Remember when you were in first grade and it was fingerprinting day and you asked, “why are we all getting fingerprinted?” and your teacher said, “your fingerprints are unique and, this way, if you got lost, the police could find out who you are” and you could tell something was fishy about that explanation, even at age six, but you didn’t know exactly what?
Maybe you sensed you were already a suspected criminal. Or maybe you were having a premonition about this study, which revealed that fingerprints aren’t infallible:
In analyzing these cases of faulty matches dating from 1920, [UC Irvine criminologist Simon Cole -ed.] suggests that the 22 exposed incidents, including eight since 1999, are merely the tip of the iceberg. Despite the publicly acknowledged cases of error, fingerprint examiners have long held that fingerprint identification is “infallible,” and testified in court that their error rate for matching fingerprints is zero.
“Rather than blindly insisting there is zero error in fingerprint matching, we should acknowledge the obvious, study the errors openly and find constructive ways to prevent faulty evidence from being used to convict innocent people,” said Cole, an assistant professor of criminology, law and society.
The study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology.
More from Dr. Simon Cole’s website…
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