Legal Research

"A Single Incriminating Fingerprint Can Land Someone in Jail: Is There Empirical Basis for Such Decisions?"

This post was written by StephanieWestAllen: "Excerpt:

The terrorist explosions that ripped through Madrid's crowded commuter trains on the morning of 11 March 2004 killed 191 people, wounded some 2,000 more and prompted an international manhunt for the perpetrators. Soon after, Spanish investigators searching the area near one of the blasts discovered an abandoned set of detonator caps inside a plastic bag that bore a single, incomplete fingerprint. They immediately shared the clue with law-enforcement colleagues around the world. And on 6 May 2004, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, proclaiming that his print was a match.

Two and a half weeks later, a chagrined FBI was forced to release Mayfield after Spanish police arrested an Algerian national -- one of several terrorists later charged with the crime -- and found one of his fingerprints to be a much better match. The FBI eventually admitted that it had made multiple errors in its fingerprint analysis1.

The Mayfield case is a textbook example of 'false positive' fingerprint identification, in which an innocent person is singled out erroneously. ...

Click to read the rest of "Science in court: The fine print" (Nature News)"

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Source: idealawg, 18 March 2010, reproduced with permission of the author.

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on March 19, 2010 (boomark / email).