Evid. Admisibility Hearing

[Paul R]

My question is for Mr. Pat Wertheim dealing with a statement Dr. Simon Cole seems to use several times within his testimony at the Admissibility Hearing you attended.

First, to give you a thimble view of my experience and who I might be - I've been involved with latent fingerprints since 1970. I've attended most schools offered within that field for my 35-year career. I've been certified since 1978 and am still working within the field at a local police department. I have taught at two college campuses on fingerprints and evidence collection for about 5 years. So I believe I have some sort of an idea what fingerprints are about.

So, what does Dr. Cole mean by his statement of "individualization"?

I've been to schools that teach "Friction ridge skin", "Ridgeology", "ACE-V", "positive/erroneous identifications", "minutiae" and many other terminologies used in fingerprinting over the past 35 years, but can't remember ever using the term "individualization" when dealing with fingerprints.

Now I understand we all have "individualization" by our uniqueness of being different, our looks, our hair, our eyes, our names and family origin; but "individualization" as used by Simon Cole seems to be some sort of smoke screen that is now being used just to show that he is some great author of a book he wants everyone to buy and use as a reference! (At least that's how it looks to me)

Please forgive me, I don't want to seem to come across as a negative person, I just get upset when people attack the system of fingerprints instead of the people who make the mistakes.

People are human, people make mistakes, and some even go overboard by letting their ego get in the way of justice. It's my opinion we should be more educated within the field of fingerprints, and when we go upon the stand to testify, we should have a fairly good understanding of all aspects to the study. I believe the person on the stand should be tested and found to be either competent or incompetent as an examiner, but not the system of fingerprints.

If ever there are two fingerprints found to be the same by two different individuals, I can only pray that it's me who finds them. I will then quit working for the prosecution and go to work for the defense.

If you can please enlighten me.

Paul R.

[Pat A. Wertheim]

Paul, old friend, you've been in the business three years longer than me, but I have to tell you this: Courtroom testimony is a whole different world than it was back in the good old days of the 1970's. Back then, we could testify, "Fingerprints are permanent and unique and I found XX number of points in the same relative position between these two prints with no unexplainable dissimilarities, so I am absolutely certain that they were both made by the same person." And that was the end of it. Some of the cases in which I have testified recently, though, if I had done it like I did back then, I would have gone down in a flaming display of ignorance.

You have a lot of reading to catch up on, Paul. First, rush out and buy David Ashbaugh's book, "Quantitative-Qualitative Friction Ridge Analysis" published in 1999. If you want to go a little further back, Harold Tuthill's book "Individualization: Principles and Procedures in Criminalistics" published in 1994 would be a good read. Another source for information on what is going on in the field today would be to read all the guidelines and definitions at www.swgfast.org and the other websites you will find in the "links" posted on all the fingerprint websites.

The point is this -- our critics like Simon Cole are reading and learning more about what we do than most fingerprint examiners themselves. And it's not just Cole himself, it goes down to the defense attorneys who follow the defense websites and read the defense attorneys' journals. Those journals are full of articles on how to defeat you in court. The only way to be prepared for them is to do the reading yourself in the books like Ashbaugh's and Tuthill's, to read the Journal of Forensic Identification every two months when it comes out, and to keep abreast of the new developments on the websites like this one, www.onin.com , www.ridgesandfurrows.com , www.swgfast.org , and all the other websites linked to all of these. You can bet our critics who work for the defense read all these books, journals, and websites. If you do not, you are setting yourself up for a major embarrassment.

To your question. In the world of forensic science, the word "identification" means "inclusion in a group." You could "identify" a footwear impression as having been made by a certain make, style, and size of shoe. You would "individualize" the footwear impression to the very specific shoe that made it. You might "identify" a bullet as having been fired by a Colt Commander 45 semiautomatic handgun, then "individualize" it to the specific weapon that fired the bullet. Switching to the word "individualize" some six or eight years ago was an effort to correct the incorrect use of the word "identify" in fingerprint testimony. I'm not saying you can't use the word "identify" in court anymore, but I am suggesting that if you still use it the way we did back in the 1970's and 1980's, you need to know about "individualization" so you can at least answer the defense attorney and the defense critics when they attack you.

There are a lot of other concepts besides "individualization" out there. Please protect yourself -- read and learn about all the changes that have taken place.

[Steve Everist]

If you go to SWGFAST's Standards for Conclusions, you will see that #1 is for Individualization, but Identification is in parentheses next to it. As time goes on, I would guess that the parenthesess will be gone and it will stand alone as Individualization.

You can find them at: http://www.swgfast.org/Standards_for_Co ... er_1_0.pdf

[Les Bush]

Hi Paul

your topic of discussion has come up previously so dont feel alone out there. As Pat rightly states our industry has gone through major changes in both understanding and language. If you do read or have already read the suggested texts and the discussion forums then my comments should touch home. A latent fingerprint identification represents three phases of examination. The first is to identify the mark as being a latent fingerprint of human origin because we need to bring the focus into our field of expertise (to exclude other sciences). The second is to individualize the mark to its source which is normally a digit represented by an inked impression on a fingerprint form (or more recently a printed digital image). Ownership of the source document brings into play the third phase where we identify the name of the person whose digit has been individualized. We truly do perform the act of identification of an individual person through our ability to accurately apply the principles of fingerprint science to individualize a latent mark. Regards from Australia. Les