CLPEX Chat Board

http://www.courant.com/news/local/state ... 7674.story

Bad fingerprint leads to teen's release
Associated Press
October 18, 2008
HARTFORD, Conn. - Charges are being dropped against a Hartford teen who spent more than a year behind bars, accused of a 2007 home invasion robbery, because the fingerprint evidence against him is faulty.

A judge granted a motion to end the prosecution of Argenis J. Burgos after the initial fingerprint identification in the case proved to be incorrect. And Burgos, now 18, does not fit the victim's description of the robbers.

Burgos' lawyer says his client always maintained his innocence and was never near the East Hartford apartment where a 71-year-old woman was robbed at gunpoint.

Police initially said they lifted the fingerprint evidence from the base of a cordless phone. But Burgos' lawyer says the print actually came from the getaway car, which was a stolen rental car.


----

If the allegations in the last paragraph are true, this is not a mis-ID case. This is a deliberate attempt by police to frame this kid. The folks involved need to be named and disciplined. The public and the public defenders need to press for a full investigation as was done in Boston when the Boston PD latent print unit mis-ID'd Cowans and is currently going on in LA.

Sorry for the double post -- I hadn't realized this was also in the LAPD thread. I've got some inquires out in CT. If anything comes up that I can talk about, I'll pass it on.

This is the longer original story in the Journal-Inquirer.

http://www.journalinquirer.com/articles ... 670939.txt

Key section:
East Hartford police Detective Ellen R. Stoldt wrote in an affidavit that one of her department’s investigators lifted two “latent” fingerprints from the base of the cordless telephone in the apartment’s master bedroom.

Stoldt said one of those prints was later matched to a known fingerprint of Burgos, initially through an automated fingerprint identification system and later by fingerprint examiner Kevin Parisi at the state Forensic Science Laboratory.

Jelly told a reporter that he had been told that the latent print used in the match actually came from the getaway car rather than the cordless phone.

The car was a rental, which had been rented by one woman, lent to her cousin, then reported stolen around the time of the robbery. So Burgos could easily have gotten a fingerprint on the car without participating in the robbery.

Moreover, Burgos didn’t fit the victim’s description of either robber.

An initial all-points bulletin put out by police described one of the robbers as a light-skinned Hispanic male, about 5 feet tall, skinny, and clean-shaven. The second robber was described as a white male speaking Spanish, heavy and about 5-foot-5.

Burgos is thin and appears to be at least 5-foot-10. He is a light-skinned black Hispanic, and he has a tattoo on his neck that wasn’t mentioned in any of the descriptions of the robbers.

In the statement she gave through her grandson more than six months after the robbery, the victim gave different descriptions of the robbers, but they still didn’t match Burgos.

She said both men were white, according to Stoldt’s affidavit.

The first man who pushed his way into her apartment was about 5-foot-9, with a thin build and in his late teens, she said, while the second man was a little shorter, with a medium build, and in the same age range. She said the second, shorter man was the one who took the cordless telephone handset.

Well, shoot. We still don't know much for sure. But what it sounds like is that the affiant/detective mis-connected in the affidavit and complaint the matched latent with a latent collected from the car. And it sounds like the prosecutor discovered the conflict between the affidavit for arrest and the police report and exhibits and brought the case to court to get the defendant out of jail. Unlikely to be fraud, if it came to light from the police case report. And likely not a "faulty fingerprint," but faulty communication.

Little of this is explicit in the news story, and it sounds like the prosecutor didn't tell the defense attorney much except that the matched print came from the car. But from a lot of years as a detective, I can imagine it happening like that. It's not uncommon for a supervisor to reserve to themselves or a specialist the production of affidavits for arrest warrants in felonies or some other arrangement in which the field investigators orally convey the minimum of information needed in a probable cause affidavit. It's entirely possible that the field investigator misstated or the affiant misunderstood and that either or both considered a match of the print from the car to someone not associated with the car prior to its theft to be probable cause, and it's entirely possible, especially not knowing what else was in the affidavit (suspect's history, gang affiliation, etc.), that a magistrate would have agreed. And case reports typically have their components reviewed piecemeal as they come in, patrol supervisor reading patrol reports and CID supervisor reading investigative product. The finished report is often just reviewed to see that the components are all there and in order, without giving it a final detailed read, which wouldn't have turned up a problem, anyway, and the affidavit might well not have been reviewed, since it had already passed the magistrate. The prosecutor, seeing the report for the first time, likely recognized the sufficiency problem with the case and looked to the PC affidavit thinking there was surely more and then found the error.

It looks like it got no farther than arrest. From a quick look at news coverage, Hartford is a hoppin' place, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the prosecutor's office took nearly a year to start preparing the case.

Well, shoot. We still don't know much for sure. But what it sounds like is that the affiant/detective mis-connected in the affidavit and complaint the matched latent with a latent collected from the car. And it sounds like the prosecutor discovered the conflict between the affidavit for arrest and the police report and exhibits and brought the case to court to get the defendant out of jail. Unlikely to be fraud, if it came to light from the police case report. And likely not a "faulty fingerprint," but faulty communication.

You may be right. The Journal-Inquirer piece looks more like a screw-up; the Courant/AP version looks more like possible malfeasance. I'd still like to see an investigation of how this error occured -- misattributing the source of prints was a key trick used in the 1980s NY State Police fabrication scandal . I'd be curious how vulnerable the Hartford PD system is to deliberate misattribution. If, indeed, it was a just a screw-up, an investigation would still be important to find how the mistake was made and look for ways to prevent it in the future.

I'm not at all sure this kind of error can be eliminated, assuming I'm right about what happened. Arrest affidavits commonly are written well before reports. It's such a simple sort of human error, not really a system error at all. There's only so much you can practically do. We pass search warrants around for everyone to read, because there's so much specific detail that has to be satisfied, and it's easy to leave something out. With something like this probably is, you gig the people who made the error and go on. I would be somewhat more concerned with the detective's judgment of probable cause, although I can't even say that without seeing the whole affidavit and the DA's past positions. But we have to police ourselves in this area. We can't depend on magistrates. They make it lawful, but they don't make it right. And if the defense counsel didn't know more, I bet the paper doesn't know squat. I'm betting their attention span is short enough that they don't bother to find out more. Or, when they find out it's a rather mundane error, they'll deem it unfit for inflammatory public consumption.

Gerald Said

I bet the paper doesn't know squat. I'm betting their attention span is short enough that they don't bother to find out more. Or, when they find out it's a rather mundane error, they'll deem it unfit for inflammatory public consumption.

Now there is a statement worthy of making it into a quotable quote.

Gerald you are one person that has both feet planted in reality. Newspaper's---they are just journalist who are surrounded by reality and not being able to touch it.

Having done my time in the media (television news), I know there's a balance to be struck between the economic need to attract and keep an audience and not bumping news with meaning for news with impact. It's not altogether an evil that they compete for an audience. A "prepaid" media would likely be extraordinarily dull. Even PBS competes and goes for Wow! They just have the luxury of a viewer base that expects more stolid explanations from time to time. I also know that it won't be out of character for a news editor to have someone follow up on this story, and if they report back that it looks like a misspeak or typo, the editor will balance it for time against other available stories, and this one will lose points for having a mundane explanation. Being picky is a necessity. Time/space is limited. But good organizations don't imply scandal early without correcting their guess when it turns out to have been wrong. The justification is, of course, that it turned out not to have been anything important. It's just how people are. There's no greater deep thinking going on in news organizations than there is in the police. The oddity in our (the people's) relationship with the media is that we hold them to be an institution, but we don't question them about their work as we do with other public institutions. We rely on the media to do that.