False Identification by Faulty Fingerprint Analysis

Most of us expect to hear these same statements from anyone who has been arrested for any crime, whether it is a misdemeanor or a felony. However, what if the person is telling the truth? What if his alibi places him miles away, sometimes - even hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime? What happens if the police claim to have fingerprints of the suspect and they match the guy in custody? They have their man. Or, do they? Although not enough statistical data has been collected to date to prove your fingerprints are not identical to another person's, the standard so far indicates each fingerprint is as individual as the person they were obtained from.

If your fingerprints have been found at a crime scene, you become a suspect until ruled out for other reasons. Perhaps you are a frequent visitor to that location. Perhaps you delivered an appliance for repaired a leaking sink. If you have a valid reason for being in a particular residence or business, other means are then used to rule you out as the suspect. Blood evidence, DNA evidence, ironclad alibis, whatever is necessary will be used to prove you were just an innocent person who happened to have been in the area at some time before the crime was committed.

Fingerprint evidence is one of the oldest and most trusted pieces of evidence in most courtrooms. It is the defining proof of guilt and more so than any other evidence in criminal cases. Why? Because everyone has fingerprints like no other person since no one has the same patterns. Fingerprints have been used for decades with nearly indisputable weight by our courts.

The history of using fingerprints goes as far back as Babylonian times when fingerprints were used to record business transactions. But it wasn't until the 19th century that fingerprints began to be used as a means of identification. While many people had recognized that fingerprints were distinquishable between individuals, it wasn't until Sir Edward Henry, a commissioner of the Metropolitan Police of London, became interested in using fingerprints to catch criminals. The Henry Classification System was developed into a classification system based on the direction, flow, pattern and other characteristics of the friction ridges in fingerprints, very similar to what is used today. Today, the characteristics of fingerprints include the ridges and furrows as well as the minutiae points. Minutiae points are local ridge characteristics that occur at either a ridge bifurcation or a ridge ending.

Nevertheless, what if your fingerprints have been misidentified? What if someone made a mistake? What about the examiner who has worked too many hours and is working while exhausted, or the examiner who arrives at work intoxicated or under the influence of drugs? What if the fingerprint examiner, due to negligence, perception, incompetence, or outright fraud stated that the incriminating fingerprints from a crime scene belong to you and only you?

One thing is certain. Fingerprint evidence is not a science, but an art based on the experience and training of the fingerprint examiner, and is ultimately still a subjective decision. How subjective are these decisions?

Dr. Itiel Dror, of Southampton University, conducted several studies that proved perceptual context can affect how you perceive information. After taking fingerprints from criminal cases already identified by the subjects in his study five years prior, he again had them examine the fingerprints but under a different context. As he stated in an interview on BBC's Newsnight in February 2006, "The context manipulated their expectation and affected how they judged the fingerprints. It didn't matter that the same fingerprints were judged by them differently in the past." Even though an expert fingerprint examiner may strive to be as correct as he or she can be, the different context affected their decision.

Combine this subjective decision making with the fact that most crime scenes do not offer up a complete set of fingerprints from a suspect. Most often, a lifted print latent print may only be a single, partial print that has been smudged or has been overlaid on someone's innocent fingerprint. Along with the resolution of the print itself, all these factors may contribute to an erroneous identification.

Does erroneous fingerprint identification happen? Not even the FBI does quality identification all the time. Nor does the FBI have a standard to go by; instead, it relies on two or more fingerprint examiners who agree there is a match. However, in the Madrid train bombing case in Spain, which occurred on March 11, 2004, the FBI insisted they had made a "100 percent positive identification" on a suspect. The suspect was Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon attorney and was arrested on a "material witness warrant" three weeks after the Spanish police told them their identification did not match the fingerprint they had. Only after Spanish authorities had matched their fingerprint to that of an Algerian man, did the FBI admit they made a mistake, saying it was the first one ever by the FBI. Was it?

In 2000, Jose Corona was arrested as a suspect in an attempted murder case of a cab driver, based on a fake fingerprint report. Officer William Douglass, a 30-year veteran detective of the LAPD Police Department, had fraudulently composed the report. The report claimed that fingerprint examination of 24 separate prints found that one belonged to Corona. When Defense Dale Rubin demanded and received the report, he found that only four prints had been found and none belonged to his client. Douglass then claimed he had made a fake report in order to get Corona to confess and then forgot to replace it with the actual report. The judge found that Corona's civil rights had been violated, and threw out the case against him.

Astonishingly, Detective Douglass was not prosecuted. Deputy District Attorney Elizabeth Munisoglu decided not to file charges against the detective. During an interview, she stated, "I looked at it and I didn't see a criminal action, I saw an error in judgment and a mistake, one that shouldn't have happened, of course. But it was just a mistake on the detective's part."

A mistake? An error in judgment? Yet, it could have cost Corona years in prison instead of the 469 days he spent awaiting trial for an attempted murder charge of which he was not guilty.

On October 17, 2008, in Los Angeles, California, one fingerprint analyst, who was involved in two separate, but mishandled fingerprint identification cases, was fired and three others were suspended last year after internal investigations found problems with the fingerprint analysis. Rhonda Sim-Lewis, chief of the Police Department's administrative and technical bureau, said she believes no innocent people have been convicted of crimes due to fingerprint mistakes by her department, but she acknowledged there was no way to be sure without a full review. Yet another LAPD officer, Yvette Sanchez-Owens, commanding officer of the department's scientific investigation division, stated, "People were reviewing the work of friends and just rubber stamping it without really reviewing it."

Therefore, the question remains. How many people are convicted each year based on shoddy work due to problems with fingerprint analysis?

Even so, in the vast majority of cases, fingerprints are very reliable and forensic fingerprint examiners do correct analysis of fingerprints. The uniqueness of friction ridge patterns and the methods where individualizations are made by qualified examiners' are determined and accepted in the realm of criminal justice. Nonetheless, if a suspect's freedom and life are being based on the testimony of a fingerprint expert, a second opinion may well be worth the added time and cost.

Sources:

1.) Truth In Justice - Junk in Science

2.) How Fingerprinting Works, History of Fingerprinting, by Stephanie Watson

3.) Dr. Dror BBC Interview - Erroneous Fingerprint Individualizations - Why do they occur?

4.) LAPD Fiction - How a detective made up evidence and got away with it, by Jim Crogan

5.) LAPD Blames Finger Print Errors for False Arrests

6.) Fingerprint Analysis Questioned - Experts Question the Authority of Fingerprint Analysis,N E W Y O R K, April 15 2007, World News with Charles Gibson