Keeping Elimination Prints

[Terry A. Smith]

Further to a post on retention of the latent print (or lack thereof) evidence....

What are the feelings of CLPEX board readers on the destruction of Elimination Fingerprints for a case, once comparisons have been completed and conclusions reviewed.

My agency is currently in the 'habit' of keeping ELIMS but, being the person who actually has care and control over these files, it doesn't sit well with me. In the event one of the persons having provided ELIMS becomes a suspect in another unrelated crime, and where we have no criminal tenprint on file for the party, it would be a tad too tempting and convenient for an investigator to dig the prints out and have a comparison conducted.

I would personally prefer to get rid of them where they aren't 'evidence' ( of course if you make an ID on an ELIM, you need to keep until the case is concluded).

Thoughts?

[Gerald Clough]

I don't know that there's enough reason to keep them to override the donors' expectations that they won't "have their prints on file" forever more. Most likely, they could be printed again, in the unlikely event it somehow became an issue. Probably ought to be in policy, so people can get reliable information if they ask about their prints, which in my experience they often do, and to cover in case there are questions later. On the other hand, I suspect there could be plenty of other opinion.

[antonroland]

Let me start by saying that I do not know your systems / SOP's and so I will base my response on our systems...

Personally I would vote for keeping complete records of elims for, say, at least 5 years...possibly not much more than 5 years but definitely more than 3 years. I base this number on 3 years being the period of prescription for the institution of civil litigation.

Should elim (or any other records) need to be presented in a legal matter there should be notification of pending / contemplated legal action and so there is another 2 years built in for safety...

If these eliminations are kept securely I cannot see how dipping into them can (a) be possible even though tempting...(b) volumes of cases should negate this possibility even further.

I understand that storage space can be a challenge and the percentage of cases where these enquiries are actually made are very small.

Fact is, if there are ever future queries when a case goes public for whatever reason, how do you respond if those recorde have been destroyed?

I also do understand your concern from a legal perspective but I keep thinking of thinking controlled access and public transparency...

[David Johnson]

When elims are taken they are included in the latent packet to be given to the LPE's

These them remain inside the latent packet. They are never entered into the archive system or anything like that.

I think that they should remain in the file for several reasons one is that your fear that they will at somepoint be used by a detective digging through the file is kind of unlikely
Two they were used during the comparison and as such should there be any kind of discovery motion those prints might have to be turned over so that defense has a chance to look at them.

Third there may come a latter time when the case is reexamined an you would not be able to verify the id's if the elims were destoryed.

As long as you are not entering them into an AFIS database I really dont see the harm in keeping them.
Plus no one has a right to with hold fingerprints or DNA or any physical decriptors from the police anyway. So if they were a suspect in a future crime they would get fingerprinted then and the examiners would not have to root around old file looking for their elims