Powder or Ink when it comes to Postmortems

[Lady]

Hi everyone,

I usually surf the forum but never post. I'm relatively new to the latent community (only been a LP analyst a little over a year) and I have a pretty basic question for everyone.

Do you or your agency prefer to use ink or powder when documenting postmortem impressions? Do you get better results with one over the other? Do you use both in a sequential process? During my training I was taught "Ink for the living, powder for the dead". Our MEs do most of the documenting with ink; however, if they have a difficult or more time-consuming body that needs major case prints we come into the picture and exclusively use powder.

[Dr. Borracho]

Go with whatever works. If the ME cannot get good prints with ink, try powder. Do not overlook the possibility of simple close up photography of the finger tips. I guess going down the list, you could call that "sequential processing."

[timbo]

My experience is that powder works better than ink the vast majority of the time. Ink is good when the deceased is very fresh and undamaged, but degrades in usefulness the more difficult the scenario is. Powder, in my opinion, produces better results than ink with the more difficult scenarios.

For ones that powder does not work so well on (eg. highly desiccated), photography (as the good doctor pointed out) and/or casting with something like mikrosil.

[josher89]

I second timbo. When rigor sets in and you are needing palm prints, powder is the way to go. We use the spoon if we can for fingers but that's usually after getting palms with powder. What works well is using the full-sized Avery shipping labels (8.5x11). Peel off the backing, stick the sticky side to the powdered hand, and peel from the heel of the hand toward the fingertips. Use a sheet of clear acetate paper for the cover and you have it.

It doesn't take a lot of powder to do this, either. if you glop (TM) the powder on, your impressions will look crappy. A light dusting is all that it takes. Just use a dry towel (I'm guessing there's no shortage of those at the morgue) and make sure the hands are dry.

[Shane Turnidge]

I don't know if anyone has ever considered doing this but why not just photograph the hands and usable digits?
It's been done on mummified remains before where you place your 2 cm. sticky scale on the distal flexion joint or anywhere safe for calibration later.

The process is the same for identifying hands in images;
1) Horizontal flipping
2) Invert the image (Create a negative)
3) Clarification (levels etc. (particularly the blues))
4) Calibration (1:1 and a 1000 ppi for AFIS)

The advantage to this method is that it doesn't interfere with the remains and you can get results very quickly.

Shane Turnidge