Interesting article in last week's New Yorker about the heated legal debate about the validity of fingerprinting as a science, one admissible as expert testimony in a court of law.
Some say yes, fingerprinting is a science. It has long been regarded as thus, both in courts of law and by the public at large, no doubt from seeing a few too many suits dusting for prints in movie crime scenes.
In the case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals from 1993, the Supreme Court established the legal precedent that Federal Rules of Evidence, should provide the standard for admitting expert scientific testimony. Specifically, some of the questions which had to be answered to determine if an the evidence of some field of study should be admitted:
Can the theory or technique be (and has it been) tested?
Has it been subjected to peer review and publication?
Is there a high known or potential rate of error?
Are there standards controlling the technique’s operation?
Have the techniques been accepted within the scientific community?
While fingerprinting may be holding its own, other forms of testimony are under assault. For example, the National Academy of Forensic Engineers challenges the practice of allowing policeman to perform accident reconstruction. Again, this may be the influence of movies, but when I think of accident reconstruction I think of a flip chart in a court of law, with a crude 2-D drawing of city streets, flat colored paper cutouts of the two cars in question, and a big red and orange starburst to indicate the point of collision.
On a side note, many people consider medicine to be a science, when there is just as much variability between one doctor and another as there is between one chef and another. Atul Gawande has written a number of interesting articles over the years in the New Yorker about just that topic (most of them are collected in the just published book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science). Not all fingerprint analysts are equal in ability, and two different analysts might disagree on whether a set of prints are a match.
Posted by eugene at June 2, 2002 4:10 PM