TOW #16 - Do Fingerprints Lie? (Written)

This article, titled Do Fingerprints Lie? and written by Michael Specter, tackles the subject of whether fingerprint evidence is as infallible as is generally accepted. For a very long time, the US court system would accept any sort of "expert testimony", regardless of whether they were legitimately experts. Opinions that were "generally accepted" in the field were allowed, even if they weren't factually proven. The case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals brought this into a more critical light and created stricter guidelines for what could be admissible.

This article begins with an anecdote about Shirley McKie, a police officer who was wrongly accused of a crime because her fingerprint had been found inside the house in which a murder occurred. However, she insisted that she hadn't even entered the house. It turned out, in the end, that the print that had been taken from the crime scene matched her left thumb very well, but it had actually been the print of the murderer's right forefinger. This anecdote serves to demonstrate the falsity of two different commonly accepted ideas about fingerprints: that everyone has unique fingerprints, and that they can be accurately matched to a single person by the police. It turns out, though everyone does have different fingerprints (they are created in the womb based on everyone's unique movements and friction), they are very very similar, and there is not necessarily enough training within the FBI to correctly and 100% accurately identify fingerprints all the time. The anecdote serves the purpose of disproving the things that the reader thinks they know to be true.

Specter also uses an abundance of quotes from experts to give the reader the best idea of what the general feeling in the fingerprinting community is towards the court case that was going on and the questioning of its validity. Specter himself is not an expert on this issue, so he realizes the need for expert testimony. He incorporates the opinions from different sides so that he can present an unbiased view of this very complicated issue.