Unusual Identification

[Danny L. Harness]

I had an occasion to review fingerprint identifications
from a photograph. The defendants ridge detail was captured clearly in the photo. That's the first case of that sort I have seen in my 38 year career.

My question is, how often does this happen?

The defendant was holding an object and his friction ridge detail was of sufficient value to allow identification.

Thanks for your feedback.

[Boyd Baumgartner]

There was a presentation at the IAI 100th anniversary about just such a thing. I think with the amount of people broadcasting their crimes via social media accounts it's only going to increase. I perform direct skin ids from time to time on the tougher deceased ids where the best way to get the print is to cut the skin off the finger, lightly powder it, then underlight and photo it. I have not done what you are talking about, however.

[Steve Everist]

There was a presentation at the IAI 100th anniversary about just such a thing.

Tim Fayle talked about a case where he had a picture of a pill in a palm, and used the size of the pill to calibrate the image for AFIS searching. This was followed up by George Reis talking about the legal challenges that could come from doing this.

[LEC]

There was one in Sarasota County, FL in which investigators confiscated the suspect's phone and found pictures of a man abusing a child.

https://www.forensicmag.com/article/201 ... conviction

[timbo]

As well as the case I presented, there have been various other cases published or presented of social media or cell phone photos containing ridge detail being used for ID. As well as the Sarasota County case, there are other reported cases out of Connecticut, Ontario (Canada), and New South Wales (Australia) to name a few. In the case I presented, the offender could have barely done any better photographically to make the ID so easy for me - he was perpendicular to the ridge detail, zoomed in close to his hand, in sharp focus, and even had a scale present in the photo (the pill)!

Also presented at the 100th IAI was a case from Australia presented by Rick Sinclair. A pedophile had taken 1,000s of illegal images of children. In one of the photos, a hand could be seen holding a child's private parts - obviously a 'smoking gun' for the case. They were able to perform a palm crease ID from the photo (the offender was 70+ and had significant senile atrophy, but the creases on the thenar and wrist bracelet areas were clearly visible in the photo).

Especially with the ever increasing quality and capabilities of smart phones these days, such 'social media' or 'cell phone' prints are only going to become more prevalent.

[Shane Turnidge]

These cases have now almost hit the mainstream as evidence.
Chris Grice and I wrote a piece in Evidence Technology Magazine a while back; http://www.evidencemagazine.com/index.p ... ew&id=2006 Since then I have seen and heard of several other cases, everything from Frauds to Homicide. From my own experience, the majority of these images seem to arise in Child Exploitation cases.

The method to process these images is evolving and will require further refinement. That said, we are now at a point where we can create reliable AFIS records of these images. I've given several presentations and even a workshop on the subject to the various interested groups. Here are a couple of presentations I have on the subject. If you can't get them for some reason send me a message and I'll try to help you out. I have one other presentation on the subject that I'm not able to share unless you are a Cogent AFIS admin or user as it contains some proprietary images.

These presentations give an idea of what we are able to do with these images:

For latent examiners.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/301 ... mages.pptx

For investigators.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/301 ... gator.pptx

As I said, there is still work to be done. In December 2016 I put the issue in the hands of two of the OSAC's; Physics/Pattern Evidence and Digital/Multimedia as there is going to be some crossover issues that need to be looked at.

The biggest challenge with this evidence is to get the people who first come into contact with it (Investigators) to recognize what we can do with these images. The images we currently see are usually so obvious that any identification professional would chomp at the bit to be able to process them. In the presentations you can see that with a little bit of image processing skill and luck, you can sometimes bring what seem like poor images of friction skin into the realm of identifiable evidence.

Shane Turnidge