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Big Wullie · Joined: 25 Apr 2007 Posts: 1149 Location: Glasgow

Found this article also on Strange Justice site and had to link it to let Shirley know there are others just like her Infact this article suggests fingerprint evidence is only right 95% of the time:

Thursday, October 20, 2005

http://stju.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_archive.html

CARELESS FINGERPRINT ANALYSTS PUT INNOCENT MEN IN JAIL

A single fingerprint found at the scene of a crime is such powerful evidence that it's almost an automatic conviction. Fingerprints never lie: Juries have been told that for more than a century. But a criminologist at the University of California, Irvine, has documented 22 cases, most involving violent crimes, in which fingerprint evidence turned out to be dead wrong, usually discovered after defendants had served time for crimes they did not commit.

The fingerprints didn't lie. But the experts who matched them with a suspect were wrong, and subsequently had to admit it, according to court records analyzed by Simon Cole, assistant professor of criminology, law and society at Irvine. Cole's exhaustive research argues that the "zero error rate" claimed by fingerprint experts needs serious retooling. His findings are published in the current issue of the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology.

The cases include one man who volunteered for hazardous assignments while in prison to earn money to pay for DNA research involving his case. That research eventually cleared him, despite the fact that experts had testified that his fingerprint implicated him in the attempted murder of a police officer.

In another case, a corpse found in the Nevada desert was identified – on the basis of fingerprints – as that of a California woman who later turned up alive.

Most of the cases studied by Cole were covered by the media, partly because they involved sensational events like the Madrid train bombing last year that killed 191 people. Cole suspects there are many other cases, possibly more than 1,000 each year in the United States alone, in which fingerprints have been matched erroneously with the wrong person. Cole isn't saying that fingerprints are not a useful tool for law enforcement. All he's saying is their "error rate" is more than zero, and some way needs to be found to put their reliability into perspective. "To tell the jury that it's positive identification, that it's infallible, that it's 100 percent certain is overstating the value of it," Cole said in an interview. "It may well be that it's right 95 percent of the time, but when it's wrong it's very unlikely for us to know about it. So it's likely to result in a miscarriage of justice."

The article in full:

Page One
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=1202813&page=1

Page two
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/Story?id=1202813&page=2

And Page three here
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/Story?id=1202813&page=3

UNBELIEVABLE SUPPRESSION OF EVIDENCE BY THE PROSECUTION

It's the prosecutors who should be prosecuted

After the murder conviction of Mark Dallagher was reversed by the British criminal appeals court – a conviction that had been based largely on a latent ear print which Crown experts identified as having been made by defendant – the case was scheduled to be retried within two months. The major issue on appeal had been the admissibility of the ear print evidence, strongly supported by the Crown, but urged to be unreliable by the defense. The retrial commenced in June of 2003, but after ten days the trial was abandoned. New discoveries compelled the prosecution to give additional scrutiny to the ear identification evidence. The presentation of additional evidence of guilt was, however, not forthcoming, and, on January 20, 2004, Dallagher walked out of Old Bailey a free man....

The BBC reported that the prosecution offered no evidence when the retrial was scheduled to commence, and Mr. Dallagher was formally found not guilty. Judge Sir Stephen Mitchell told the former defendant that "this most unfortunate saga at long last comes to an end." The judge said he hoped Dallagher would continue to live peacefully in Essex, where he had been living since his release on bail when the re-trial was halted in 2003. After spending seven years in prison on a life sentence, Dallagher was a free man again.

Counsel for Dallagher had discovered recently that the initial comparison of Dallagher’s known ear print with the marks left at the crime scene by Dutch ear print examiner Cornelis Van der Lugt had led to the latter’s conclusion that the two impressions were ‘DEFINITELY NOT" (underlined twice in the examiner’s report) made by Mark Dallagher. Despite this earlier report, the Crown’s "expert" in ear identifications would testify at the trial in 1998 and during the post-appeal evidence depositions and hearings in 2002, that defendant had been positively identified by an ear comparison. The discovery of this earlier report fundamentally damaged the Crown’s case.

But there was an even more bizarre twist in the Dallagher saga. A low copy DNA analysis of the latent ear mark previously said to be Dallagher’s found that the DNA in the latent print definitely could not have come from Mark Dallagher. No wonder the prosecution threw in the towel!

James Sturman, QC, one of Dallagher’s attorneys on appeal, was quoted by The Guardian as stating outside Old Bailey that Dallagher was the victim of "a grotesque miscarriage of justice." He added, "This is another example of the dangers of police following science too closely." As he walked out of court, Dallagher suggested that "the police should now properly investigate the murder of Dorothy Wood so that her family can finally have justice."

Mark Dallagher had, from the start, maintained that he was innocent – no great surprise here! He also asserted, however, that he was handicapped by an ankle injury at the time the murder was to have occurred, and had offered an uncorroborated alibi defense as well. Though the ear print identification was the primary cause of his conviction in 1998, there was also evidence of an unnamed jailhouse snitch to whom Dallagher had supposedly confessed, a confession which the defendant also strongly denied making. Snitch testimony has long been known to be extremely unreliable. It has been used by prosecutors in the trial of many persons who were convicted but later exonerated by DNA.

If we accept the superiority of DNA analysis over most other forensic methods of individualization – and certainly all forensic scientists would concede such superiority over the frequently maligned ear print comparison method – then police let the guilty murderer/burglar get away for seven years while an innocent person languished in prison. As far as we know, that guilty person is still free! At the time of Dallagher’s release, one contemporaneous news account stated that the new DNA evidence obtained by the West Yorkshire police implicates a different suspect.

kevin donald · Joined: 29 Oct 2007 Posts: 198

From the Herald.

http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/o...rprint_service_is_highlighted.php