Posted by Mark Hawthorne on October 02, 1999 at 00:00:02:
I am employed by the San Francisco Police department, in the Crime Scenes Investitation Unit. As a CLPE, I am shocked that an "identification" of this type was confirmed by so many alleged experts. From the little bit of information I have seen, I would never have declared this comparison a positive ident. Ridge counts are off, relationship of the latent and known are far out of alignment. The alleged common point (green dot)and yellow arrow are far from being remotely close. In this case it is a sad state of affairs that the case went as far in the judicial system as it did. As the old saying goes, in this country, it is better to let one-thousand guilty men go free, than to convict one innocent man. It appears in this Scottish case, a grave miscarriage of justice was undertaken. It is quite ashame that it took outsiders to set the record straight. Perhaps this case could be passed out to the many Certified Latent Print Examiners for a discussion at the next IAI conference. Poor Shirley who had to endure years of suffering all because of a bad or erroneous identification. As latent print examiners, we have a duty and responsibility to insure quality of our work product which leads to integrity of the individual and/or unit in which they work. This example is a sad case of how unfortunate circumstances can result from a poor work product or a mistake that no one wanted to admit to. In my fifteen years as a latent print examiner, I have never been confronted with a situation such as this, nor do I ever want to be in that position. I strongly believe as long as I maintain a professional non-bias posture in examining latent prints,I will never be in the position such as the Scottish. I would be interested in hearing what others have to say aside from the five eminent experts who've already posted.