I give a lot of credit to our county attorney for dealing with Mr. Cole the way that he did. Kudos to the examiners from Omaha for their testimony as well.Simon Cole is not a fingerprint analyst. Nor is he a forensic scientist.
He is a sociologist and what he terms a “historian of science.”
Douglas County Public Defender Tom Riley called the University of California-Irvine professor Tuesday to try to undercut the critical piece of evidence prosecutors have against alleged murder accomplice Juan Castaneda: two prints from a palm on the hood of shooting victim Tari Glinsmann’s car.
Crime-scene investigators ran the prints through a national computer database, which scanned them, searched and returned a top candidate: Castaneda.
Two fingerprint analysts have testified that the palm prints from the hood of the car were a match to Castaneda’s. One expert said he compared the prints and stopped counting at 30 matching points.
As Castaneda’s first-degree murder trial resumed Tuesday, Cole said fingerprint analysts cannot claim that a fingerprint only belongs to one person for a simple reason: Authorities don’t have the fingerprints of everyone in the world.
Cole said many fingerprint analysts don’t keep bench notes of their analysis – a standard in other sciences. Nor does the science have a published error rate or validation study.
“Is there a scientific basis for saying that a print is (a match) to another?,” Riley asked.
“No,” Cole said.
Under cross-examination, Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine asked if anyone had ever found identical fingerprints on two different people.
“People have not been found to have exact duplicate prints,” Cole said.
He added later: “Just because no two duplicate prints have been found doesn’t tell us the accuracy of . . . fingerprints.”
Kleine also hammered away at whether Cole had ever analyzed two fingerprints. At one point, the prosecutor asked why authorities even sent Cole copies of the palm prints in this case.
“It is laughable,” Kleine said. “You don’t look at fingerprints, you don’t compare them, you don’t perform your own analysis?”
“I don’t analyze fingerprints,” Cole said.
Cole’s testimony wrapped up Castaneda’s defense. The two sides are expected to present closing arguments Wednesday.
Earlier in Castaneda’s defense, jurors heard testimony from a former gang member who knew Castaneda and codefendants Edgar Cervantes and Eric “Scrappy” Ramirez.
In the days after the shooting, Robert Hidalgo testified, Cervantes told him that he had shot Luis Fernando-Silva and that Eric “Scrappy” Ramirez had shot the others.
“I shot the fool and Scrappy did the rest” were the words that Robert Hidalgo recalled Cervantes’ saying.
Riley used that testimony to try to contradict Cervantes’ contention that he was just the driver that night.
However, a second witness Riley called backtracked on his claims that Cervantes admitted he was a gunman.
Ian Fegan had told police that Cervantes said he shot one of the victims.
But Fegan testified last week that he lied to police out of his desperation to get a bond reduction.
Cervantes insisted he only drove Ramirez and Castaneda around. And he denied telling anyone that he was the triggerman.
It’s left to be seen how much impact who-shot-who will have on the jury.
Prosecutors haven’t accused Castaneda of killing anyone. Rather, they have charged Castaneda with first-degree murder under the felony murder law that holds everyone, gunman and accomplices, accountable if someone dies in the commission of a robbery.
Cervantes alleged that Castaneda, 15, pulled Fernando-Silva and Glinsmann out of the car.
As a side note, the suspect was convicted of the first degree murder plus seven other charges.