news article: "fingerprint expert is a virtuoso..."

[Identify]

Sheriff's fingerprint expert is a virtuoso of his craft

By Lisa Fernandez lfernandez@mercurynews.com
Posted: 07/21/2010 04:38:33 PM PDT
Updated: 07/21/2010 09:25:26 PM PDT


Rich Reneau isn't too good at remembering names. Or faces.
But a thumbprint, or one from a pinkie? He's probably got you nailed.
Reneau is in his 40th year as a fingerprint expert, and he's helped solve countless cases in the South Bay, from the recent string of bank robberies in San Jose, Cupertino and Santa Cruz to the infamous Wendy's chili finger case.
That's not to mention the first cases the 58-year-old handled as a rookie FBI agent working for J. Edgar Hoover in 1970.
"I always tell the new cops that I'm not writing tickets or pulling over drivers," said Reneau, the one-person fingerprint unit at the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office. "I'm working on every major case and minor case that comes through here. I get them all, and I love it."
Take the three Comerica bank robberies within six days in late June. The athletic-looking robber left a demand note at the bank in San Jose. He left his prints as well.
Reneau analyzed the note, sprayed with a chemical solution, and was able to match the prints to Kent Lee Mason, a previously convicted bank robber and suspected marijuana grower from Santa Cruz. Mason was arrested July 1.
When Anna Ayala told the world she found an fingertip in her bowl of Wendy's chili, Reneau ran the finger through a database. No hits. San Jose police investigators did some more follow-up and resubmitted a new name. Reneau compared the name to a set of prints already in the system.
It turned out to be Brian Rossiter, who lost his finger on the job and sold it to his co-worker, Ayala's husband. Ayala and her husband pleaded guilty to trying to defraud the fast-food company. The case received global attention.
"For the detectives, he's like a god," said Sgt. Rick Sung, a sheriff's spokesman. "He's one of the best."
In Santa Clara County, only the sheriff's office and the San Jose Police Department have latent fingerprint examiner units. Both departments perform identifications for cities that don't have their own. San Jose has 10 people in its unit and serves most other cities in the county.
"Traditional wisdom says that you need lots of experience to be good," said Pat Wertheim, an internationally known fingerprint expert who has known Reneau for 20 years. "But you also need talent and motivation. If you're tone-deaf and work at it, you can play violin. But you probably can't play Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and make someone cry. Rich can make you cry."
Campbell police Sgt. Richard Shipman said he is amazed that despite the grueling workload of up to 1,300 cases each year, Reneau "never gets stressed or never gets angry. Ever."
Why get upset? The active Bridges Community Church member in Fremont and father of two grown sons admits he's happily married to the job. (Well, maybe he doesn't want to admit that to his wife, Sharon, of 35 years.)
And even though the technology has vastly improved in four decades, Reneau still does a lot of work by hand — cataloging, manually evaluating prints that aren't high quality enough to be put into the computer and trying to get "hits" from many fragmented fingerprint databases used by agencies all over the country.
"The eye is always better than a computer," Reneau said. "Computers only give us a list of possibilities based on their algorithms. Then, it's up to the examiner. I may look at hundreds and hundreds of possibilities before I find a suspect. Computers don't make identifications. That's just a TV thing."
Shipman says Reneau doesn't miss anything.
"He's meticulous," Shipman said. "The results stand up in court all the time. Every time."
One of his most memorable cases involved then-state Supreme Court Chief Justice Rose Bird, who received death threats in the 1980s. The suspect cut out words from a newspaper and taped the threats onto paper. In doing so, he left his prints on the Scotch tape. Reneau developed prints and ran them through the FBI system. He got a hit. An arrest was made.
Reneau isn't perfect. He originally missed spotting Donald Cummings, convicted later of the sex killings of two women near San Jose State University in the 1980s. He ran some prints but didn't get a hit. Others asked him to take a second look, which he did. This time, he got a positive result.
Then there was the Acronico case that was unsolved for 20 years.
In 1979, Los Gatos socialite Gloria "Tookie" Acronico was kidnapped, robbed and murdered in her Mercedes Benz. The prints sat on his desk until 1999, a year after the sheriff's office got a fingerprint computer terminal to search for fingerprint matches.
"We started inputting all our cold cases," Reneau said. And that's when the computer spit out a bunch of possible suspects. One of those possibilities was Troy Lee Johnson, a 53-year-old drifter who had a previous minor criminal record.
Then it required the old-school touch of Reneau to eyeball the prints from inside the Mercedes, created by the soot of the fire inside the car, and compare them to Johnson's prints in the computer. Reneau said the two matched. And in 2000, Johnson was sentenced to prison for life.
"Oh, it was fantastic," Reneau said. "Everybody has one of those cases where you say, 'One of these days I'm going to crack that case.' This was that case."
Contact Lisa Fernandez at 408-920-5002.
http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-new ... k_check=1

[Iain McKie]

Am I alone in being worried about this posting?

Allowing for media ‘creativity’ is this the image we wish to portray of the ‘expert’?

I am more than willing to take Pat Wertheim’s word that Rich Reneau is an excellent expert of high integrity but is this ‘deification’ of some experts as so much better than others in the interests of the science?

"For the detectives, he's like a god," said Sgt. Rick Sung, a sheriff's spokesman. "He's one of the best."

I need hardly remind readers that it was two such ‘deified ‘ experts in the SCRO who made two wrong identifications that some of their colleagues confirmed because they did not feel they could find against experienced experts who were revered as ‘the best’. It was two ‘world experts’ of vast experience, Peter Swan and Martin Leadbetter, who compounded these mistakes and created the 14 year nightmare that the Fingerprint Inquiry is about to report on.

Given the right (or rather the wrong) culture within a forensic unit reverence can lead to many of the psychological and emotional factors outlined in Itiel Dror’s work. http://www.cognitiveconsultantsinternat ... sub=drdror

It seems to me that while acknowledging experience and expertise we should never put any expert on a pedestal or imply that they are above criticism. I suspect Mr Reneau feels the very same way.

[kevin]

That is a really interesting point Iain brings up - is it wrong that an examiner receives some recognition for work in a field that often times goes overlooked?? Or is this kind of article doing more harm than good??

Great point Iain.

[L.J.Steele]

Reneau isn't perfect. He originally missed spotting Donald Cummings, convicted later of the sex killings of two women near San Jose State University in the 1980s. He ran some prints but didn't get a hit. Others asked him to take a second look, which he did. This time, he got a positive result.

Iain, the thing that caught my eye was this -- which raises my yellow flag of "confirmation bias". May be nothing to the flag, but it is the sort of thing that would make me as defense counsel think hard about my own expert to review the match.

[Pat A. Wertheim]

. . . is this ‘deification’ of some experts as so much better than others in the interests of the science?

. . .my yellow flag of "confirmation bias". May be nothing to the flag, but it is the sort of thing that would make me as defense counsel think hard about my own expert to review the match.

Come on, guys, lighten up a bit. This was a "fluff" article by a hometown newspaper, little more that a Sunday filler and a "Local Boy Done Good" story to celebrate Rich's over 30 years in the business.

Iain, you received your service medal for thirty years of exemplary service to Strathclyde Police, but I'm sure there were things said at the award ceremony or at your retirement party that stretched the truth just a wee bit.

Lisa, what trial attorney of any reasonable length of service hasn't missed an argument in court, resulting in an adverse ruling to the lawyer's position? Should one such lost case result in yellow flags placed on the rest of that lawyer's career as a pawn for the other side?

Rich is an excellent examiner who has spent a long career dedicated to the scientific examination of fingerprint evidence. He is not a god -- he has made mistakes. But he is not a police puppet giving identifications to detectives who want to get a bad guy off the street. He is a good, solid fingerprint examiner, more talented and more dedicated than most.

And I lied to the reporter, too. Rich really cannot play Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and make you cry.

[L.J.Steele]

Pat, not trying to cast aspersions -- I don't know anything about the case. Anytime someone says I didn't see it at first, but when asked to take a second look at something specific, there it was, it raises my confirmation bias flag. And again, confirmation bias is not the same thing as being a police puppet, nor does it mean that the second conclusion is wrong.

Sure, I expect every experienced attorney, trial or appellate, has missed things that they see in hindsight -- I've done it myself. And one gets chagrined when it happens, and tries to fix it if it were possible to fix. I'm not trying to say that the examiner erred, but it is a situation to raise a flag.

[Charles Parker]

Some other bias that could be in play (I have high lighted some of my favorites):

Decision-making and behavioral biases

Many of these biases are studied for how they affect belief formation, business decisions, and scientific research.

Anchoring – the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions

Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behavior.

Base rate fallacy – the tendency to ignore available statistical data in favor of particulars.

Bias blind spot – the tendency not to compensate for one's own cognitive biases.[2]

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Contrast effect – the enhancement or diminishing of a weight or other measurement when compared with a recently observed contrasting object.

Experimenter's or Expectation bias – the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.[6]

Focusing effect – the tendency to place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.

Framing – using an approach or description of the situation or issue that is too narrow. Also framing effect – drawing different conclusions based on how data is presented.

Information bias – the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.

Interloper effect – the tendency to value third party consultation as objective, confirming, and without motive. Also consultation paradox, the conclusion that solutions proposed by existing personnel within an organization are less likely to receive support than from those recruited for that purpose.

Irrational escalation – the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.

Mere exposure effect – the tendency to express undue liking for things merely because of familiarity with them.

Negativity bias – the tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.

Omission bias – the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).

Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.

Selective perception – the tendency for expectations to affect perception.

Von Restorff effect – the tendency for an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" to be more likely to be remembered than other items.

Wishful thinking – the formation of beliefs and the making of decisions according to what is pleasing to imagine instead of by appeal to evidence or rationality.

Just a few that might be applicable to the posting.

[g.]

I sometimes think this "yellow flag of confirmation bias" is waved too quickly and too often.

Lisa, you're a fan of the Gorilla/Basketball video. Is is confirmation bias when they miss the gorilla the first time in watching the video and then you ask them to take a look again for the gorilla and lo and behold they see it! Are they imagining it b/c of confirmation bias or aren't you just directing their attention to something that was always there, but they missed it the first time!?

As a defense attorney, I would think that I would challenge any forensic evidence if it was the ONLY link to my client in the case. No matter how good the technique (fingerprints, dna, etc.) if only a single bit of evidence and that's it, links someone, we've seen a number of cases where that evidence might not have been as good as portrayed.

Just a thought.

g.

[L.J.Steele]

I sometimes think this "yellow flag of confirmation bias" is waved too quickly and too often.

Yellow flags, for me, can come up frequently, and oft-times they go away with a bit of investigation. Their job is just like a flashing yellow traffic light -- look, proceed with caution. I use them to remind me to look deeper at whatever raised the flag. It isn't meant as a knock against the examiner, just a reminder that this situation may be more complex that it first appears and to look at it carefully, consider an expert, etc.

Lisa, you're a fan of the Gorilla/Basketball video. Is is confirmation bias when they miss the gorilla the first time in watching the video and then you ask them to take a look again for the gorilla and lo and behold they see it! Are they imagining it b/c of confirmation bias or aren't you just directing their attention to something that was always there, but they missed it the first time!?

These days I'm using the UK public safety version
http://www.dothetest.co.uk/basketball.html
as it avoids any subconscious cues I might give in presenting the instructions for the video and thus a more consistent result. In this case, the video is unambiguous -- you can go back and look at it frame by frame if you wish to confirm that you aren't imagining the gorilla. The confirmation bias problem described by Dror seems to only come up if the data is difficult to interpret -- it requires a judgment and the suggestion is putting a thumb on the scale.

As a defense attorney, I would think that I would challenge any forensic evidence if it was the ONLY link to my client in the case.

This is more complex than it sounds -- often there's more than one bit of evidence, but the evidence is not clearly independent. There's a fingerprint, which leads to the client's picture in the paper as a suspect, after which a witness comes forward and says "yeah that's the guy I saw!", meanwhile the police are questioning the client's buddies, one of whom gives a statement incriminating the client in order to settle some pending charges of his own...

Or the first bit of evidence was ambiguous. But the results are circulated to the investigators, or reach the press. Other forensics experts working on other equally ambiguous evidence, become aware of the information inculpating the suspect, and come to the conclusion that their evidence matches the suspect. To what extent are the second and third tests reliable in this situation?

The criminal cases that do have clear, unambiguous evidence don't tend to go to trial. They tend to end with a plea. The ones I see, at least, are usually the ones that depend on one or more bits of less reliable evidence.

[L.J.Steele]

Too quick with the send key...

Also, there is the real world problem of limited budgets and limited expert availability -- I'm not trial counsel, so I don't have to make these decisions, but I understand that one can't often afford multiple, often expensive experts, for each case. Defense counsel often has to decide what's most important or what's most likely to get a useful result and start digging there. There's also the related risk of generating inculpatory evidence -- let's say that there's an fingerprint found at the scene -- State's expert says can't be matched. Defense would like to argue that a known third party did it. Does one have one's own expert test the evidence, with the risk that one's own expert may conclude that the print matches the defendant, and that the State may get wind of that result or infer it when the expert disappears from the defense witness list.

But this is all far afield from the original thread.