A single mark found at the scene was attributed to DC McKie who denied under oath that it could be hers. In November 2017, a state appellate court did something almost unprecedented: It held that a trial judge made an error by admitting testimony on latent fingerprinting.Few courts have carefully examined the reliability of latent fingerprint testimony. Most people are aware of fingerprinting either through personal experience or from watching police shows on television, but here we’ll take a bit of a closer look at how fingerprint evidence is obtained and analyzed. Only two out of 5861 of these comparisons were incorrect, an error rate of 0.034 per cent. In England also, fingerprint evidence was received and up-held in early cases. Critics say that showing an image is more like itself than other similar images is irrelevant.
The psychological aspect of forensic science (the preparation of physical evidence for purpose of court) is also a potential Achilles heel as to the validity of fingerprint evidence – in particular in countries with an adversarial legal system where the function of counsel is largely to undermine the credibility of the evidence presented.Key words: prints, marks, reliability, validity, probability, error, bias.A [finger]print is a record taken by police of a (usually) known individual under controlled conditions. supported a claim that fingerprint identification evidence is unreliable and should not have been (or be) admitted against them.13 Numerous courts between 2009 and 2011 acknowledged 8. Fingerprint testimony has been admitted in federal and state courts for decades, largely unquestioned.As Simon Cole has observed, judges have grandfathered in latent fingerprint evidence based on its longstanding use, and not based on any evidence that it is in fact reliable.In Part I, I summarize what has changed in the scientific research and understanding of latent fingerprint evidence. At her trial, two fingerprint experts disputed the mark belonged to DC McKie. After examining the prints of the Algerian national, the FBI released Mayfield from custody.
"This could create an incentive for the fundamental research needed to validate the underlying premises of the technique," says Imwinkelried. In reality, says evidence expert Jennifer Mnookin, the use of fingerprinting has never withstood rigorous scientific testing standards. What the.In addition, experts should routinely undergo and report the results of blind, rigorous proficiency testing that represents the “full range of latent fingerprints encountered in casework,” and that ensures that any examiner is in fact making accurate judgments.The reliable application of an expert method to the facts in a particular case remains a neglected prong of Rule 702 and,White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs, Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law.Introduction Much has been written on how the COVID-19 pandemic has brought longstanding structural inequities into sharp relief. "The last couple of years, all other courts have held [fingerprint evidence] is reliable and the testimony is admissible," he said. (Haber & Haber, 2003),Giannelli describes confirmation bias in terms of “the tendency to test a hypothesis by looking for instances that confirm it rather than by searching for potentially falsifying instances.” Kassin, Dror & Kukucka (2013) describe the various contextual influences which may generate bias in forensic evidence, in terms of: “Knowing the nature and details of the crime, being pressured by detectives; working within – and as part of – the police; the use of computer-generated lists that feature some suspects ahead of others; appearing in court within an adversarial criminal justice system.”.The importance of cognitive psychology of expert evidence has been highlighted in a series of experiments conducted by Dr. Itiel Dror (2005) in which he had took the fingerprints from real criminal cases and presented them to the same fingerprint examiners who had previously given evidence at court.
%PDF-1.6 %���� Quoting the testimony of the latent fingerprint expert, the court scrutinized how the expert concluded that crime scene prints were “identified as” the same as those taken from the defendant.Regardless of the court’s brevity, the opinion could bolster practices requiring careful documentation of forensic examination.