Homeless in Arizona

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According to these two articles, fingerprint evidence and DNA evidence is not the slam dunk, you're guilty evidence that TV shows, movies and the police like to make them out as.

While both fingerprint evidence and DNA evidence are pretty good at identifying people who committed crimes, they both have some problems and are not 100% accurate all the time.

One of the articles is from the New Yorker and the other from the Digital Reporter.

Fingerprint evidence has two major problems.

First the police rarely if ever find perfect full fingerprints at crime scenes. The cops usually find partial fingerprints at crimes.

Second there is no world, or even national standard for identifying fingerprints.

The FBI has their own way of identifying if a fingerprint matches, Scotland Yard another way, the state of Arizona another and the other states their own rules on what is a match and what isn't a match.

DNA evidence seems to be fairly easily able to be accidently spread around by anybody who happens to be at the crime scene.

In the 2nd article, some paramedics left the DNA evidence of a drunk (Lukis Anderson) they that treated in downtown San Jose at the murder scene of Raveesh Kumra in Monte Sereno. And the poor drunk (Lukis Anderson) was almost convicted of murder because of it.

Here are 4 different versions of the same two articles. First the fingerprint one, second the DNA one, and last the both the fingerprint and DNA ones combined.

Looks like DNA can easily be accidently spread from one person to another. And allow the cops to convict that innocent person of a crime.

I have posted an article on fingerprint testing which is almost as scary as the one several times.

That article was from the New Yorker and probably published 20 years ago.

I will see if I can find it and repost it.

Source

Framed for Murder By His Own DNA

APRIL 19, 2018 / by KATIE WORTH Digital Reporter

When the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder.

“I drink a lot,” he remembers telling public defender Kelley Kulick as they sat in a plain interview room at the Santa Clara County, California, jail. Sometimes he blacked out, so it was possible he did something he didn’t remember. “Maybe I did do it.”

Kulick shushed him. If she was going to keep her new client off death row, he couldn’t go around saying things like that. But she agreed. It looked bad.

Before he was charged with murder, Anderson was a 26-year-old homeless alcoholic with a long rap sheet who spent his days hustling for change in downtown San Jose. The murder victim, Raveesh Kumra, was a 66-year-old investor who lived in Monte Sereno, a Silicon Valley enclave 10 miles and many socioeconomic rungs away.

Around midnight on November 29, 2012, a group of men had broken into Kumra’s 7,000-square-foot mansion. They found him watching CNN in the living room, tied him, blindfolded him and gagged him with mustache-print duct tape. They found his companion, Harinder, asleep in an upstairs bedroom, hit her on the mouth and tied her up next to Raveesh. Then they plundered the house for cash and jewelry.

After the men left, Harinder, still blindfolded, felt her way to a kitchen phone and called 911. Police arrived, then an ambulance. One of the paramedics declared Raveesh dead. The coroner would later conclude that he had been suffocated by the mustache tape.

Three-and-a-half weeks later, the police arrested Anderson. His DNA had been found on Raveesh’s fingernails. They believed the men struggled as Anderson tied up his victim. They charged him with murder. Kulick was appointed to his case.

As they looked at the DNA results, Anderson tried to make sense of a crime he had no memory of committing.

“Nah, nah, nah. I don’t do things like that,” he recalls telling her. “But maybe I did.”

“Lukis, shut up,” Kulick says she told him. “Let’s just hit the pause button till we work through the evidence to really see what happened.”

What happened, although months would pass before anyone figured it out, was that Lukis Anderson’s DNA had found its way onto the fingernails of a dead man he had never even met.

Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was still in its infancy, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid — usually blood, semen or spit — to generate a genetic profile.

That changed in 1997, when Australian forensic scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal justice world with a nine-paragraph paper titled “DNA Fingerprints from Fingerprints.” It revealed that DNA could be detected not just from bodily fluids but from traces left by a touch. Investigators across the globe began scouring crime scenes for anything — a doorknob, a countertop, a knife handle — that a perpetrator may have tainted with incriminating “touch” DNA.

But van Oorschot’s paper also contained a vital observation: Some people’s DNA appeared on things that they had never touched.

In the years since, van Oorschot’s lab has been one of the few to investigate this phenomenon, dubbed “secondary transfer.” What they have learned is that, once it’s out in the world, DNA doesn’t always stay put.

In one of his lab’s experiments, for instance, volunteers sat at a table and shared a jug of juice. After 20 minutes of chatting and sipping, swabs were deployed on their hands, the chairs, the table, the jug and the juice glasses, then tested for genetic material. Although the volunteers never touched each other, 50 percent wound up with another’s DNA on their hand. A third of the glasses bore the DNA of volunteers who did not touch or drink from them.

Then there was the foreign DNA — profiles that didn’t match any of the juice drinkers. It turned up on about half of the chairs and glasses, and all over the participants’ hands and the table. The only explanation: The participants unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the lover they kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus grip or the barista who handed them an afternoon latte.

In a sense, this isn’t surprising: We leave a trail of ourselves everywhere we go. An average person may shed upward of 50 million skin cells a day. Attorney Erin Murphy, author of “Inside the Cell,” a book about forensic DNA, has calculated that in two minutes the average person sheds enough skin cells to cover a football field. We also spew saliva, which is packed with DNA. If we stand still and talk for 30 seconds, our DNA may be found more than a yard away. With a forceful sneeze, it might land on a nearby wall.

To find out the prevalence of DNA in the world, a group of Dutch researchers tested 105 public items — escalator rails, public toilet door handles, shopping basket handles, coins. Ninety-one percent bore human DNA, sometimes from half a dozen people. Even items intimate to us — the armpits of our shirts, say — can bear other people’s DNA, they found.

The itinerant nature of DNA has serious implications for forensic investigations. After all, if traces of our DNA can make their way to a crime scene we never visited, aren’t we all possible suspects?

Forensic DNA has other flaws: Complex mixtures of many DNA profiles can be wrongly interpreted, certainty statistics are often wildly miscalculated, and DNA analysis robots have sometimes been stretched past the limits of their sensitivity.

But as advances in technology are solving some of these problems, they have actually made the problem of DNA transfer worse. Each new generation of forensic tools is more sensitive; labs today can identify people with DNA from just a handful of cells. A handful of cells can easily migrate.

A survey of the published science, interviews with leading scientists and a review of thousands of pages of court and police documents associated with the Kumra case has elucidated how secondary DNA transfer can undermine the credibility of the criminal justice system’s most trusted tool. And yet, very few crime labs worldwide regularly and robustly study secondary DNA transfer.

This is partly because most forensic scientists believe DNA to be the least of their field’s problems. They’re not wrong: DNA is the most accurate forensic science we have. It has exonerated scores of people convicted based on more flawed disciplines like hair or bite-mark analysis. And there have been few publicized cases of DNA mistakenly implicating someone in a crime.

But, like most human enterprises, DNA analysis is not perfect. And without study, the scope and impact of that imperfection is difficult to assess, says Peter Gill, a British forensic researcher. He has little doubt that his field, so often credited with solving crimes, is also responsible for wrongful convictions.

“The problem is we’re not looking for these things,” Gill says. “For every miscarriage of justice that is detected, there must be a dozen that are never discovered.”

The phone rang five times.

“Are you awake?” the dispatcher asked.

“Yeah,” lied Corporal Erin Lunsford.

“Are you back on full duty or you still light duty?” she asked, according to a tape of the call.

Lunsford had been off crutches for two weeks already, but it was 2:15 a.m. and pouring rain. Probably some downed tree needed to be policed. “Light duty,” Lunsford said.

“Oh,” she said. “Never mind.”

“Why, what are you calling about?” he asked.

“We had a home invasion that turned into a 187,” she said. Cop slang for murder.

“Shit, seriously?” Lunsford said, waking up.

Lunsford had served all 15 of his professional years as a police officer at the Los Gatos–Monte Sereno Police Department, a 38-officer agency that policed two drowsy towns. He rose through the ranks and was working a stint in the department’s detective bureau. He had mostly been investigating property crimes. Los Gatos, a wealthy bedroom community of Silicon Valley, averaged a homicide once every three or four years. Monte Sereno, a bedroom community of the bedroom community, hadn’t had a homicide in roughly 20.

Lunsford got dressed. He drove through the November torrent. He spotted cop cars clustered around a brick and iron gate. An ambulance flashed quietly in the driveway. Beyond it, the lit Kumra mansion.

Lunsford’s boss told him to take the lead on the investigation. The on-scene supervisor walked him through the house. Dressers emptied, files dumped. A cellphone in a toilet, pissed on. A refrigerator beeping every 10 seconds, announcing its doors were ajar. Raveesh’s body, heavyset and disheveled, on the floor near the kitchen. His eyes still blindfolded.

An investigator from the county coroner’s office arrived and moved Kumra’s body into a van. Lunsford followed her to the morgue for the autopsy. A doctor undressed the victim and scraped and cut his fingernails for evidence.

Lunsford recognized Raveesh, a wealthy businessman who had once owned a share of a local concert venue. Lunsford had come to the Kumra mansion a couple times on “family calls” that never amounted to anything: “Just people arguing,” he recalled. He had also run into him at Goguen’s Last Call, a dive frequented by Raveesh as a regular and Lunsford as a cop responding to calls. Raveesh was an affable extrovert, always buying rounds; the unofficial mayor of that part of town, Lunsford called him.

In the coming days, as Lunsford interviewed people who knew the Kumras, he was told that Raveesh also had relationships with sex workers. Raveesh and Harinder had divorced around 2010 after more than 30 years of marriage, but still lived together.

While Lunsford attended the autopsy, a team of gloved investigators combed the mansion. They tucked paper evidence into manila envelopes; bulkier items into brown paper bags. They amassed more than 100.

Teams specializing in crime scene investigations were first assembled over a century ago, after the French scientist Edmond Locard devised the principle that birthed the field of forensics: A perpetrator will bring something to a crime scene and leave with something from it. Van Oorschot’s touch DNA discovery had unveiled the most literal expression imaginable of Locard’s principle.

Like those early teams, the investigators in the Kumra mansion were looking for fingerprints, footprints and hair. But unlike their predecessors, they devoted considerable time to thinking through everything the perpetrators may have touched.

Some perpetrators are giving thought to this as well. A 2013 Canadian study of 350 sexual homicides found that about a third of perpetrators appeared to have taken care not to leave DNA, killing their victims in tidier ways than beating or strangling, which are likely to leave behind genetic clues, for instance. And it worked: In those “forensically aware” cases, police solved the case 50 percent of the time, compared to 83 percent of their sloppier counterparts.

The men who killed Kumra seemed somewhat forensically aware, albeit clumsily. They had worn latex gloves through their rampage; a pile of them were left in the kitchen sink, wet and soapy, as though someone had tried to wash off the DNA.

In the weeks after the murder, Tahnee Nelson Mehmet, a criminalist at the county crime lab, ran dozens of tests on the evidence collected from the Kumra mansion. Most only revealed DNA profiles consistent with Raveesh or Harinder.

But in her first few batches of evidence, Mehmet hit forensic pay dirt: a handful of unknown profiles — including on the washed gloves. She ran them through the state database of people arrested for or convicted of felonies and got three hits, all from the Bay Area: 22-year-old DeAngelo Austin on the duct tape; 21-year-old Javier Garcia on the gloves; and, on the fingernail clippings, 26-year-old Lukis Anderson.

Within weeks of the DNA hits, Lunsford had plenty of evidence implicating Austin and Garcia: Both were from Oakland, but a warrant for their cellphone records showed they’d pinged towers near Monte Sereno the night of the homicide. Police records showed that Austin belonged to a gang linked to a series of home burglaries. And most damning of all, Austin’s older sister, a 32-year-old sex worker named Katrina Fritz, had been involved with Raveesh for 12 years. Police had even found her phone backed up on Raveesh’s computer. Eventually she would admit that she had given her brother a map of the house.

Connecting Anderson to the crime proved trickier. There were no phone records showing he had traveled to Monte Sereno that night. He wasn’t associated with a gang. But one thing on his rap sheet drew Lunsford’s attention: A felony residential burglary.

Eventually Lunsford found a link. A year earlier, Anderson had been locked up in the same jail as a friend of Austin’s named Shawn Hampton. Hampton wore an ankle monitor as a condition of his parole. It showed that two days before the crime he had driven to San Jose. He made a couple of stops downtown, right near Anderson’s territory.

It started to crystallize for Lunsford: When Austin was planning the break-in, he wanted a local guy experienced in burglary. So Hampton hooked him up with his jail buddy Anderson.

Anderson had recently landed back in jail after violating his probation on the burglary charge. Lunsford and his boss, Sergeant Mike D’Antonio, visited him there. They taped the interview.

“Does this guy look familiar to you? What about this lady?” Lunsford said, laying out pictures of the victims on the interview room table.

“I don’t know, man,” Anderson said.

Lunsford pulled out a picture of Anderson’s mother.

“All right, what about this lady here? You don’t know who she is?” Lunsford said.

Anderson met Lunsford’s sarcasm with silence.

Lunsford set down a letter from the state of California showing the database match between Anderson’s DNA and the profile found on the victim’s fingernails.

“This starting to ring some bells?” Lunsford said.

“My guess is you didn’t think anybody was gonna be home,” D’Antonio said. “My guess is it went way farther than you ever thought it would go.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Anderson said.

“You do,” Lunsford said. “You won’t look at their pictures. The only picture you looked at good was your mom.”

Finally, D’Antonio took a compromising tone.

“Lukis, Lukis, Lukis,” he said. “I don’t have a crystal ball to know what the truth is. Only you do. And in all the years I’ve been doing this I’ve never seen a DNA hit being wrong.”

Anderson had been in jail on the murder charge for over a month when a defense investigator dropped a stack of records on Kulick’s desk. Look at them, the investigator said. Now.

They were Anderson’s medical records. Because his murder charge could carry the death penalty, Kulick had the investigator pull everything pertinent to Anderson’s medical history, including his mental health, in case they had to ask for leniency during sentencing.

She suspected Anderson could be a good candidate for such leniency. He spent much of his childhood homeless. In early adulthood, he was diagnosed with a mental health disorder and diabetes. And he had developed a mighty alcohol addiction. One day, while drunk, he stepped off a curb and into the path of a moving truck. He survived, but his memory was never quite right again. He lost track of days, sometimes several in a row.

That’s not to say his life was bleak. He made friends easily. He had a coy sense of humor and dimples that shone like headlights. His buddies, many on the streets themselves, looked after him, as did some downtown shopkeepers. Kulick and her investigator had spoken to several of them. They shook their heads. Anderson might be a drunk, they said, but he wasn’t a killer.

His rap sheet seemed to agree. It was filled with petty crimes: drunk in public, riding a bike under the influence, probation violations. The one serious conviction — the residential burglary that had caught Lunsford’s attention — seemed more benign upon careful reading. According to the police report, Anderson had drunkenly broken the front window of a home and tried to crawl through. The horrified resident had pushed him back out with blankets. Police found him a few minutes later standing on the sidewalk, dazed and bleeding. Though nothing had been stolen, he had been charged with a felony and pleaded no contest. His DNA was added to the state criminal database.

The medical records showed that Anderson was also a regular in county hospitals. Most recently, he had arrived in an ambulance to Valley Medical Center, where he was declared inebriated nearly to the point of unconsciousness. Blood alcohol tests indicated he had consumed the equivalent of 21 beers. He spent the night detoxing. The next morning he was discharged, somewhat more sober.

The date on that record was November 29. If the record was right, Anderson had been in the hospital precisely as Raveesh Kumra was suffocating on duct tape miles away.

Kulick remembers turning to the investigator, who was staring back at her. She was used to alibis being partial and difficult to prove. This one was signed by hospital staff. More than anything, she felt terrified. “To know that you have a factually innocent client sitting in jail facing the death penalty is really scary,” she said later. “You don’t want to screw up.”

She knew Lunsford and the prosecutors would try to find holes: Perhaps the date on the record was wrong, or someone had stolen his ID, or there was more than one Lukis Anderson.

So she and the investigator systematically retraced his day. Anderson had only patchy recollections of the night in question. But they found a record that a 7-Eleven clerk called authorities at 7:54 p.m. complaining that Anderson was panhandling. He moved on before the police arrived.

His meanderings took him four blocks east, to S&S Market. The clerk there told Kulick that Anderson sat down in front of the store at about 8:15 p.m., already drunk, and got drunker. A couple of hours later, he wandered into the store and collapsed in an aisle. The clerk called the authorities.

The police arrived first, followed by a truck from the San Jose Fire Department. A paramedic with the fire department told Kulick he had picked up Anderson drunk so often that he knew his birth date by heart. Two other paramedics arrived with an ambulance. They wrestled Anderson onto a stretcher and took him to the hospital. According to his medical records, he was admitted at 10:45 p.m. The doctor who treated him said Anderson remained in bed through the night.

Harinder Kumra had said the men who killed Raveesh rampaged through her house sometime between 11:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m.

Kulick called the district attorney’s office. She wanted to meet with them and Lunsford.

In 2008, German detectives were on the trail of the “Phantom of Heilbronn.” A serial killer and thief, the Phantom murdered immigrants and a cop, robbed a gemstone trader and munched on a cookie while burglarizing a caravan. Police mobilized across borders, offered a large reward and racked up more than 16,000 hours on the hunt. But they struggled to discern a pattern to the crimes, other than the DNA profile the Phantom left at 40 crime scenes in Germany, France and Austria.

At long last, they found the Phantom: An elderly Polish worker in a factory that produced the swabs police used to collect DNA. She had somehow contaminated the swabs as she worked. Crime scene investigators had, in turn, contaminated dozens of crime scenes with her DNA.

Contamination, the unintentional introduction of DNA into evidence by the very people investigating the crime, is the best understood form of transfer. And after Lunsford heard Kulick’s presentation — then retraced Anderson’s day himself, concluded he had jailed an innocent man and felt sick to his stomach for a while — he counted contamination among his leading theories.

As the Phantom of Heilbronn case demonstrated, contamination can happen long before evidence arrives in a lab. A 2016 study by Gill, the British forensic researcher, found DNA on three-quarters of crime scene tools he tested, including cameras, measuring tapes and gloves. Those items can pick up DNA at one scene and move it to the next.

Once it arrives in the lab, the risk continues: One set of researchers found stray DNA in even the cleanest parts of their lab. Worried that the very case files they worked on could be a source of contamination, they tested 20. Seventy-five percent held the DNA of people who hadn’t handled the file.

In Santa Clara County, the district attorney’s office reviewed the Kumra case and found no obvious evidence of errors or improper use of tools in the crime lab. They checked if Anderson’s DNA had shown up in any other cases the lab had recently handled, and inadvertently wandered into the Kumra case. It had not.

So they began investigating a second theory: That Raveesh and Anderson somehow met in the hours or days before the homicide, at which point Anderson’s DNA became caught under Raveesh’s fingernails.

“We are convinced that at some point — we just don’t know when in the 24 hours, 48 hours or 72 hours beforehand that their paths crossed,” deputy district attorney Kevin Smith told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.

There now exists a small pile of studies exploring how DNA moves: If a man shakes someone’s hand and then uses the restroom, could their DNA wind up on his penis? (Yes.) If someone drags another person by the ankles, how often does their profile clearly show up? (40 percent of the time.) And, of utmost relevance to Lukis Anderson, how many of us walk around with traces of other people’s DNA on our fingernails? (1 in 5.)

Whether someone’s DNA moves from one place to another — and then is found there — depends on a handful of factors: quantity (two transferred cells are less likely to be detected than 2,000), vigor of contact (a limp handshake relays less DNA than a bone-crushing one), the nature of the surfaces involved (a tabletop’s chemical content affects how much DNA it picks up), and elapsed time (we’re more likely carrying DNA of someone we just hugged than someone we hugged hours ago, since foreign DNA tends to rub off over time).

Then there’s a person’s shedding status: “Good” shedders lavish their DNA on their environment; “poor” shedders move through the world virtually undetectable, genetically speaking. In general, flaky, sweaty or diseased skin is thought to shed more DNA than healthy, arid skin. Nail chewers, nose pickers and habitual face touchers spread their DNA around, as do hands that haven’t seen a bar of soap lately — discarded DNA can accumulate over time, and soap helps wash it away.

And some people simply seem to be naturally superior shedders. Mariya Goray, a forensic science researcher in van Oorschot’s lab who coauthored the juice study with him, has found one of her colleagues to be an outrageously prodigious shedder. “He’s amazing,” she said, her voice tinged with admiration. “Maybe I’ll do a study on him. And the study will just be called, ‘James.'”

She hopes to develop a test to determine a person’s shedder status, which could be deployed to assess a suspect’s claims that their DNA arrived somewhere innocently.

Such a test could have been useful in the case of David Butler, an English cabdriver. In 2011, DNA found on the fingernails of a woman who had been murdered six years earlier was run through a database and matched Butler’s. He swore he’d never met the woman. His defense attorney noted that he had a skin condition so severe that fellow cabbies had dubbed him “Flaky.” Perhaps he had given a ride to the actual murderer that day, who inadvertently picked up Butler’s DNA in the cab and later deposited it on the victim, they theorized.

Investigators didn’t buy the explanation, but jurors did. Butler was acquitted after eight months in jail. Upon release, he excoriated police for their blind faith in the evidence.

“DNA has become the magic bullet for the police,” Butler told the BBC. “They thought it was my DNA, ergo it must be me.”

Traditional police work would have never steered police to Anderson. But the DNA hit led them to seek other evidence confirming his guilt. “It wasn’t malicious. It was confirmation bias,” Kulick says. “They got the DNA, and then they made up a story to fit it.”

Had the case gone to trial, jurors may well have done the same. A 2008 series of studies by researchers at the University of Nevada, Yale and Claremont McKenna College found that jurors rated DNA evidence as 95 percent accurate and 94 percent persuasive of a suspect’s guilt.

Eleven leading DNA transfer scientists contacted for this story were in consensus that the criminal justice system must be willing to question DNA evidence. They were also in agreement about whose job it should be to navigate those queries: forensic scientists.

As it stands, forensic scientists generally stick to the question of source (whose DNA is this?) and leave activity (how did it get here?) for judges and juries to wrestle with. But the researchers contend that forensic scientists are best armed with the information necessary to answer that question.

Consider a case in which a man is accused of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter. He looks mighty guilty when his DNA and a fragment of sperm is found on her underwear. But jurors might give the defense more credence if a forensic scientist familiarized them with a 2016 Canadian study showing that fathers’ DNA is frequently found on their daughters’ clean underwear; occasionally, a fragment of sperm is there too. It migrates there in the wash.

This shift — from reporting on who to reporting on how — has been encouraged by the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes. But the shift has been slow on that continent and virtually nonexistent in the United States, where defense attorneys have argued that forensic scientists — in many communities employed by the prosecutor’s office or police department — should be careful to stick to the facts rather than make conjectures.

“The problem is that when forensic scientists get involved in those determinations, they’re wrought with confirmation bias,” says Jennifer Friedman, a Los Angeles County public defender.

Meanwhile, forensic scientists in the U.S. have resisted the shift, arguing they lack the data to confidently testify about how DNA moves.

Van Oorschot and Gill concede this point. Only a handful of labs in Europe and Australia regularly research transfer. The forensic scientists interviewed for this story say they are not aware of any lab or university in the U.S. that routinely does so.

Funding gets some of the blame: The Australian labs and some European labs get government dollars to study DNA transfer. But British forensic researcher and professor Georgina Meakin of University College London says she must find alternative ways to pay for her own transfer research; the Centre for Forensic Sciences, where Meakin works, has launched a crowdfunding page for a new lab to study trace evidence transfer. In the U.S., all the grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Institute of Justice for forensics research put together likely sum just $13.5 million a year, according to a 2016 report on forensic science by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST); of that, very little has been spent looking into DNA transfer.

“The folks with the greatest interest in making sure forensic science isn’t misused are defendants,” says Eric Lander, principal leader of the Human Genome Project, who cochaired PCAST under President Obama. “Defendants don’t have an awful lot of power.”

In 2009, after issuing a report harshly criticizing the paucity of science behind most forensics, the National Academy of Sciences urged Congress to create a new, independent federal agency to oversee the field. There was little political appetite to do that. Instead, in 2013, Obama created a 40-member National Commission on Forensic Science, filled it with people who saw forensics from radically different perspectives — prosecutors, defense attorneys, academics, lab analysts and scientists — and made a rule that all actions must be approved by a supermajority. Naturally, the commission got off to a slow start. But ultimately it produced more than 40 recommendations and opinions. These lacked the teeth of a regulatory ruling, but the Justice Department was obligated to respond to them.

At the beginning, most of the commission’s efforts were focused on improving other disciplines, “because DNA testing as a whole is so much better than much forensic science that we had focused a lot of our attention elsewhere,” says U.S. district judge Jed Rakoff, a member of the commission.

According to Rakoff and other members interviewed, the commission was just digging into issues touching on DNA transfer when Attorney General Jeff Sessions took office last year. In April 2017, his department announced it would not renew the commission’s charter. It never met again.

Then, in August, President Trump signed the Rapid DNA Act of 2017, allowing law enforcement to use new technology that produces DNA results in just 90 minutes. The bill had bipartisan support and received little press. But privacy advocates worry it may usher in an era of widespread “stop and spit” policing, in which law enforcement asks anyone they stop for a DNA sample. This is already occurring in towns in Florida, Connecticut, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, according to reporting by ProPublica. If law enforcement deems there is probable cause, they can compel someone to provide DNA; otherwise, it is voluntary.

If stop-and-spit becomes more widely used and police databases swell, it could have a disproportionate impact on African Americans and Latinos, who are more often searched, ticketed and arrested by police. In most states, a felony arrest is enough to add someone in perpetuity to the state database. Just this month, the California Supreme Court declined to overturn a provision requiring all people arrested or charged for a felony to give up their DNA; in Oklahoma, the DNA of any undocumented immigrant arrested on suspicion of any crime is added to a database. Those whose DNA appears in a database face a greater risk of being implicated in a crime they didn’t commit.

It was Lunsford who figured it out in the end.

He was reading through Anderson’s medical records and paused on the names of the ambulance paramedics who picked up Anderson from his repose on the sidewalk outside S&S Market. He had seen them before.

He pulled up the Kumra case files. Sure enough, there were the names again: Three hours after picking up Anderson, the two paramedics had responded to the Kumra mansion, where they checked Raveesh’s vitals.

The prosecutors, defense attorney and police agree that somehow, the paramedics must have moved Anderson’s DNA from San Jose to Monte Sereno. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen has postulated that a pulse oximeter slipped over both patients’ fingers may have been the culprit; Kulick thinks it could have been their uniforms or another piece of equipment. It may never be known for sure.

A spokesman for Rural/Metro Corporation, where the paramedics worked, told San Francisco TV station KPIX5 that the company had high sanitation standards, requiring paramedics to change gloves and sanitize the vehicles.

Deputy District Attorney Smith framed the incident as a freak accident. “It’s a small world,” he told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter.

The trial against the other men implicated in the case moved forward. Austin’s older sister, Fritz, testified in trials against him and Garcia. She also testified against a third man, Marcellous Drummer, whose DNA had been found on evidence from the Kumra crime scene months after the initial hits.

During the trials, Harinder Kumra told jurors she was still haunted by the image of the man who split her lip open. “Every day I see that face. Every night when I sleep, when there’s a noise, I think it’s him,” she said. She has sold the mansion. Members of the Kumra family declined to comment for this story.

The DNA in the case did not go uncontested. Garcia’s attorney argued that, like Anderson’s, Garcia’s DNA had arrived at the scene inadvertently. According to the attorney, Austin had come by the trap house where Garcia hung out to pick up Garcia’s cousin; the cousin was in on the crime and had borrowed a box of gloves that Garcia frequently used, which is why Garcia’s DNA was found on the gloves at the crime scene; the reason Garcia’s cell phone pinged towers near Monte Sereno was because his cousin had borrowed it that night. However, the cousin died within weeks of the crime, and therefore wasn’t questioned or investigated.

Jurors were not persuaded and convicted Garcia, along with Drummer and Austin, of murder, robbery of an inhabited place and false imprisonment.

“I get it,” says Garcia’s attorney Christopher Givens. “People hear DNA and say, oh, sure you loaned your phone to someone.”

A jury could have had the same reaction to Anderson, had his alibi not been discovered, Givens says. “The sad thing is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually pleaded to something. They probably would have offered him a deal, and he would have been scared enough to take it.”

Garcia received a sentence of 37 years to life; Drummer and Austin’s sentences were enhanced for gang affiliation to life without parole. Garcia and Austin have appeals pending. Fritz received a reduced sentence for her testimony. In 2017 she was released from jail after spending four years in custody.

Lunsford received accolades for his detective work in the Kumra case and has since been promoted to sergeant; his boss, D’Antonio, is now a captain. But Lunsford says his perspective on DNA has forever changed. “We shook hands, and I transferred on you, you transferred on me. It happens. It’s just biological,” he says.

Based on interviews with prosecutors, defense lawyers and DNA experts, Anderson’s case is the clearest known case of DNA transference implicating an innocent man. It’s impossible to say how often this kind of thing happens, but law enforcement officials argue that it is well outside the norm. “There is no piece of evidence or science which is absolutely perfect, but DNA is the closest we have,” says District Attorney Rosen. “Mr. Anderson was a very unusual situation. We haven’t come across it again.”

Van Oorschot, the forensic science researcher whose 1997 paper revolutionized the field, cautions against disbelieving too much in the power of touch DNA to solve crimes. “I think it’s made a huge impact in a positive way,” he says. “But no one should ever rely solely on DNA evidence to judge what’s going on.”

Anderson’s case has altered the criminal justice system in a small but important way, says Kulick.

“As defense attorneys, we used to get laughed out of the courtroom if in closing arguments we argued transfer,” she says. “That was hocus-pocus. That was made up fiction. But Lukis showed us that it’s real.”

The cost of that demonstration was almost half a year of Anderson’s life.

Being accused of murder was “gut-wrenching,” he says. It pains him that he questioned his own innocence, even though, he says, “deep down I knew I didn’t do it.”

After he was released, Anderson returned to the streets. As is typical in cases where people are wrongly implicated in a crime, he received no compensation for his time in jail. He has continued to struggle with alcohol but has stayed out of major legal trouble since. He’s applying for Social Security, which could help him finally secure housing.

Anderson feels certain he’s not the only innocent person to be locked up because of transfer. He considers himself blessed by God to be free. And he has advice about DNA evidence: “There’s more that’s gotta be looked at than just the DNA,” he says. “You’ve got to dig deeper a little more. Re-analyze. Do everything all over again … before you say ‘this is what it is.’ Because it may not necessarily be so.”

This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project and WIRED.

Correction: An earlier version of this story identified the National Institute of Standards and Technology as the National Institute of Science and Technology.

I posted it back when I was involved with the old Phoenix CopWatch.

Yea, FINGERPRINTS can lie.

Well, actually fingerprints don't lie, but the cops who analyze them routinely lie or make mistakes.

There are two major problems with fingerprint evidence,

1) most fingerprints the cops find are PARTIAL PRINTS and

2) there is no universal standard on how to identify fingerprints. The Feds have one standard, that state of Arizona another, the state of California a 3rd and so on.

Source

Annals of Crime

May 27, 2002 Issue

Do Fingerprints Lie?

The gold standard of forensic evidence is now being challenged.

By Michael Specter

Late one afternoon in the spring of 1998, a police detective named Shirley McKie stood by the sea on the southern coast of Scotland and thought about ending her life. A promising young officer, the thirty-five-year-old McKie had become an outcast among her colleagues in the tiny hamlet of Strathclyde. A year earlier, she had been assigned to a murder case in which an old woman was stabbed through the right eye with a pair of sewing scissors. Within hours of the killing, a team of forensic specialists had begun working their way through the victim’s house. Along with blood, hair, and fibres, the detectives found some unexpected evidence: one of the prints lifted from the room where the murder took place apparently matched the left thumb of Detective McKie.

Crime scenes are often contaminated by fingerprints belonging to police officers, and investigators quickly learn to eliminate them from the pool of suspects. But McKie said that she had never entered the house. Four experts from the Scottish Criminal Record Office—the agency that stores and identifies fingerprints for Scotland’s police—insisted, however, that the print was hers. Though McKie held to her story, even her father doubted her. “I love my daughter very much,’’ Iain McKie, who served as a police officer in Scotland for more than thirty years, told me earlier this year. “But when they said the print was Shirley’s I have to admit I assumed the worst. My entire career I had heard that fingerprints never lie.”

Nobody actually suspected McKie of murder, and in fact the victim’s handyman, David Asbury, was charged with the crime. The sole physical evidence against him consisted of two fingerprints—one of his, lifted from an unopened Christmas gift inside the house, and one of the victim’s, found on a biscuit tin in Asbury’s home. The last thing prosecutors needed was for their own witness to raise questions in court about the quality of the evidence. Yet McKie did just that—repeating under oath that she had never entered the house. Asbury was convicted anyway, but Scottish prosecutors were enraged by McKie’s testimony. As far as they were concerned, McKie had not only lied; she had challenged one of the evidentiary pillars of the entire legal system. Despite their victory in the murder trial, they charged McKie with perjury.

Desperate, she went to the public library and searched the Internet for somebody who might help her. Among the names she came upon was that of Allan Bayle, a senior forensic official at New Scotland Yard and perhaps the United Kingdom’s foremost fingerprint expert. (It was Bayle’s expertise and supporting evidence that helped convict one of the principal Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland.) He agreed to review the prints, and what he saw astonished him. “It was obvious the fingerprint was not Shirley’s,’’ Bayle told me recently. “It wasn’t even a close call. She was identified on the left thumb, but that’s not the hand the print was from. It’s the right forefinger. But how can you admit you are wrong about Shirley’s print without opening yourself to doubt about the murder suspect, too?” Bayle posted a comment on Onin.com, a Web site trafficked regularly by the world’s fingerprint community. “I have looked at the McKie case,’’ he wrote. “The mark is not identical. I have shown this mark to many experts in the UK and they have come to the same conclusions.”

Bayle’s assertion caused a furor. He was threatened with disciplinary action, shunned by his colleagues, and, after a quarter century with the Metropolitan Police, driven from his job. But in the end McKie was acquitted, and Bayle’s statement helped challenge a system that had, until then, simply been taken for granted.

For more than a century, the fingerprint has been regarded as an unassailable symbol of truth, particularly in the courtroom. When a trained expert tells a judge and jury that prints found at a crime scene match those of the accused, his testimony often decides the case. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s basic text on the subject is entitled “The Science of Fingerprints,’’ and a science is what F.B.I. officials believe fingerprinting to be; their Web site states that “fingerprints offer an infallible means of personal identification.’’ The Bureau maintains a database that includes the fingerprints of more than forty-three million Americans; it can be searched from precinct houses and properly equipped police cruisers across the country. Fingerprints are regularly used to resolve disputes, prevent forgery, and certify the remains of the dead; they have helped send countless people to prison. Until this year, fingerprint evidence had never successfully been challenged in any American courtroom.

Then, on January 7th, U.S. District Court Judge Louis H. Pollak—a former dean of the law schools at Yale and at the University of Pennsylvania—issued a ruling that limited the use of fingerprint evidence in a drug-related murder case now under way in Philadelphia. He decided that there were not enough data showing that methods used by fingerprint analysts would pass the tests of scientific rigor required by the Supreme Court, and noted the “alarmingly high” error rates on periodic proficiency exams. Although Judge Pollak later decided to permit F.B.I. fingerprint experts to testify in this particular case, students of forensic science felt his skepticism was justified. “We have seen forensic disciplines which focus on bite marks, hair analysis, and handwriting increasingly questioned in the courts,” Robert Epstein, who had argued for the exclusion of fingerprint testimony in the case, told me. “But we have accepted fingerprinting uncritically for a hundred years.’’

Epstein, an assistant federal public defender in Philadelphia, was responsible for the first major court challenge to the discipline, in 1999, in U.S. v. Byron Mitchell. In that case, Epstein showed that standards for examiners vary widely, and that errors on proficiency tests—which are given irregularly and in a variety of forms—are far from rare. The critical evidence consisted of two fingerprint marks lifted from a car used in a robbery. To prepare for the trial, F.B.I. officials had sent the prints to agencies in all fifty states; roughly twenty per cent failed to identify them correctly. “After all this time, we still have no idea how well fingerprinting really works,’’ Epstein said. “The F.B.I. calls it a science. By what definition is it a science? Where are the data? Where are the studies? We know that fingerprint examiners are not always right. But are they usually right or are they sometimes right? That, I am afraid, we don’t know. Are there a few people in prison who shouldn’t be? Are there many? Nobody has ever bothered to try and find out. Look closely at the great discipline of fingerprinting. It’s not only not a science—it should not even be admitted as evidence in an American court of law.”

Fingerprints have been a source of fascination for thousands of years. They were used as seals on legal contracts in ancient Babylonia, and have been found embossed on six-thousand-year-old Chinese earthenware and pressed onto walls in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Hundreds of years ago, the outline of a hand with etchings representing the ridge patterns on fingertips was scratched into slate rock beside Kejimkujik Lake, in Nova Scotia.

For most of human history, using fingerprints to establish a person’s identity was unnecessary. Until the nineteenth century, people rarely left the villages in which they were born, and it was possible to live for years without setting eyes on a stranger. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, cities throughout Europe and America filled with migrants whose names and backgrounds could not be easily verified by employers or landlords. As the sociologist Simon Cole made clear in “Suspect Identities,” a recent history of fingerprinting, felons quickly learned to lie about their names, and the soaring rate of urban crime forced police to search for a more exacting way to determine and keep track of identities. The first such system was devised in 1883 by a Parisian police clerk named Alphonse Bertillon. His method, called anthropometry, relied on an elaborate set of anatomical measurements—such as head size, length of the left middle finger, face height—and features like scars and hair and eye color to distinguish one person from another. Anthropometry proved useful, but fingerprinting, which was then coming into use in Britain, held more promise. By the eighteen-sixties, Sir William J. Herschel, a British civil servant in India, had begun to keep records of fingerprints and use them to resolve common contract disputes and petty frauds.

Fingerprinting did not become indispensable, however, until 1869, when Britain stopped exiling criminals to Australia, and Parliament passed the Habitual Criminals Act. This law required judges to take past offenses into account when determining the severity of a sentence. But in order to include prior offenses in an evaluation one would need to know whether the convict had a previous record, and many criminals simply used a different alias each time they were arrested. The discovery that no two people had exactly the same pattern of ridge characteristics on their fingertips seemed to offer a solution. In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds published the first comments, in the scientific journal Nature, on the use of fingerprints to solve crimes. Soon afterward, Charles Darwin’s misanthropic cousin, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and the founder of eugenics, designed a system of numbering the ridges on the tips of fingers—now known as Galton points—which is still in use throughout the world. (Ultimately, though, he saw fingerprints as a way to classify people by race.)

Nobody is sure exactly how Mark Twain learned about fingerprints, but his novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” published in 1894, planted them in the American imagination. The main character in the book, a lawyer, earned the nickname Pudd’nhead in part because he spent so much time collecting “finger-marks”—which was regarded as proof of his foolishness until he astounded his fellow-citizens by using the marks to solve a murder. If you were to walk into a courtroom today and listen to the testimony of a typical forensic expert, you might hear a recitation much like Pudd’nhead Wilson’s:

Every human being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain physical marks which do not change their character, and by which he can always be identified—and that without shade of doubt or question. These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak, and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and the mutations of time. . . . This signature is each man’s very own. There is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe!

Some things have changed since Pudd’nhead Wilson, of course. A few weeks ago, I visited the headquarters of the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems, the F.B.I.’s billion-dollar data center, just outside Clarksburg, West Virginia—a citadel of the American forensic community. After driving past a series of shacks and double-wides and Bob Evans restaurants, you come upon a forest with a vast, futuristic complex looming above the trees. (I.A.F.I.S. moved from more crowded quarters in the Hoover Building in 1995, thanks to the influence of the state’s senior senator, Robert C. Byrd.)

Clarksburg is home to the world’s largest collection of fingerprints; on an average day, forty thousand are fed into the system. The I.A.F.I.S. computers, which can process three thousand searches a second, sort through the database in a variety of ways. For example, they compare complete sets of fingerprints in the files with new arrivals—as when a suspect is held in custody and the police send his “ten-prints” to I.A.F.I.S. The computer hunts for shared characteristics, and then attempts to match the prints to a record on file. “We identify about eight thousand fugitives per month here,’’ Billy P. Martin, the acting chief of the Identification and Investigative Services Section, told me. Martin said that eleven per cent of job applicants whose fingerprints are entered into the system—they could be day-care workers, casino staff, federal employees—turn out to have criminal records; as many as sixty per cent of the matches are repeat offenders.

The center looks like a nasa control room, with dozens of people monitoring the encrypted network of fingerprint machines sending in data from police stations throughout the country. The main computer floor is the size of two football fields and contains sixty-two purple-and-gray “jukeboxes,” each filled with two hundred compact disks containing fingerprints. (There are three thousand sets on each CD.) When someone is arrested, his prints are initially searched against a state’s computer files. If the search finds nothing, the information is forwarded to the federal database in Clarksburg. To make a match, the I.A.F.I.S. computer analyzes the many points on the ridges of every fingerprint it receives, starting with the thumb and working toward the pinkie; only when the data produce prints that match (or several prints that seem similar) is the original print forwarded to an analyst for comparison.

”We used to go to a file cabinet, pull out paper cards. If it was all loops—which is the most common type of print—you could spend an hour,’’ Martin said. “Now a computer algorithm does it in seconds. The system searches the electronic image against the database and pulls up the image onto the screen. The accuracy rate on first run is 99.97 per cent.’’ Still, this would mean that the I.A.F.I.S. computers make three hundred mistakes in every million searches. That is where trained examiners come in. The patterns on fingertips are more like topographical maps or handwriting than, say, bar codes. They can be so similar that even the most sophisticated computer program can’t tell them apart; it takes a trained human eye to detect the subtle differences.

I sat with one of the examiners in a dim, nearly silent room lined with what seemed like an endless series of cubicles. At each station, someone was staring at a monitor with two huge fingerprints on it. No two people—not even identical twins—have ever been shown to share fingerprints. The friction ridges that cover the skin on your hands and feet are formed by the seventeenth week in the womb; at birth they have become so deep that nothing can alter them, not even surgery. Look at your fingertips: the patterns resemble finely detailed maps of the bypasses and exit ramps on modern roads. Experts use the nomenclature of the highway to describe them: there are spurs, bifurcations, and crossovers. Some people have fingertips that are dominated by “loops,” others by “tented arches” or small circles that examiners call “lakes,” or smaller ones still, called “dots.” Collectively, these details are referred to as minutiae—an average human fingerprint may contain as many as a hundred and fifty minutia points. To identify fingerprints, an expert must compare these points individually, until enough of them correspond that he or she feels confident of a match.

When fingerprints are properly recorded (inked, then rolled, finger by finger, onto a flat surface, or scanned into a machine that captures and stores each finger as a digital image), identification works almost flawlessly. The trouble is that investigators in the field rarely see the pristine prints that can be quickly analyzed by a computer; most of the prints introduced at criminal trials are fragments known as “latent prints.” Crime scenes are messy, and the average fingerprint taken from them represents only a fraction of a full fingertip—about twenty per cent. They are frequently distorted and hard to read, having been lifted from a grainy table or a bloodstained floor. “It is one thing to say that fingerprints are unique and quite another to suggest that a partial latent print, often covered in blood or taken from an obscure surface, is unique, identical, or easy to identify,’’ Barry Scheck told me. In the past decade, Scheck, who directs the Innocence Project, has used DNA evidence to exonerate more than a hundred prisoners, some of them on death row. “We have always been told that fingerprint evidence is the gold standard of forensic science. If you have a print, you have your man. But it is not an objective decision. It is inexact, partial, and open to all sorts of critics.’’

Police use several methods to discover latent fingerprints. First, they shine a flashlight or a laser along the clean, solid surfaces on which a print may have been left by the perspiration and oil on a fingertip. When a print is discovered, detectives use a brush and powder to mark it, much as they did in the nineteenth century; the powder clings to the perspiration. (The method works best on smooth surfaces, like glass.) The print is then photographed and lifted with tape.

The technology for retrieving partial and obscure fingerprints keeps improving. On a recent episode of the television program “C.S.I.,” you might have seen detectives using a technique called superglue fuming to reveal the outline of a face on a plastic bag—an unconventional use of a common practice. In order to find difficult prints on an irregular surface, such as the human body, crime-scene investigators blow fumes of superglue over it. As the fumes adhere to the surface, the ridges of any fingerprint left there turn white and come clearly into view. Another common method involves ninhydrin, which works like invisible ink: when you douse paper with it, the chemical brings out any sweat that may have been left by fingertips. Ninhydrin is particularly useful with old prints or those covered in blood.

F.B.I. fingerprint examiners have a variety of computer tools—a sort of specialized version of Photoshop—to help them compare rolled prints with those in their system. In front of me, an I.A.F.I.S. examiner stared at his computer screen as a training instructor, Charles W. Jones, Jr., explained the process. “He is looking for ridges that form dots,’’ Jones said. “Bifurcations. Usually they look for six or seven of those.’’ The examiners work around the clock, in three shifts, and are required to evaluate at least thirty prints an hour. They know nothing about the people attached to the fingers on their screens; the prints could be those of a rapist, a serial killer, Osama bin Laden, a woman applying for a job in the Secret Service, or a bus driver from Queens. (“Yesterday I did fifty-one for a couple hours in a row,’’ an examiner told me proudly.)

At the bottom of the screen there are three buttons—”Ident,” “Unable,” and “Non-Ident”—and the examiner must click on one of them. If he identifies a finger, the print goes to a second analyst. If the two examiners independently reach the same conclusion, the fingerprint is considered to have been identified. If not, it gets forwarded to an analyst with more experience. “We have a pretty good fail-safe system,’’ Jones said. “Computers help immensely. But in the end they can’t pull the trigger. That’s our job.’’

Only a human being can make critical decisions about identity, and yet the talent, training, and experience of examiners vary widely. “The current identification system . . . is only as genuine as the knowledge, experience, and ability of the specialist carrying out the comparison,’’ David R. Ashbaugh, a staff sergeant with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, writes, in “Quantitative-Qualitative Friction Ridge Analysis,” which is considered the Bible of the field. And although fingerprint analysis has been in use for decades, there has never been any consensus about professional standards. How many distinct characteristics are necessary to prove that a latent fingerprint comes from a specific person? The answer is different in New York, California, and London. In certain states, and in many countries, fingerprint examiners must show that prints share a set number of Galton points before they can say they have made an identification. Australia and France require at least twelve matching Galton points; in Italy, the number is sixteen. In America, standards vary, even within a state. The F.B.I. doesn’t require a minimum number of points; all such regulations were dropped fifty years ago, because, according to Stephen B. Meagher, the chief of the Bureau’s latent-print unit, the F.B.I. believes that making an identification using Galton points alone can cause errors.

Meagher says that fingerprint analysis is an objective science; Robert Epstein, the Philadelphia attorney who has led the fight against presenting fingerprint evidence in court, says it is not a science at all. Neither is exactly right. Examining the many contours of a human finger is not as objective as measuring someone’s temperature or weight, or developing a new vaccine. But it’s not guesswork, either. It involves, inevitably, human judgment, and most people agree that when it is done well it is highly accurate. The difficulty is in determining whether it has been done well.

Scientific methodology is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they make sense; in laboratories throughout the world, researchers spend at least as much time trying to disprove a theory as they do trying to prove it. Eventually, those ideas that don’t prove false are accepted. But fingerprinting was developed by the police, not by scientists, and it has never been subjected to rigorous analysis—you cannot go to Harvard, Berkeley, or Oxford and talk to the scholar working on fingerprint research. Yet by the early twentieth century fingerprinting had become so widely accepted in American courts that further research no longer seemed necessary, and none of any significance has been completed.

David L. Faigman, who teaches at the Hastings College of the Law and is an editor of the annually revised forensic text “Modern Scientific Evidence,’’ has spent most of his career campaigning to increase the scientific literacy of judges and juries. Faigman likens the acceptance of fingerprint evidence to the way leeches were once assumed to be of great medical value. “Leeches were used for centuries,’’ he told me. “It was especially common for the treatment of pneumonia and it was considered an effective therapy. It wasn’t till late in the nineteenth century that they did the clinical tests to show that leeches did not help for pneumonia, and they may have actually hurt. Fingerprinting is like that in at least one crucial way: it is something we assume works but something we have never properly tested. Until we test our beliefs, we can’t say for sure if we have leeches or we have aspirin”—an effective remedy that was used before it was understood. “One of the things that science teaches us is that you can’t know the answers until you ask the questions.’’

The discussion of fingerprinting is only the most visible element in a much larger debate about how forensic science fits into the legal system. For years, any sophisticated attorney was certain to call upon expert witnesses—doctors, psychiatrists, Bruno Magli shoe salesmen—to assert whatever might help his case. And studies have shown that juries are in fact susceptible to the influence of such experts. Until recently, though, there were no guidelines for qualification; nearly anybody could be called an expert, which meant that, unlike other witnesses, the expert could present his “opinion” almost as if it were fact. Experts have been asked to testify about the rate at which a tire would skid, and the distance blood would splatter when a certain calibre bullet smashed into a skull. They have lectured scores of juries on the likelihood that a medicine could cause a particular side effect; they have interpreted polygraphs and handwriting, and have pronounced on whether a bite mark was made by one set of teeth to the exclusion of all others.

Although forensic evidence has proved particularly powerful with juries, it is particularly weak as a science. By the nineteen-eighties, the kind of evidence that was routinely admitted into court without any statistical grounding or rationale had earned a name: “junk science.” And junk science had become ubiquitous. With the problem growing out of control, in 1993 the Supreme Court took up a lawsuit called Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. The case involved a child who suffered from serious birth defects. His lawyers claimed that the defects were caused by Bendectin, a drug that was for many years routinely prescribed for morning sickness, which his mother took while she was pregnant. The company argued that no valid evidence existed to support the claim. The Court’s decision set a new standard for scientific evidence in America: for the first time, it held that it was not permissible for expert witnesses to testify to what was “generally accepted” to be true in their field. Judges had to act as “gatekeepers,” the Court said; if an expert lacked reliability he was no longer allowed in the courtroom. The ruling, and others that expanded upon it, laid down clear guidelines for the federal bench, requiring judges to consider a series of questions: Could a technique be tested or proved false? Was there a known or potential error rate? (DNA identification has provided the model, because experts have gathered enough statistical evidence to estimate the odds—which are astronomical—that one person’s DNA could be traced to another.) The Court also instructed judges to consider whether a particular theory had ever been subjected to the academic rigor of peer review or publication.

The Daubert ruling forced federal judges to become more sophisticated about science, which has not been easy for them. “Daubert changed everything,” Michael J. Saks, a law professor at Arizona State University, who has written widely on the subject, told me. “And it is pretty clear when you look at those criteria that fingerprinting simply doesn’t satisfy any of them.’’ Since the Daubert ruling, federal courts have judged handwriting evidence and hair identification to be unscientific. The use of polygraph data has also been curtailed. Questions have been raised about ballistics—say, whether a bullet can be traced back to a particular gun. Somehow, though, until Judge Pollak came along, challenges to fingerprinting continued to be regarded as heresy.

Relying largely on testimony presented by Robert Epstein in U.S. v. Byron Mitchell, the first post-Daubert case involving fingerprint testimony, Judge Pollak ruled in January that an expert could say whether he thought fingerprints belonged to the people accused of the crime, but he could not say that the fingerprints he had examined were, beyond doubt, those of the defendant.

Pollak is one of the federal judiciary’s most respected judges. Federal prosecutors were so concerned that any ruling he issued would carry a significance even greater than its legal weight that they asked the Judge to reconsider his precedent-shattering decision. Pollak agreed.

Late in February, Pollak held a hearing on the reliability of fingerprint evidence. For three days, several of the world’s most prominent experts discussed their field in his courtroom. The F.B.I.’s Stephen B. Meagher testified that no Bureau analyst had ever misidentified a person in court, and that the Bureau’s annual proficiency test was among the reasons that the Judge should be confident about admitting expert testimony. Allan Bayle, the British forensic specialist, flew in from London at the request of the defense. He had a different view. He told Pollak that the F.B.I.’s proficiency test was so easy it could be passed with no more than six weeks of training. “If I gave my experts [at Scotland Yard] these tests, they would fall about laughing,” he told Pollak in court. Later, in conversation with me, he expanded on those comments. “The F.B.I. are conning themselves and they are conning everybody else,’’ he said. “They don’t even use real scene-of-crime marks for the fingerprint tests.” He pointed out that the fingerprints used in the exams were so different from each other that almost anybody could tell them apart. “Let’s say I asked you to look at a zebra, a giraffe, an elephant, and a lion. Then I asked you to find the zebra. How hard would that be? What the Bureau should be doing is comparing five zebras and selecting among them.” Bayle and other critics stopped short of calling fingerprint evidence junk science, but they noted that there are few data showing how often latent prints are properly identified.

By February 27th, the final day of the hearing, the fissures in an old and accepted discipline had become visible, and Judge Pollak promised to issue a final ruling within a couple of weeks.

A few days after Pollak’s hearing ended, I flew to Cardiff to attend the annual meeting of the Fingerprint Society. It was raining in Wales, and the members of the society were deeply unsettled because their profession was under assault. Each year, the society gathers for a few days to listen to lectures and to talk about developments in the field. The society has always been a club—the type where you might expect to stumble upon Sherlock Holmes or G. K. Chesterton. The bar at the Thistle Hotel, where the conference was held, was filled with police officers from Sussex, Aberdeen, and most places in between. The conference was well attended by representatives of the United States Secret Service and the F.B.I. There were also a few stray academics interested in the latest obscure technology, such as magnetic nanoflake powders, which are able to capture fingerprints without disturbing whatever traces of DNA may be present. (With conventional methods, an investigator has to choose: either swab a mark to harvest the DNA or lift it to find the print.)

By the time I arrived, the society was preoccupied by two issues: the Pollak hearings and the lingering ill will from the McKie case, in Scotland. One of those in attendance was Meagher, the lead F.B.I. witness in Judge Pollak’s courtroom. I introduced myself, and told him that I understood he couldn’t discuss the Philadelphia case while it was under review, but asked if we could talk about the field in general. “No,’’ he said, without a moment’s hesitation.Iain McKie had also come to Cardiff that weekend, as had Allan Bayle. McKie, a tall, reedy man with a great nimbus of curly white hair, presented a lecture on the ethics of fingerprinting. He remained livid about the fact that a fingerprint had destroyed his daughter’s career; although she had been acquitted of perjury, she felt unwelcome on the police force after having been strip-searched and jailed by her colleagues, and had resigned soon after her trial. She never returned to work. Today, she spends much of her time trying to force Scottish authorities to admit that what they did to her was wrong. “I believe a person made a mistake, and instead of admitting it they were prepared to send me to jail,’’ Shirley McKie said after she was acquitted of perjury. “It ruined my life, and now I am trying to pick up the pieces.”

The Scottish Criminal Record Office has never acknowledged the error, nor has the Fingerprint Society issued any statement about the incident. (David Asbury, the man convicted of the murder, was released in August of 2000, pending an appeal. As expected, the judge in the case questioned the validity of the fingerprint evidence that had led to his conviction.) In Cardiff, McKie told the Fingerprint Society that the system they represented was “incestuous, secretive, and arrogant. It has been opened to unprecedented analysis and it’s sadly lacking. It pains me to say that, because I was a police officer for thirty years. You are indicted on the basis of a fingerprint. You are not innocent till proven guilty; if the police have a print, you are assumed to be guilty. We need to start a new culture. The view that the police and fingerprint evidence are always right, the rest of the world be damned, has to end.’’

Afterward, the corridors and conference rooms were buzzing; it was as if somebody had challenged the fundamentals of grammar at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. But McKie was far from the only speaker at the conference to raise questions about the field. Christophe Champod, who works for a British organization called the Forensic Science Service, has long attempted to apply rigorous statistical methods to fingerprinting. Champod spoke in an understated and academic manner, but what he had to say was even more forceful than McKie’s presentation. He told the audience that they had only themselves to blame for the state of the field, that for years they had resisted any attempts to carry out large trials, which would then permit examiners to provide some guidance to juries about the value of their analysis, as is the case with DNA. “What we are trying to do in this field is reduce, reduce, reduce the population so that there is only a single individual that can possess a set of fingerprints. . . . But we can never examine the fingerprints of the entire universe. So, based on your experience, you make an inference: the probability that there is another person in the universe that could have a good match for the mark is very small. In the end, it’s like a leap of faith. It’s a very small leap, but it is a leap nonetheless.”

Half an hour had been allotted for questions, but there was only silence. Afterward, one of the organizers explained it to me: “He was using the terms of religion to describe our science. That’s just not fair.”

Allan Bayle invited me to visit him in London after the meeting. Bayle is six feet five with sandy hair and flecks of gray in his blue eyes. He had recently married and he lives with his wife, child, and mother-in-law just steps from the M1 motorway entrance in Hendon, on the northern edge of the city. We sat in his conservatory on a cloudy day while his five-month-old boy slept in a stroller beside us.

Bayle was frustrated. For the past five years, he had worked mostly as a lecturer on fingerprints for the Metropolitan Police. “I taught advanced forensic scene examination, and I loved it. Once I said I would give evidence in the McKie case, though, I was no longer allowed to go to meetings. But that is not why I left. They did nothing about this mistake in identity. When you know something is wrong, how can you stay silent?” He told me he was particularly upset that Shirley McKie’s career as a police officer had ended for no reason. Bayle’s life, too, has changed. He now works as an independent consultant. Although he has been portrayed as a critic of fingerprint analysis, he is critical only of the notion that it should never be questioned. “It’s a valuable craft,” he said. “But is it a science like physics or biology? Well, of course not. All I have been saying is, let’s admit we make errors and do what we can to limit them. It is such a subjective job. The F.B.I. want to say they are not subjective. Well, look at what David Ashbaugh—certainly among the most noted of all fingerprint analysts—said when he testified in the Mitchell case.” Ashbaugh had clearly stated that fingerprint identification was “subjective,” adding that the examiner’s talents are his “personal knowledge, ability, and experience.”

Bayle took out a large portfolio containing dozens of fingerprints, as well as gruesome pictures of crime scenes. “Look at the mess,’’ he said. He showed me a series of photographs: jagged fingerprints—black smudges, really—recovered from the scenes of several murders he had investigated. “With all that information, you then come to your conclusions. You have to somehow match that to this clean image’’—he handed me a picture of a perfect print, taken at a police booking—”and say, finally, it’s one man’s print. You have got to look at everything, not just points. The Bureau has not had a missed ident in all their years of working, and I applaud that. But they are not testing their experts’ ability. And that is dangerous.’’

The following week, Stephen Meagher agreed to speak with me at the F.B.I. headquarters, on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Meagher is perhaps the best known and most forceful advocate for the view that fingerprint evidence is scientifically valid and that it ought to be welcome in courts.

”But is it really a science?” I asked as soon as we settled down to talk in his office. Meagher said that he didn’t think of science as a term that could be easily defined or tailored to fit all disciplines in the same way. “There is academic science, legal science, and forensic science,’’ he told me. “They are different. You can be an expert in the field and give testimony without having an academic level of scientific knowledge. . . . It is not achievable to take pure science and move it into a legal arena.’’ This seemed surprising, since Meagher had often argued that, when performed correctly, fingerprint analysis is an “objective’’ science. In 1999, when he was asked in court whether, based on the unique properties of fingerprints, he had an opinion of the error rate associated with his work, he said, “As applied to the scientific methodology, it’s zero.” (Scientists don’t talk this way; it is an axiom among biomedical researchers that nothing in biology is true a hundred per cent of the time.)

Later, when I asked David Faigman, the Hastings law professor, whether it made sense to divide science into legal, academic, and forensic subgroups, he laughed.

”Of course it makes no sense,’’ he said. “Mr. Meagher operates on a sixteenth-century notion—a Francis Bacon idea—of what science is all about. To me, the analogue for law is meteorology. It deals with physics and chemistry—the most basic sciences. Yet it has to make predictions and empirical statements regarding complex reality. That is because so many factors determine the weather that it’s really a probabilistic science. And I think fingerprinting is the same.”

”Most fields of normal science could pull from the shelf dozens or hundreds, if not thousands, of studies testing their various hypotheses and contentions, which had been conducted over the past decades or century, and hand them to the court,’’ Michael Saks wrote in “Modern Scientific Evidence.” For fingerprinting there was nothing. In 1999, the F.B.I. conducted its study in preparation for the Byron Mitchell trial. The study asked examiners to match the two actual latent prints taken from the car in the Mitchell case with the known set of fingerprints of the man on trial. Both sets of prints were sent to the crime laboratories of fifty-three law-enforcement agencies. Of the thirty-five agencies that examined them and responded, most concluded that the latent prints matched the known prints of the accused; eight said that no match could be made for one of the latent prints, and six said that no match could be made for the other print. The F.B.I., realizing it had a problem, sent annotated enlargements of all the prints to those examiners who had said the fingerprints couldn’t be matched. In these photographs, the points of similarity on the fingertips were clearly marked. This time, every lab adopted the F.B.I.’s conclusions.

When I asked Meagher about the study, he told me that the test was supposed to demonstrate the uniqueness of the prints; it was not meant to be a test of competency. He claimed opponents have used the data unfairly. At the same time, he conceded that it would not matter how clean a fingerprint was if the person examining it hadn’t been trained properly. “Our system is a huge statistical-probability model, but it doesn’t make identifications, because it doesn’t have all the information that is needed,” he said. “It’s a job for human beings.”

On March 13th, Judge Pollak vacated his earlier order. He issued a new opinion, in which he stated that the defense had succeeded in raising “real questions about the adequacy of the proficiency tests taken annually by certified F.B.I. fingerprint examiners.” Yet he was persuaded by the F.B.I.’s record of accuracy, and wrote that “whatever may be the case for other law-enforcement agencies” the Bureau’s standards seemed good enough to permit F.B.I. experts to testify in his courtroom. “In short,’’ he concluded, “I have changed my mind.’’ It was, naturally, a blow to the opposition—though Pollak was careful to rule only on the case before him and only with regard to the F.B.I.

I met with the Judge shortly after he issued his decision. Having arrived early for our meeting, I watched as he led the jury-selection process in the case in which Meagher will now be permitted to testify. Like most courtrooms, it was decorated with an American flag, but it was filled with art as well: prints by Matisse, Cézanne, and Eakins and drawings by Victor Hugo lined the walls.

During the lunch break, we sat in his ramshackle office. The stuffing was falling out of both of our chairs. Pollak, a lively man in his late seventies, declined to talk specifically about the case, but was happy to consider the broader issues it raised. “The most important question here, of course, is, Am I the right person to be a gatekeeper?’’ he said. “I, who know little of science. . . . As society comes to rely more fully on technology, the question will become acute.’’ Pollak said that he found it worrisome that the Supreme Court ruling in the Daubert case meant that he could rule one way on an issue like fingerprints and another federal judge in a different jurisdiction could do the opposite, and neither ruling would be reversed (the Court will hear appeals only on procedure, not on the law). He was frank about how poorly prepared most judges are for making decisions based on scientific issues.

”I want to tell you that shortly after I got into this line of work there was no more unqualified district judge”—for making such decisions—”in the United States,’’ Judge Pollak said of himself. He told me that in the early nineteen-eighties he had met a former chief executive of DuPont at a reception. “He asked me how it can be that people like me are entrusted to make such major scientific decisions. He wasn’t questioning my good faith. But by virtue of my job I have been asked to make decisions that are out of the range of any competence that I have.” Pollak conceded that the DuPont chairman had a point. I asked if he felt scientifically competent to rule on the current case in Philadelphia. He laughed but didn’t answer. “I knew when I decided the thing there was going to be some surprise,’’ he said, referring to his initial opinion. “Honestly, I don’t think I had anticipated the degree to which people would be startled. . . . Other lawyers in fingerprint situations are now almost duty bound to raise these questions and challenges again. How could they in good faith act in any other way? This decision is certainly not the end. I think we can be certain of that.’’ ♦

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about aids, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.