Fingerprint Examiners Beware

(This deserves another review)

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Sir Winston Churchill

Hi fellow SCAFO members.

Latent print identification has proven to be a very accurate and reliable form of evidence for over a hundred years. The identification of a fingerprint to its sole source has been demonstrated, accepted, and embraced by the courts of the world for over one hundred years and has extensive legal and scientific precedence.

Biologists, medical doctors, and professors of human anatomy who have studied the formation of friction ridge skin all agree that all areas of friction skin are unique.

It will be a sad day for society and the criminal justice system when latent print examiners no longer provide the factual testimony that a latent print was made by a specific person. This step backwards is being promoted partially because of the efforts of social justice warriors who have been attacking fingerprint identification in the courts since Daubert with little or no success. Their tactics now have changed, and they have found their way into organizations such as OSAC.

For example, Simon Cole a paid defense advocate and witness, is now the vice chair of the Academy Standards Board (ASB), Friction Ridge Consensus Body. The courts have repeatedly rejected his arguments to suppress fingerprint evidence during evidence hearings. He is an academic whose background is in sociology, and he teaches at the University of California Irvine. He is not a trained fingerprint examiner.

Cole states in his book, Suspect Identities, that “The equation of identity with a unique body that begins at birth and ends at death is not an eternal notion: it is a product of the nineteenth-century Western imperialist culture”, page 311. Cole is also joined by defense attorneys on this “Friction Ridge Consensus Body”. His radical socialist agenda is now being codified in the ASB standards.

Steven Scarborough correctly calls it the “hijacking of a forensic science”. Many of the “consensus” recommendations of this board cannot be backed up with science: they are only their opinion of how things should be.

Today, there is a movement to reset the clock on fingerprint evidence. Some academics and the Defense Bar choose to ignore all the research and empirical data accumulated over one hundred years that provides proof that fingerprint evidence is unique and can be identified to its sole source. They suggest that a fingerprint identification must now be supported with statistical calculations to somehow make it “less subjective and more scientific”. This is a step back to where we started in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s without any scientific justification.

The late eminent Professor of Zoology and Philosopher of Biology Ernst Mayr PhD of Harvard University provides an explanation of the thought process of these individuals:

“In the uniqueness of biological entities and phenomena lies one of the major differences between biology and the physical sciences. Physicists and chemists often have genuine difficulty in understanding the biologist’s stress on the unique. The variation from individual to individual within the population is the reality of nature, whereas the mean value (the “type”) is only a statistical abstraction. Biopopulations differ fundamentally from classes of inanimate objects not

only in their propensity for variation but also in their internal cohesion and their spatio-temporal restriction. There is nothing in inanimate nature that corresponds to biopopulations, and this perhaps explains why philosophers whose background is in mathematics or physics seem to have such a difficult time understanding this concept”

Mayr, Ernst, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, p.15, (1988), Harvard University Press.

In 1996, the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies of Science (NAS) issued a report titled, The Evaluation of Forensic DNA Evidence. The report compared the state of DNA profiling with fingerprint identification. The report made the following statements about uniqueness:

DNA analysis promises to be the most important tool for human identification since Francis Galton developed the use of fingerprints for that purpose. We can confidently predict that, in the not-distant future, persons as closely related as brothers will be routinely distinguished, and DNA profiles will be as fully accepted as fingerprints now are. Preface p.v.

The history of fingerprints offers some instructive parallels with DNA typing (Stigler 1995). Francis Galton, the first to put fingerprinting on a sound basis, did an analysis 100 years ago that is remarkably modern in its approach. Although Galton paid careful attention to probabilities, his successors usually have not. – It is now simply accepted that fingerprint patterns are unique”. P.56 1996 NRC

– With an increasing number of loci available for forensic analysis, we are approaching the time when each person's profile will be unique. P.161 1996 NRC

Even, the very flawed NAS 2009 report, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward conceded that:

Because of the amount of detail available in friction ridges, it seems plausible that a careful comparison of two impressions can accurately discern whether or not they had a common source”. Page 142.

Also, “—there is tremendous variability among prints made by different fingers. This variability clearly provides a scientific basis for using fingerprints to distinguish individuals. AAAS, Forensic Science Assessments: A Quality and Gap Analysis- Latent Fingerprint Examination, P.18, September 2017.

I have included a reprint of Chapter 8, Individuality of the Finger Print, from the textbook; Finger Prints, Palms, and Soles, by Doctors Cummings and Midlo. Published in 1943.

This document provides an important piece of the historical and scientific foundation of our field. Their research, which spanned decades has been peer reviewed and their conclusions that all areas of volar skin are unique and persistent has been verified by all other biological researchers studying the formation of friction ridge skin since.

Enjoy the conference. I join you in celebrating the 85th year of this premiere forensic organization.

Bill Leo, SCAFO President 1996