time, Cole chalked this up to the clever way fingerprint images are used in court: The experts would show jurors blow-ups of the fingerprints and point out similarities between a crime-scene “latent” print and an inked fingerprint from a defendant. When these similarities proved hard for a layperson to perceive - as they often are - Cole found that fingerprint examiners were adept at explaining this away by asserting that only a trained expert could make such determinations.
“It was a Catch-22,” Cole says. “Whether you see a similarity or not, the fingerprint examiner has an explanation for why it’s a match.”
. . . .
Several recent fingerprint blunders seem to bolster Cole’s position. Richard Jackson of Upper Darby, Pa., was sentenced to life without parole and served two years before his lawyers convinced a judge that local police had mistakenly matched his fingerprints to the killer’s. A re-examination exonerated him, but two of the three police experts who made the error and verified one another’s erroneous matches are still doing fingerprint analysis.
In Boston, Stephan Cowans was released earlier this year after serving seven years in prison for shooting a police officer. He was convicted based on fingerprint evidence that had been reviewed by at least two police analysts. Later, DNA testing exonerated him. A re-examination of the fingerprint once again showed there was no match, despite the verification procedures.
The Cowans case was soon followed by the arrest of attorney Mayfield in connection with the Madrid bombing, after three senior FBI examiners, the most highly trained fingerprint experts in the country, mistakenly declared his prints a match to the bomb suspect’s partial, blurred latent print.
The error was compounded when a nationally renowned fingerprint expert hired by the defense also found that Mayfield’s prints matched the bomber’s. The match, then, was verified four times - incorrectly.
The error might never have been detected at all if the bombing occurred in this country, Cole argues.
Link (requires free subscription).
