we looked at a recent article from Georgia regarding
legal challenges to fingerprints.
_________________________________________ Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-fingerprints17-2008oct17,0,6832992.story The Los Angeles Police Department has acknowledged in
a confidential report that people have been falsely implicated in crimes
because the department's fingerprint experts wrongly identified them as
suspects.
"This is something of extraordinary concern," said Michael Judge, public
defender for Los Angeles County. "Juries tend to accord the highest
level of confidence to fingerprint evidence. This is the type of thing
that easily could lead to innocent people being convicted."
The two cases were used by investigators to illustrate broader problems with shoddy work and poor oversight that have plagued the department's Latent Print Unit. Rhonda Sims-Lewis, chief of the LAPD's administrative and technical bureau, acknowledged the findings, but said changes to the unit's leadership and protocols were made last year after senior officials became aware of problems. Internal discipline investigations led to the firing of one fingerprint analyst, who had been involved in both of the mishandled cases. Three other analysts received suspensions, Sims-Lewis said. In addition, two supervisors responsible for overseeing the unit were replaced, staff was bolstered and oversight tightened, she said.
"This is very, very serious," Sims-Lewis said. "We feel very compelled
to take quick action when something like this arises. Guilty people can
be set free and innocent people can be jailed."
There are 78 forensic print specialists assigned to the unit, according to the department's website. They are not sworn police officers but among the hundreds of civilians who fill specialty jobs in the department. After prints are lifted from a crime scene, the specialists run them through automated databases to find possible matches and then analyze those to seek a more precise match. Two other analysts are then supposed to check the work for accuracy. Sims-Lewis and other department officials, however, described a poorly run operation, in which records and evidence were left lying around or misplaced, and supervisors "were stuck in the old way of doing things." Pressed to explain the sloppy work of the unit, Yvette Sanchez-Owens, commanding officer of the Scientific Investigation Division, speculated that "people were reviewing the work of friends and just rubber stamping it without really reviewing it." In one of the cases highlighted in the report, a man was extradited from Alabama to face burglary charges after an analyst matched his prints to those found at the scene. The mistake was missed by two reviewers and was caught only when a third reviewer was preparing to testify at the trial. In the other example, Maria Delosange Maldonado, a pregnant hospital technician, was charged in February 2006 with breaking into a San Fernando Valley cellphone store. When questions were raised about the accuracy of the print analysis, the LAPD said the prints could not be reexamined because they had been lost. The audit characterized the fingerprint identification in that case as "erroneous." Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for Dist. Atty Steve Cooley, said the D.A.'s office was "looking into" the question of what, if anything, prosecutors should do to better guard against faulty evidence making it into a courtroom. The LAPD's internal investigation challenges the widely held view that forensic matches made by fingerprint experts are airtight. The authors of the internal LAPD report recalled the infamous example of an Oregon man who was linked through faulty fingerprint analysis by three federal agents to the 2004 terrorist train bombings in Madrid. Jack Weiss, chairman of the City Council's public safety committee said there was "nothing more basic and more bread and butter than fingerprints. You have to be able to take each one of them to the bank." He said he will hold hearings on the issue and call fingerprint lab employees to testify before his panel. "We want to know the extent of it and whether it affects any other cases. We want to know how far back it goes," he said. Los Angeles police officials had initially planned to hire an outside expert last year to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the unit. They failed, however, to secure the $325,000 to $450,000 from city coffers needed for the review. In-house auditors were used instead, but Sims-Lewis acknowledged that they did not have the expertise required to comprehensively examine the unit's past and current practices. "We still want outside eyes to come in and make sure we're doing things right," she said. The focus of the audit would be improving the operation, officials said, but they also believe it would uncover past errors if any had been made. Although there is no way to be certain without the full audit, Sim-Lewis said she was confident that faulty work by the unit had not sent an innocent person to prison or freed someone who was guilty. Mistakes, she said, would have been caught by experts hired by defense attorneys. Judge, the public defender, disputed that notion and called on the city to hire the outside auditor. "Law enforcement should take seriously this matter by investing more in testing and studies, and by focusing more on these people they are sending into court with very powerful evidence." joel.rubin@latimes.com richard.winton@latimes.com Times staff writer Harriet Ryan contributed to this report.
Re: LAPD Fingerprint Mistake
A couple of friends called and emailed me about the situation in Los Angeles this week. I replied something like, "Look, as I understand it, you've got one case of lost latent print lifts and one case of erroneous identification in, what, the last ten years? Come on, LAPD has about 50 full time latent print examiners doing probably tens of thousands of correct identifications during that time. Is there a problem? Maybe. Is it serious? I doubt it!" Stephen Meagher stated at a conference a few years ago that the FBI makes an erroneous identification about 1 for every 11,000,000 correct identifications. If you happen to be the person misidentified in that one erroneous ident, it is a serious problem (ask Brandon Mayfield). But in the overall scheme of things regarding reliability of forensic evidence, it is not a big problem. It has always been my contention that dishonesty is a far more serious problem than erroneous identification. Cases of fabricated evidence far outnumber cases of honest mistake. But the underlying current of this thread is that this is a problem we in the fingerprint community have to deal with, and that is correct. We need to take corrective action wherever and whenever erroneous idents occur, but we also need to purge the dishonest people from our ranks. They are the ones who do more harm. And each of us needs to stay informed on these issues so we can answer in court when questioned about them.
Pat A. Wertheim
_________________________________________
Disclaimer: The intent of this is to
provide thought provoking discussion. No claims of accuracy exist.
Question – Sufficiency: How much of a full print did you have?
Possible Answers: a) (Stating a percentage of the physical size) 1/3 of a fully rolled fingerprint. b) (Stating a percentage of level two details) I had 30 level 2 details, most rolled impressions have about 100-150 level two characteristics. c) (Stating the amount of relevant information needed) I had enough relevant information that any expert would agree with my conclusion. d) There are several methods to determine how much of a fully rolled print a latent was from, and all methods will give different result. Would you like me to explain some of these and the differences in the conclusions?
Discussion: This question is usually trying to imply that you had less than a sufficient amount to do an adequate examination or to arrive at the best conclusion. Answer a: This measure of how
much you had can easily be misinterpreted. As an example, you can have
1/2 of a rolled impression but not have the clarity to make a conclusive
determination. You can also have 1/20th of a rolled impression and
have more than enough information to come to a conclusion. In this
case I had 1/3rd of the physical area of the rolled impression but without
stating the clarity level then it’s not clear to others if I had a
sufficient amount of information. Answer b: Another method
would be to figure out the percentage of level two characteristics in the
latent print compared to the number of level two details in the rolled
impression. If I have 30 points out of 100 then the latent was 1/3rd of the
rolled impression. But this is misleading because we don't only use
level 2 details to make an individualization. Answer c: Another method is
to look at how much relevant information was available. If I wanted to
find out what kind of liquid was in a glass, how much of the liquid would be
needed to come to a conclusive determination, surely not the entire
glassful. In the case with a latent print and a rolled impression, how
much is needed to have a sufficient amount of relevant information?
We need enough information in the latent print that any expert using
the same information, would arrive at the same conclusion. Answer d: This is the best answer because it makes an attorney commit to allowing you the time needed to give a comprehensive answer. If an attorney allows a full answer then someone can state all of the information in answers a, b, and c.
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