Originally published October 9 2005
New evidence casts doubt on the reliability of fingerprinting technology
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A case in Massachusetts is attempting to undermine the "zero error rate" presumed of fingerprint identification technologies.
A HIGH-profile court case in Massachusetts is once again casting doubt on the claimed infallibility of fingerprint evidence.
The doubts follow cases in which the testimony of fingerprint examiners has turned out to be unreliable.
Despite three FBI examiners plus an external expert agreeing on the identification, Spanish authorities eventually matched the prints to an Algerian.
Likewise, Stephan Cowans served six years in a Massachusetts prison for shooting a police officer before being released last year after the fingerprint evidence on which he had been convicted was trumped by DNA.
A key submission to the appeal court is a dossier signed by 16 leading fingerprint sceptics, citing numerous reasons for challenging the US Department of Justice's long-standing contention that fingerprint evidence has a "zero error rate", and so is beyond legal dispute.
The so-called "50K study" took a set of 50,000 pre-existing images of fingerprints and compared each one electronically against the whole of the data set, producing a grand total of 2.5 billion comparisons.
The study does not mimic what happens in real life, where messy, partial prints from a crime scene are compared with inked archive prints of known criminals.
He wrote that critics misunderstood the purpose of his study, which sought to establish that individual fingerprints are effectively unique - unlike any other person's print.
By the time New Scientist went to press, the FBI had not responded to our requests for comment.
But critics of fingerprinting have seized on this admission and included it in the dossier as evidence that the 50K study doesn't back up the infallibility of fingerprinting.
"It shows that the author of the study says it doesn't have anything to do with reliability," says Simon Cole, a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine and one of the 16 co-signatories of the dossier.
All content posted on this site is commentary or opinion and is protected under Free Speech. Truth Publishing LLC takes sole responsibility for all content. Truth Publishing sells no hard products and earns no money from the recommendation of products. NaturalNews.com is presented for educational and commentary purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice from any licensed practitioner. Truth Publishing assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. For the full terms of usage of this material, visit www.NaturalNews.com/terms.shtml