By Brian Carnell

Thursday, January 10, 2002

Last April I wrote about upcoming legal challenges to fingerprint evidence. The first success in challenges to fingerprints came this week as a federal judge placed restrictions on what fingerprint experts could tell a jury about such evidence. The judge did not throw out fingerprint evidence altogether, but did conclude that some common claims about fingerprints do not meet the U.S. Supreme Court's Daubert test for scientific validity of evidence.

The case before the Judge Louis H. Pollak was United States v. Plaza. The defense team had sought to exclude all fingerprint evidence in the case, arguing that it was unscientific. The judge ruled that experts on both sides could testify about fingerprint evidence, but ruled that such experts could not tell a jury that two fingerprints are a "match" because the methods used to determine this have not been rigorously tested as required under the Daubert ruling that laid out the tests for admissibility of scientific testimony in trials.

Pollak ruled that the techniques commonly used to compare a latent print from a crime scene with a print taken from a suspect had never been subjected to adversarial testing. Pollak wrote that the government "had little success in identifying scientific testing that tended to establish the reliability of fingerprint identifications." Pollak noted that both defense and prosecution experts testified that matching latent prints to known fingerprints was a subjective rather than scientific determination.

In fact even though fingerprint matching has been used for more than 100 years in American courts, only recently did the FBI fund a study to try to determine error rates for fingerprint matching. This was a key point, since Daubert requires that trial judges consider the known or potential error rate of a procedure when allowing testimony involving it. Since there is almost no information about error rates with fingerprint matching, it could not meet that particular Daubert test.

Source:

Experts may no longer testify that fingerprints 'match,' says federal judge. Shanon P. Duff, The Legal Intelligencer, January 8, 2002.

Discuss (0 Replies) | Printer Friendly