CLPEX Chat Board

San Jose police withheld uncertainties in fingerprint cases
By Tracey Kaplan
Mercury News
Posted: 03/07/2009 07:07:36 PM PST

For years, San Jose police never told anyone when fingerprint technicians could not agree about whether a suspect's prints matched those taken from the crime scene.

Instead, the police department's Central Identification Unit generated a report indicating that two technicians agreed the suspect's prints had been positively identified, while omitting that a third technician dissented.

The police stuck to that policy even after prosecutors and outside experts warned them they could not legally withhold the information from defense attorneys, and urged them to change their procedures. Last month, the department finally finished a slow-paced review dating back to mid-2007 and overhauled the policy so that the doubts are reflected, soon after the Mercury News filed Public Record Act requests about the issue.

"They were trying to suppress favorable evidence to the defense, it's clear as day," said Michael Kresser, director of the Sixth District Appellate Program. "How any law enforcement agency didn't understand that that is not legal is beyond me," said Kresser, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court mandate in Brady vs. Maryland that members of the prosecution team must provide defense attorneys with any evidence that could potentially help their clients.

The revelation of the withheld evidence comes on the heels of a controversy about withheld medical examination videotapes of children believed to be victims of sexual abuse; the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office is belatedly notifying defense attorneys in hundreds of cases that ended in conviction, dating back to 1991, that videotapes that potentially could help their clients exist.

But in contrast to the discovery of 3,300 videotapes, taken by hospital staff at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, police officials say there is no way to go back and alert defense attorneys of past uncertainty among technicians about the fingerprint evidence in their cases. There was no record kept of those instances, police say, leaving them without a way to remedy the problem — and leaving open the possibility that a defendant could have been convicted at trial, or even entered a guilty plea, based on suspect fingerprint evidence.

Police insist that even though they have not kept any record of such cases in the past, they occurred rarely; they say that only one such case arose in the past year, as they have been internally reviewing their practice.

'Best practices'

They contend their concern remains to accurately report the department's conclusion when a fingerprint match has been made. "As the field changes, the chief is committed to best practices," said Deputy Chief Christopher Moore, head of the department's Bureau of Technical Services.

The SJPD's longtime procedures call for a second technician to verify when a positive match is made in comparing crime-scene prints to the computerized database in all cases but homicides — where the procedure calls for three technicians to agree on the match. But if the second technician in a non-homicide case is not convinced that the prints match, a supervisor then is asked to cast the deciding "vote" — and any doubts were, until last month, left unreported. The police last week downplayed the significance of such instances, saying they normally involve cases where the second technician considers the match inconclusive, not completely mistaken.

But such disputes have special importance because of the great deference given to fingerprint evidence by lawyers and jurors alike. Many defense lawyers urge clients to plead guilty in the face of a positive match.

Still, across the country, the reverence shown fingerprints has been tarnished by increasing evidence exposing the fallibility of matching prints, which may be smudged, incomplete or otherwise distorted. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences cited the lack of uniform standards in fingerprint labs as part of its broader criticisms of forensic evidence.

Fingerprint errors caused Brandon Mayfield, a Muslim lawyer from Portland, Ore., to be wrongly linked to the 2004 terrorist train bombing in Madrid that killed 191 people. Mayfield, who did not have a valid passport and said he had not been outside the United States in years, was later cleared and won a $2 million legal settlement from the federal government.

The erroneous identification caused the FBI to amend its procedures in late 2005, to ensure that any disagreements between two analysts was recorded and provided to defense attorneys to comply with the prosecutors' obligation under the Brady v. Maryland ruling to provide defendants all potentially helpful material. The FBI also revised its procedures to require that the second, verifying analyst work independently of the first analyst, to minimize pressure to reach a consensus.

Following that change, Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney David Angel, who ran the office's now-defunct innocence project, began examining the practices in county police agencies to ensure that the chance for error was minimized.

Angel, who earlier had helped win agreement among Santa Clara County police agencies to improve their lineup procedures, by summer 2007 was pushing for changes in the fingerprint practices — changes that many other departments around California and throughout the nation adopted following the FBI changes.

But Angel encountered resistance from San Jose police and inconsistent support from his own office, officials said. "It wasn't a priority for us, or for the DA," said Phyllis Dawkins-Thames, supervising senior analyst for the San Jose fingerprint unit, in part because such disagreements were so uncommon. The unit performs fingerprint analysis for all the cities in the county.

Documents released in response to the Mercury News' Public Records Act request show the police hesitant to alter their practice. They resisted calling such differences between analysts "disagreements."

Outside expert

They turned to outside expert Pat Wertheim, with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, asking whether the district attorney's office's pleas that dissenting opinions be recorded was really necessary. Wertheim assured them that, while they may not wish defense attorneys to learn of such doubts, the information had to be revealed.

"Like we told them," said Assistant District Attorney David Tomkins, who wrote memos about the matter to the police over a period of months last year, "it's our lawyers who are going to be reported to the state bar, not you," for failing to turn over such evidence because prosecutors are the ones held legally responsible for making sure potentially exculpatory material gathered by investigating agencies is turned over to defendants. Finally, last month, the police adopted the change.

Prosecutors in neighboring San Mateo County expressed amazement that the shift took so much time to accomplish. Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said last week that if examiners in his county balked, as SJPD's did, "That would be unacceptable."

Experts say that as it becomes apparent that making fingerprint identifications is partly science, and partly art, the criminal justice system will not be able to cling much longer to the myth that fingerprint evidence is error-free.

"All forensic science is coming under a lot more scrutiny as to transparency in note-taking and reporting," Wertheim said last week. "You just don't sweep things under the carpet."

Mercury News Staff Writer Sean Webby contributed to this report.

Contact Tracey Kaplan at tkaplan@mercurynews.com or (408) 278-3482.

CORRESPONDENCE ON FINGERPRINT ISSUE

For nearly two years, Santa Clara County prosecutors warned San Jose police that they were improperly withholding evidence from defense attorneys in cases where fingerprint analysts did not agree. Some key exchanges in documents that officials made public last week:

June 14, 2007
Deputy District Attorney David Angel writes San Jose Police Department senior fingerprint supervisor Phyllis Dawkins-Thames: "It has been quite a while since we last spoke "... it is my understanding that at SJPD if there is a disagreement "... the disagreement is not necessarily recorded or disclosed."

Sept. 11, 2007
Angel again writes Dawkins-Thames: "I thought that we had left it that you would provide a written response concerning the potential Brady issue which we believe is triggered by your decision in reporting only the majority opinion in the case of a disagreement in making a fingerprint identification. Did you send the letter out already? If not, do you plan on doing so?"

July 28, 2008
Henry Templeman, senior latent print examiner for San Jose police, seeks outside advice from Pat Wertheim, a renowned fingerprint expert: "The Santa Clara Office of the District Attorney has asked management here at San Jose PD to disclose unresolved examiner disagreement. "... [T]he fact that an unresolved disagreement occurred is currently not documented "... and therefore not disclosed. It is simply not mentioned and there is no record that any disagreement ever occurred."

Aug. 4, 2008
Wertheim"s reply: "In the event of an identification, the defense is entitled to know that there was not complete agreement in the department. "... I know a lot of examiners will be opposed to letting the defense know there was not complete agreement."

Feb. 27, 2009
Assistant District Attorney David Tomkins notifies prosecutors in his office that "as a result of discussions with the District Attorney"s Office, the San Jose Police Department will document all instances of lack of consensus between fingerprint examiners in their reports ... fingerprint reports should be closely scrutinized for this information."

I received the following email this morning. The writer, Janet, is going through about the same process with her unit that the newspaper article Kasey quotes above was about. I thought it would be fun to post her email to me (slightly sanitized) and my response, and see what others might have to say about it.

Janet wrote:Mr. Wertheim,

My name is Janet. I am a Crime Scene Supervisor with the XXX Police Department in XXX. The Crime Scene Specialists in this Unit wear many hats. We process crime scenes, test Marijuana, complete line-ups, among many other duties. One of our duties is to complete Fingerprint Comparisons. I try to keep abreast of what is going on in all of the fields for which I am responsible and one concern has been what has been going on in the fingerprint community. I am aware that you are on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Forensic Identification and I am also aware of your reputation. That is why I am contacting you.

I don’t want to waste your time, but was hoping you could help me. We do not have any Certified Latent Print Examiners in the Unit. Unfortunately, it is not encouraged. Up to now, we have used a simple form for our findings on fingerprint comparisons. I would like to change that and have everyone write a report instead. I was wondering if there was any way that you might possibly give me an idea of how the report should be written. I was hoping that perhaps you had an outline of a report that you might issue and could e-mail to me.

If you do not have time or can not help me, could you give me direction as to whom I should contact?

Thank you in advance for any help you can give me.

Janet

My response:

Pat A. Wertheim wrote:Hi Janet

Let me get out my crystal ball and look back a few decades, then try to look forward a few.

The 1970's was a fun decade. You didn't have to take notes, latent print certification didn't exist, you just did your job and testified and the magic answer was "8." If you had that many points, cross examination ceased and you went home for a cold beer with another successful case under your belt.

The 1980's was still a fun decade. Most people were starting to take notes, but it wasn't required. Certification had come into being, but it wasn't widely accepted. "Resolution VII" had become part of our language and you didn't even need the magic number 8 anymore.

The 1990's were starting to change things more. ASCLD accredited labs had started picking up the latent print function in larger agencies. Note taking became mandatory in those labs, and almost so everywhere else. Certification became more accepted and more important. The number "8" marked you as a Neanderthal among experts. If you couldn't discuss "ridgeology" on the witness stand, you might not be able to succeed in court.

Then came 1999. The Byron Mitchell case was heard in Philadelphia in the second week of July that year. That, of course, was the first Daubert challenge to fingerprints. The FBI and SWGFAST joined forces and assembled a team of a dozen or more of the top fingerprint experts, biologists, and other forensic scientists to put together a defense of fingerprints as science. We won, but afterward we could never go back to "business as usual." The 20th Century was over and the 21st Century was dawning. Hundreds more Daubert challenges have been filed around the country and we have won the vast majority of them.

The Brandon Mayfield case in May, 2004, and the subsequent reorganization of the FBI fingerprint section and the policies under which they worked was a major cataclysm. The FBI had been claiming a "Zero Error Rate" prior to that, but the egg on their face splashed across the whole profession. The Stacey report (JFI, 2006, volume 6) was an important document in the aftermath of Mayfield.

Now, ASCLD has gone ISO. That will be a more major shift than most folks yet realize. SWGFAST is changing from "guidelines" for a latent print operation to writing "standards." That will have a major impact on how you do things and how you have to answer in court for the way your operation is run. This latest report from NAS will have a profound influence in the coming year or two.

It has become pretty obvious to me that the old fashioned latent print unit in a small or medium sized police department is on its way out. Accredited laboratories are taking over. And unless a lab is ASCLD/ISO accredited, they will either have to embrace that or close up shop in the not to distant future. Some states now require a latent print examiner to either work in an ASCLD accredited lab or be IAI certified to testify in court. Not accredited? Not certified? Not testifying.

The sad thing is that all this is occurring at a time when the country is in such a terrible recession that we can't afford to take the steps necessary to keep up with the times. But the courts will not give us a reprieve just because it would cost money to comply with ASCLD/ISO, SWGFAST, and NAS. I know that in my state, I am worried about the small agencies shutting down their operations and shifting more work to the state lab where I work -- at a time when we are already being slowed down in productivity by the new ISO requirements and yet can't hire and train more people because of the recession. And when an examiner leaves or retires, the position is left vacant, adding that much more to the overload and backlog.

My crystal ball tells me that a small sized lab like yours can limp along for a while yet working the way you always have. But without ASCLD/ISO accreditation or IAI certification, your years are probably numbered in the single digits. IAI certification for your examiners may add a few years, but probably not too many. I really don't see any non-accredited labs being around 15 or 20 years from now. None. Hopefully, by then the recession will be over and the state labs will be hiring and can take over the functions for the police departments that don't want to commit to a full service operation.

Sorry, I didn't really answer your request, did I? Unfortunately, I don't have a standard report I could send you. In my lab, we are struggling with ISO right now and have not even standardized fully what we are doing. And if I sent you a detailed explanation of how we are trying to rewrite what we do, it would make you want to take a job waitressing at Denny's or serving coffee at Starbucks (jobs a couple of our latent print examiners had in college that they are seriously considering going back to).

I can commiserate with you, but I don't have any easy answers. Good luck trying to find somebody who does. For the hard answers, study ASCLD/ISO accreditation requirements. Read the Stacey report. Read all the SWGFAST guidelines and standards. Read the NAS report on forensic sciences that came out a couple of weeks ago. Read the ASCLD and IAI responses to NAS. It will take you a couple of weeks to read all of that, and longer to make sense out of it. There are no easy answers. If you're close enough to retirement to limp along for a few more years, you can probably make it without doing all that homework. Otherwise, you've got your tasks laid out for you.

Best wishes,
Pat

Any thoughts?

Legal reality and old ways meet again. One would imagine that it was something of "close call" or a "hard one," if at least one examiner had doubts about justification of the conclusion. It's hard to escape that it was material to the case and therefore a valid Brady issue. More and more, it just becomes clear that holding that all properly conducted examinations produce equally reliable conclusions is what ultimately invites broad attacks on fingerprint identification. Differences of opinion, whether entirely honest and competent or less than honest and competent, are why we have juries, but the jury can't effectively play the role without all the available information. How many of us were told in our training, "Your conclusion can't be a consensus. It can't be decided by vote." For the individual examiner, that's true. But if your conclusion is the one conclusion sponsored by the organization, and an alternative conclusion was eliminated by vote (or veto), that's the effect.

This certainly emphasizes the importance of true blind verification. Anything else risks not only the usual potential bias toward the first conclusion, but risks some reluctance to put a dissenting opinion in the record, which is for sure going to get the examiner called for the defense. None of this is a problem in an ideal latent unit culture, but we know they aren't all even nearly ideal. We tend to dislike the notion that latent print examination should be conducted by independent, meaning non-law enforcement organizations. But if the goal is the most productive and complete analysis of evidence, and we claim independence in our examinations, we are bound to produce full account of the analysis. Neither universal nor even general agreement has ever been required of an expert opinion. Maybe we're just growing up. Or rather, like an 18 year old reluctant to tussle with the real world, we're being kicked out of the house to face up to it.

My advise to Janet would be if you are not fully trained and qualified as a fingerprint expert don't do it, you are playing a game of Russian roulette and the courts are handing you the revolver that has been loaded by your employer and your employer doesn't even know that they are doing it! So when there finally is blood on the court room floor who is going to come to your aid?

Hi Neville. I don't think Janet's department has done anything quite so drastic as give her a loaded gun to put to her head in court. I think a better analogy would be that ID Units, like people, go through the aging process. Unlike people, however, ID Units can reverse the aging process. I do not like all of the ASCLD/ISO requirements. I think much of what we are doing now adds little or nothing to the quality of our work product, but requires much extra time unnecessarily spent in record keeping tasks. For that reason, productivity suffers for little benefit in improved quality of conclusions. That said, I am a bench level examiner with little say in the matter except to comply with my department's policies and procedures. In our aging analogy, ASCLD/ISO is an age reversal compound, the "Fountain of Youth," if you will. Unfortuantely, the cost of this age reversal compound is high enough that most small and mid-sized agencies will just forego treatment. So, to carry the anology to its conclusion, Janet's ID Unit will age and die without an infusion of ASCLD/ISO. It may take a year, maybe five, probably no longer than ten, for her unit to fade away. Not as drastic as Russian Roulette, but just as certain in the long run. A new report format would be like a face lift. It might make the ID Unit look like it was advancing with the times, but it would have no real long lasting effect on the continued existance of the unit.

So if we meet again in another 20 years you should be into your 30's, with your teens still to come, maybe the revolver is not such a bad idea!
But the question that springs to my mind would have to be, if you are getting so bogged down in red tape will not your department just become so inefficient that it will be seen by the bosses to be a waste of time and shut it down anyway? Maybe it will be seen that DNA is more effective!!!!!!!!
(Perhaps the 12 point rule had some merit after all. Shhhhhhh)

We do not have any Certified Latent Print Examiners in the Unit.

Sounds A bit like SCRO

Janet seems like she really cares about what she is being asked to do. She deserves credit for not just blindly following rules and is asking pertinent questions. She obviously realises that there are huge problems and is trying to find help.

Its terrible that they are given the responsiblities of checking and comparing fingerprints when they do not have the qualifications. We all know how that can end.

I think all she can do if her place of work will not do it, is to try to find a job which does use proper experts.

It is an absolutre disgrace that these people have been allowed to be used in this way.

I am wondering though, Just exactly how many people are in prison from testimony from these so called experts that have no qualifications whatever.

There should be a full investigation into this whole office and area

Dear Wullie, I believe Beryl is more correct. If the department is requiring so many tasks of each person, then full training and attention to any one task is impossible. And yet Beryl is right in his observation that Janet really does care about the job. It has been my observation that erroneous identifications come more often from people who don't care. People who care but who have not been fully trained and do not do fingerprints full time are more likely to leave correct identifications unfound. I sincerely doubt Janet and her coworkers have sent innocent people to jail, but I would not be surprised if there were criminals still on the street committing crimes that might have been caught by a team of full-time cetified latent print examiners.

Pat

I do not disagree that the Guilty walk in the footsteps of the Innocent nor that Janet cares about her work and takes it very serious indeed.

I do however have doubt about people giving evidence as experts with no qualification whatever.

Take this one in England for example:

Forensic Expert Faces Jail:

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.htm ... _a_source=


And many other links can be found here:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q= ... nman&meta=


If they are not experts in their field, then they should not be giving "expert" evidence.

If caught giving evidence when not an expert then they should be banned, This is the very least we would expect.

I would not be comfortable giving evidence as a Fingerprint Expert if my field was FDR, for example.

If Janet does not have any qualified fingerprint experts in her unit then these jobs must be passed to another unit which does.

I wish her luck.

Big Wullie wrote:If they are not experts in their field, then they should not be giving "expert" evidence.

Hi again, Wullie. I agree with your sentiment, but the conundrum lies in the definition of "expert." We each know how we personally define that word, but is there a definition that can be applied across the board? That is the question. Let me examine a few different thoughts.

First, Neville is the easiest to respond to with a definition of "expert." Neville is a true expert beyond the strictest definition of any person or any court in any country in the world. In New Zealand, as I recall (and please correct me if I am wrong, Neville), there is a five year training period for latent print examiners during which the trainee must successfully complete 13 modules. Each module is represented by a three ring binder of reading and study material that is several inches thick. At the end of each module, the student must pass a thorough exam on the material in that module in order to proceed to the next module. At the end of the five years, the student must pass a comprehensive examination on the material from all thirteen modules. I saw the comparison portion of that final examination and I will state unequivocally that it is far more difficult than the IAI Latent Print Certification exam. The trainee who completes the five year program has three tries at the final exam and if he/she cannot pass it by the third time, they are back in the unemployment line. But the training is so thorough that the vast majority who take the final exam pass it. Of course, some wash out in the training program and never make it to the final exam. The experts I met in New Zealand, as a group, worked with ease at a higher level of difficulty in comparisons than students in any other country or class I have taught. Australia is a close second. Australia has a similar training program for new latent print examiners. There, as in New Zealand, the people who make it through the training program exceed the standards of "expert" applied almost anywhere else in the world.

Another comment about "expert" in New Zealand (I don't know whether this also applies to Australia). There is the separate distinction of "Senior Expert" (again, Neville, please correct me if my memory has failed). A "Senior Expert" must have a number of years as "expert" after which he/she is eligible to propose a research project to an oversight committee in the national police. Once approved, the research project may be undertaken. It culminates with the publication of a research paper of a minimum of 10,000 words. And lest anybody think the research project is a mere formality, I assure you it is not. The oversight committee takes it seriously, the New Zealand Police take it seriously, and unless the aspiring "Senior Expert" takes it seriously, he/she will never make it. Neville is one of a handful of "Senior Experts" in New Zealand.

I observed another very important characteristic of the experts in New Zealand. Without exception, they had a professional attitude that included a commitment to ethics of the highest order. Calling an ident that was questionable, fabricating evidence, or bending the rules would have been totally unthinkable. And if there were to be an act of unethical behavior on the part of an expert, I believe the rest of the experts would universally reject that person. I cannot imagine them closing ranks around a miscreant and trying to protect him.

Now, Wullie, to take that to another level, let's move out of New Zealand. The length of a training program combined with an examination to prove proficiency may produce a person defined by the national police and the courts as an "expert." But if the component of ethics is missing, that expertise may become more dangerous than valuable.

Now let's bring it back to the US. Here, there is no national or universal training standard. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Our form of decentralized government currently allows state or local option in all such regards. I know of one agency where a detective from a large rural area attended a one week training class in fingerprint comparison and went home to proclaim himself an expert. His agency is very proud of him. Surrounding agencies use him for their fingerprint comparisons. There are no verifications, no checks on his work, no proficiency testing, no audits either internal or external. In the US, as long as the courts accept him as an expert, he is by the very definition of the word in the American criminal justice system, an "Expert." That would never fly in New Zealand or Australia. It would never fly in the UK. It would never fly in most countries, but in that officer's jurisdiction, it is not even questioned.

Janet's agency is not as remiss in training as the one I mentioned in the last paragraph, but obviously the standard in her department does not measure up to the standards of many in the US, and certainly not to the training standards in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, most of Europe, or many other countries in the world. But Janet's department does have the ethical underpinning which some other agencies (both in the US and in other countries) have been shown in recent years to lack. That makes the identifications coming from her unit reliable. While the courts in Janet's jurisdiction still accept her and the others in her unit as experts, their days are numbered.

ASCLD/ISO accreditation is a step to correct the inequity in the US system. The recent NAS report is another step in correcting that inequity. Police departments such as the one with the guy I mentioned above will have to close their ID units in the coming decade, and that may not be a bad thing. Agencies like Janet's will suffer, too, and that may not be a good thing. But if the US as a whole is to bring our state and local forensic science services up to the level demanded by other countries, standards must be instituted. Those standards, once they become mandatory, will force ID units such as Janet's to either upgrade drastically or close. And that was my point to Janet. Cosmetic changes such as a new report format may give a more professional appearance, but without the underlying reorganization of the whole unit and serious upgrades in training, cosmetic changes will not satisfy the standards coming down the road.

Pat A. Wertheim wrote: Police departments such as the one with the guy I mentioned above will have to close their ID units in the coming decade, and that may not be a bad thing. Agencies like Janet's will suffer, too, and that may not be a good thing. But if the US as a whole is to bring our state and local forensic science services up to the level demanded by other countries, standards must be instituted. Those standards, once they become mandatory, will force ID units such as Janet's to either upgrade drastically or close.

I agree with the need. It's not reasonable of realistic to depend on assumed individual self-evaluation, individual rigor, and plain honesty. But I think you're optimistic as to time. While federal authority has never shrunk from unfunded mandate, there is little any federal authority or national body can do, besides recommend. States will move at their own pace, and the controlling factors will the competing issues of costs and availability. Latent print examination is the most widely distributed physical evidence analysis of all, largely on account of economies. A relatively small agency can afford an officer/examiner with mixed duties and can, at present and as you point out, have him trained for little more than the cost of his time in training and perhaps lodging during training. Of all the comparison analytics that do not depend on costly hardware, fingerprint examination addresses the most commonly recovered and most telling evidence. As it is largely a local government function, legislative decisions are sensitive to the desires of local officials as communicated to their state legislators. Because local officials have far more direct contact with their constituents than the legislators themselves, state senators and representatives listen closely to implied potential criticism from them. Sheriff's and district attorneys often carry significant influence over how their constituents vote and are listened to when they speak on how proposed state legislation affects their operations. While I don't know the legislative history of the bill, I note that Texas excluded latent print examination from lab certification. I think that whatever was at work, it was a recognition of how much local agencies rely on their own resources.

Substantive changes in such matters take place in stages measured in decades, not years. An complete overhaul of latent print examination standards can be expected to be a series of modest steps, each of modest cost, and each with manageable impact on local operations. And for the next few years, anything requiring major funding to change what is seen as a somewhat flawed (the flaws often being expressed in rather esoteric terms) but working system will be beyond even the more healthy states.

State courts, too, move slowly. The usual flow of standards development in state courts is through the mechanism of expert testimony on principles. Getting expert challenges to general issues in fingerprint comparison admitted at trial is almost always a process of taking selected cases through appeals to ask that exclusion at trial be considered as error. It is very often a consideration of whether academics who are not actual practitioners will be heard. Eyewitness identification provides some insight. The question of expert testimony on the nature of such identification has reach he federal courts, and the federal circuits are still far from being in universal agreement, and many of the opinions are somewhat vague. Qualified research on fingerprint comparison issues is at this time, I think, not much more developed than that on eyewitness issues and is far more complex and less subject to clear applications to individual cases. And defense and appeal attorneys have had a far easier time interpreting and proposing application of eyewitness evidence than they have had or will have with fingerprint research.

I think members of the latent print community and those studying the issues and proposing legislative measures must, if they hope to begin making changes, think in terms of small, locally palatable, practical steps and a gradual approach to costs. And, ideally, they will craft proposals in which there is something in them for local agencies and governments. The classical federal approach is to provide grants programs for local agencies with money available in decreasing amounts over a period of years while the local entity takes up the load. The productive strategy has always been to help the local agencies provide something better than what they have now and to bring them "into the fold," so that when legislated standards are proposed that require the measures for which funds have already been offered and provided, the more progressive (who are also often the more politically influential) are already meeting them or can meet them without a heavy burden. The goal is that when the chaff is blown away eventually, no one much misses it. And once such grants have been offered, there is little justification for complaint by those who don't avail themselves of them.

There are many small measures that can prime the effort. If the bulk of examiner training is performed through a state agency, that agency can craft the training sequence so that no acknowledgment of completion is made until the entire series is completed. Such agencies are loathe to "certify," but they can declare what they consider minimal training, any fraction of which they consider incomplete and of no practical use. Likewise, state law enforcement licensing authorities can specify minimum training standards, and an advisory from them to a legislature will likely be adopted. Their authority, while not certifying competency, can at least insure some reasonable degree of training. They can also require continuing education, so we do not see people who did three weeks 20 years ago and have never read a book or article or attended any training since and are not aware of developments. None of those are very costly, and there can be little objection from anyone. And it brings that state a better awareness of the need for change.

Hi Pat

I do not envisage a world where people can claim to be experts without any formal training.

Obviously Janet is concerned enough to write the following:

I don’t want to waste your time, but was hoping you could help me. We do not have any Certified Latent Print Examiners in the Unit.

She then went on to say:

Unfortunately, it is not encouraged. Up to now, we have used a simple form for our findings on fingerprint comparisons. I would like to change that

So at least by her own admissions there are concerns that Justice might not be properly done by experts who have no training.

I merely repeat her claims.

There is always room for improvement.

I wish her well in her endeavours

Hi Pat

That process is really working, you are getting younger, or is it your special diet, your memory is better than mine can you share that diet with the rest of the f/p/ whorld (no that is not a spelling mistake, people in the UK will know that) I think there are a couple more modules now though, we didn't want it too easy for the trainees.

Pat you are just too kind with you comments I am sure the next time I visit the Fingerprint Section I will be in for a hard time. Oh well I most likely deserve it.

I feel very sorry for those so-called f/p experts out there they must face the witness box in total fear. Bad enough having had the training. Like all things we move on and so does the training it took a few decades for our training to go that far. Before I joined you did 5yrs of working in the office and at scenes and were made up to being a Detective. There were no exams just doing the job the hard way. Then in the 1960's and 70's a training book was put together, and in the 1970's examinations were written, a title change to reflect the work done, we were all cops. Then the civies came in with a dedicated training officer. In the 1990's the modules were written, down in Wellington at HQ, the modules are slowly being added to and altered to reflect changes in work flows and corrections being applied.

So, yes it does take time but with people asking the right questions at the right time and place, things can be sped up. If it had not been for a now retired John Clarke who wrote the modules often in his own time at home it would have taken much longer and cost far more. You just need someone who is very focused and willing to take the flack, because not everyone wants to have to sit the exams.