New Hampshire Supreme Court Ruling

[Dennis Degler]

[Michele]

Does anyone know which agencies have written procedures for blind verification (other than New Hampshire and the FBI)?

[Gerald Clough]

I think the real value in this ruling is a rational reminder of the difference between admissibility issues and credibility of the particular testimony. No matter what the field, it is the method that is tested for admissibility. If a method admissible under Daubert and its kin is invoked, the competency and rigor of the examination are strictly fact issues, bearing not upon whether you can get a believable result, but whether this result is credible. It's for the finder of fact, assisted by experts.

Perhaps it's one more step toward the proper treatment of latent print evidence. The challenges to latent print examination and other comparative evidence have been almost exclusively on admissibility, for the simple reason that it's the sort of evidence that is far more objective than other expert areas. A defendant faces the fact that a defense expert is almost certainly going to confirm the examiner's identification. At best, another expert might challenge the certainty of the ultimate conclusion in a close case, while agreeing on what has been observed. This sort of proper challenge is the most reliable way to catch any error that makes it to the courtroom. Perhaps if LPE weathers enough of these admissibility challenges, defendants will do their jobs at trial, rather than leave it for an admissibility appeal. As this court came close to pointing out, if your argument is that the defendant could not have been the source of the latent, it's remiss to fail to challenge the fact case with your own expert examiner. Hard cheese for the guilty, but quit whining.

[steve ostrowski]

While there may be something to learn here, I have a tough time swallowing the idea there were transgressions (emphasis added) on the part of forensic science, or that these types of incidents should spark a knee-jerk reaction to implement more procedures based on the actions of one rogue judge.

When I wrote the article, I chose the word transgression to mean areas where we did not give due diligence to the task at hand. Kind of like an overall lacking. This is not an admission of wrongdoing or belief that any part of the case was unreliable or inadmissible, just that we could have been doing things better (as we were in other disciplines within our own lab.) I was describing what we do (or did) here in NH and was not implying anything toward the science or fingerprint community as a whole. I believe there is always room for improvement and any good scientist should agree; otherwise thinking becomes stale and the science becomes sedentary.

During the first 6-9 months following the original Langill decision to suppress fingerprint evidence we had several meetings. During these meetings we looked at how casework was being done in footwear, tire, firearms, toolmarks, physical-fracture match, etc. The SOPs at the time were evaluated and cross-compared with protocols from other units.

We saw differences between the procedures of some of these disciplines and those of fingerprints. Essentially, we were doing it better in other disciplines. Therefore, we took the best and most encompassing methods from these comparative sciences, created a template protocol and applied it to each of the disciplines and sub-disciplines. Improvements we agreed upon by all examiners within the involved units in the NHSP Forensic Lab. This was far from a knee-jerk reaction.

A lot of this information will be outlined in a presentation given by Lisa Corson of our lab at the IAI Conference in Louisville, KY this August. I believe it is Friday morning. I would recommend that all those with curiosities on how we improved our day-to-day operations with regard to fingerprints attend the talk.

[Charles Parker]

Steve Said

Improvements we agreed upon by all examiners within the involved units in the NHSP Forensic Lab.

Please Steve tell me how you got all the examiners to agree. In my section all the examiners are not going to agree with SOP, Methodology, etc.

That is the trick----getting them all to agree.

Steve Said

A lot of this information will be outlined in a presentation given by Lisa Corson of our lab at the IAI Conference in Louisville, KY this August. I believe it is Friday morning. I would recommend that all those with curiosities on how we improved our day-to-day operations with regard to fingerprints attend the talk.

Tell Lisa I will be on the front row. I am interested in your day-to-day opeations.

[Steve Everist]

Tell Lisa I will be on the front row. I am interested in your day-to-day opeations.

I guarantee that will be exactly where he'll be too! I'll be a little further back...