#156 Wrongful Conviction: Junk Science - Fingerprint Evidence

keep up with you when you dance all night. You both head inside and grab a drink, catch up a little bit, and then hit the dance floor. The place is all base and flashing lights. Neither one of you stops moving until they turn off the music and the DJ tells everyone it's closing time. Time to get out of here. When you get outside the club, you say goodbye to Alvin because you have to get up early in the morning. You're not going to go back to

his place tonight. You give Alvin a call the next weekend, but there's no answer. You don't think much of it because Alvin sometimes just doesn't answer his phone. He's the kind of guy that does his own thing. But then a few days later, you get a call from another friend. He tells you he passed by Alvin's house and there were police officers surrounding it. They said that Alvin had been murdered. You hang up in immediately head to the police station. You want to help figure out who did this.

You meet with detectives and you find out that Alvin was murdered on the night you went dancing with him, but he wasn't discovered until nine days later. His landlord found him on the floor of his apartment, and you hear all this, and you're just immediately nauseous. If you had stayed at his house that night, maybe you could have protected him. You tell the police everything you can remember out that night. You want to do anything you can to help them find out who did this to

your friend. The police call you in four times over the next two weeks as they investigate Alvin's murder. One day, they tell you they're taking fingerprints of everyone who had been around Alvin in the days preceding his death. They tell you that by allowing them to take your prints, it will help them figure out who committed the murder.

Part of you feels like you're in an episode of some detective show when they pressed the tips of your fingers and the palms of your hands on a cold ink pad, then roll the tips of your fingers one by one on a piece of paper. You've seen this process what seems like hundreds of times before on TV and in the movies, but you've never actually done it yourself. You have no record. You've never been fingerprinted before. Not long after that, the police call you into the station

one more time, but something has shifted. They bring you into an interrogation room. The first thing they do is show you a polaroid of Alvin's body. You immediately feel fluid bubble into your esophagus, and you quickly scanned the room for a garbage can. Your mind quickly computes, ship, if I puke in front of these cops, they'll think I did this. You managed to swallow the vomit, and there's a sharp burn in your throat. Then they show you another picture and Alvin is flat on his back.

There's blood everywhere, on his clothes, the carpet next to him. You can't even see his face. Whoever did this put Alvin's big white box fan over his head. And shoulders, so you can't see the top portion of his body. He used to make fun of Alvin for that fan. You were always telling him just to invest in a damn ac unit. Already, the whole thing seems so surreal.

And now the office sirs are pointing at the fan in the picture and they say, you see those bloody smudges on the fan, Those are fingerprints, and the prints we took from you the other day. We've collected over a dozen fingerprints of people who were in Alvin's apartment before he was murdered, and only yours matched the prints on that fan. There were no signs of break in at his apartment, but you didn't have to break in, did you. Alvin let you in after your night out together.

Then you got in an argument with him. You got jealous that he was dancing with other men, and you stabbed him to death, didn't you. You stare at the officer and disbelieve. No. You say, what are you talking about? Why would I come here willingly to help you guys out if I had anything to do with this. They don't listen to a word you say. They put handcuffs on you and put you in custody at your trial,

the execution calls a fingerprint expert to the stand. He says, before we're even born as fetuses in the womb, human beings developed ridges on their fingers and hands. In addition to those ridges, we have glands that secrete oils, so that when we touch objects, the whorls, loops, and swirl pattern of those ridges are left behind. Fingerprint analysis has been around for over a hundred years, and we know

that each of our fingerprints are unique. The fingerprints were covered from this crime scene were visible to the naked eye because they were left as impressions in the victim's blood. I analyze these prints and compared them to defining characteristics of the defendants prints. The bloody prints found near the victim's body clearly belonged to the defendant. I am certain about this. The prosecution calls two more fingerprint experts to the stand, and they all agree these are your prints.

But your attorney calls two witnesses to the stand, fingerprint experts that claim it isn't even close. There's no way these prints belong to you. The jury isn't phazed by the conflicting opinions of the expert witnesses. They are convinced by the impassioned story that the prosecutor laid out. They convict you of first degree murder and abuse of a corpse. Your sentenced to life without parole. They're shouting in the courtroom as you're escorted out by cops with your hands

coughed tightly behind your back. You can't understand why this is happening. What is going on? Those are not your fingerprints. You feel totally and completely helpless, But lucky for you, this isn't the end. The fingerprint experts that testified in your defense called this conviction a gross miscarriage of justice. They demand that the evidence be reevaluated. A panel of experts to just that and find that the prosecution's evaluation was clearly wrong. The prints at the crime scene clearly

do not match your fingerprints. One of the experts for the prosecution admits he made a mistake. You're afforded a new trial and you are found not guilty. But this process takes two agonizing years, and after serving that amount of time in prison for a crime you never committed, the murder of your friend, you're released. The story you just heard is based on the true story of Richard Jackson, who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life without parole

for the murder of his friend Alvin Davis. While fingerprint analysis has been proven to be purely subjective, it still holds a firm place in the public imagination and therefore endures minds as reliable science. I'm Josh Dubin, civil rights and criminal defense attorney, an innocence ambassador to the Innocence Project in New York. Today, on Wrongful Conviction Junk Science, we examined fingerprint evidence. Contrary to what pop culture has

ingrained in the American conscience. Matching known prints of a suspect the prince left at the scene of a crime is not an exact science. It is entirely subjective up to the eye of the examiner. So how did fingerprints become so widely accepted and thought of as the gold standard as full proof evidence. It turns out that the first time fingerprints were admitted into evidence was almost a hundred and ten years ago, and the methods used to

match prints to individuals hasn't changed much since. The Pacers Foundation is a proud supporter of this episode and of the Last Mile organization which provides business and tech training to help incarcerated individuals successfully and permanently re enter the workforce. The Pacers Foundation is committed to improving the lives of Hoosiers across Indiana, supporting organizations dedicated primarily to helping young

people and students. For more information on the work of the Pacers Foundation or the Last Mile Program, visit Pacers Foundation dot org or the Last Mile dot org. As Clarence Hiller painted the railing outside his home in the early evening of September eighteenth, nineteen, he couldn't stop looking over his shoulder. It seemed like the entire South Side

of Chicago was on edge. There had been a number of robberies in the area, and everyone was worried that they could be the next victim, and so in the middle of that night, when Clarence heard the screams of his wife and daughter, he was prepared to launch into action. He confronted the stranger in his house, and as Clarence tried to force the man out, both the robber and Clarence fell down the stairs. Three shots were fired, the intruder fled in. His neighbors came outside and their slippers

and rows to see what had happened. They found Clarence bleeding just outside his front door with his daughter standing over him. The police were called and a suspect, Thomas Jennings, was found just eight blocks away. His coat was torn and bloody and he was carrying a revolver. Thomas Jennings was ultimately convicted, but this wasn't the only evidence used

in his prosecution. When Thomas Jennings climbed into the Hiller's home that night, he grabbed onto the railing that Clarence was painting the night before, leaving a fingerprint behind in a semi wet coat of paint. The prosecution cut off the piece of the rail with the fingerprint that Jennings left behind. At his murder trial, jennings defense attorney argued that this new forensic method of lifting and comparing fingerprints couldn't be trusted. There were no tests that could prove

that it was reliable. But then the prosecutor got in front of the jury and pressed his finger onto a piece of paper. He then demonstrated how he was able to lift his own print off of it. By proving that he could collect the evidence, he was able to convince the jury that it was also possible to accurately analyze and match it to a suspect. The judge ruled

that fingerprint testimony was admissible, and Jennings was convicted. The precedent of admitting fingerprints has been upheld again and again, despite the fact that numerous men and women have been falsely identified through fingerprint evidence. For example, on March eleventh, two thousand and four, there were a series of explosions in Madrid during rush hour. Ten bombs went off, all within two minutes of each other. A hundred and ninety

three people died in almost two thousand were injured. Upon investigations, Spanish authorities found a fingerprint on one of the plastic bags that contained a detonator. They photographed it, then reached out the countries around the world to help find the culprits of the attack. The U S authorities ran the print through a database of fingerprints. Twenty possible matches appeared. One of them was Brandon Mayfield, but Brandon Mayfield hadn't left the country in ten years. He didn't even have

a valid passport. FBI analysts had no idea how Mayfield would have been able to fly to Spain and back completely undetected, and yet they pursued him as a suspect. It turns out that Brandon had converted to Islam after marrying his Egyptian wife, and so American authorities must have seen him as a convenient suspect just a few years

after nine eleven. In fact, despite evidence that showed that it was extremely unlikely that Brandon had left the prints on that bag, three different FBI agents testified that the prince found in Spain matched Mayfields. They said that it matched with one certainty. They arrested Mayfield, and while he sat in jail, the FBI tried to convince the Spanish authorities that these prints were Mayfields, but the Spanish police

didn't see what the FBI saw. The prince didn't seem to match at all from their perspective, a far cry from a match with a certainty. They said that when they compared Mayfield's prints to the ones on the bag, it was quote conclusively negative. They eventually did find a match for the fingerprints and apprehended the man who left them behind during the attack. The FBI admitted that they made a mistake in pursuing Mayfield and let him walk free.

Mayfield is now probably the best known case of mistaken fingerprints, but he certainly isn't the only one. And we probably can guess if the Spanish police hadn't been involved, or if they didn't have d n A. If you can imagine this case in the United States, Mr Mayfield would have been convicted. How would his defense lawyer have attacked three FBI agents with all of this experience, who claimed with a certainty that this print belonged to Mr Mayfield.

But here's the point here. You could assume that three fingerprint examiners with decades of experience who were certified, followed the process and they were all wrong. Joining us today is Mary Moriarty, the chief public Defender of Hennepin County in Minnesota, and I'm really excited to have her as a guest. She is a staunch defender of the rights of the accused and an outspoken wanted that and we need more public defenders like that in our country. She

has worked to challenge the admission of fingerprints. So, Mary, tell us a little bit about how you first became interested in fingerprints. So it goes back to when I

as a child. Actually, if you noticed my last name is Moriarty, and I had a particular interest in Sherlock Holmes, and I got for Christmas one year the Hardy Boys book that talked about how to collect evidence, and one of the things they had in there was a recipe for fingerprint powder, and so I would go take my parents glasses, wine glasses, that kind of thing, and I would dust them for prints. I would put tape over it and I would lift the print. But I never

really thought, well, what do you do after that? It was just an interesting exercise in taking items that I knew my parents had touched and actually trying to lift the prints from them. Well, I think I was like screwing around with a Rubik's cube and playing with g I Joe figure. So this makes me a little bit insecure about what I was doing as a kid, But it certainly sounds like you were headed towards a career

involving forensics and the law. For a while. My father was actually a public defender, and some of my dad's clients were actually my classmates, and I I got to know them as individuals. There's an attempt to other rise people who become public defender clients and and you know, the age old question that public defenders get asked is how can you represent those people? And it's very easy because those people are our brothers, our dads, are sisters,

are cousins. And you look at what those clients have been through, and so many of them have a history of trauma, you can understand why they find themselves in these particular situations. And I think growing up my parents fostered a really strong sense of justice in my life in in in every situation, they would sit me down and say, you know what, what is the right thing to do here? So fast forward when I went to

law school. Once I finally made that decision, I knew that there was only one thing that I wanted to be and that was a public defender. I wanted to be in a courtroom representing the same people that I got to know through my father's practice. All Right, so you became an attorney and got a chance to write some of the wrongs that you solved the system. But what were your thoughts about fingerprints when you first started out?

I have to acknowledge. So I've been a public defender for thirty years, and I certainly had fingerprint cases and I also accepted without questioning that they were based on science and that an expert could actually testify that a single finger made this print from the crime scene. And fingerprints have been accepted as evidence in courts for over one years, and people assume that it's reliable. So this

is something that always fascinated me. I don't even know when it was that I began to believe this, but even I had come to the belief that fingerprints were sort of the gold standard, and that seems to be sort of a consistent, you know, collective thought in the American psyche that fingerprints are regarded as being just really reliable. Why do you think that is? They're in popular culture. We've all grown up being given a certain perspective on

what fingerprints are. When I started getting an interest in fingerprints, I would say to people outside the legal system, my friends, I would say, you know, when you think about how a fingerprint from a crime scene is compared to the known print of somebody, what does that look like in your mind? And they will always say, well, I envision the crime scene print on a screen right next to the known fingerprint, and then I see a computer merging them,

and bells going off, going ding ding ding. It matches, and that makes sense. It makes sense that people would think that. When I tell people that that's not at all what happens, they are shocked. Lay people here that there are these databases and they tend to think that everybody's fingerprints are in it. And so I think what people believe is that, Okay, you get a fingerprint off a gun and you put it in a database and the computer comes up with the match and that's it.

So that's not true at all. So of course we're we're all entrenched in popular culture. We've been told for many, many years fingerprints are fantastic. And you know, why would anybody um take the time to actually look to see what they do? So tell us a little bit about what they actually do. Practically speaking, how does it actually work?

What a fingerprint examiners look at. The way fingerprint examiners actually look at fingerprints is through what they call a methodology called ace V. So it's a C E slash V which is analysis, comparison, evaluation and verification. So here's a description of what they actually do. Let's say a person is shot with a gun. They will lift and by lift I mean they'll look for a fingerprint on that gun, and then they will try to remove that fingerprint so that they can compare it. So the a

part is analysis. They are supposed to look at that fingerprint to see whether there is enough detail in it to go any further. People have seen these pictures of somebody rolling their finger over a pad of ink, and that's how you get the print. That's not what happens. When people touch objects. You get a fragment, and sometimes it's smeared, and sometimes there's dust on it, sometimes there's oil, there's there are a lot of different fact and so

here's the deal. It's not that you're comparing a fully rolled fingerprint to a fully rolled fingerprint. You are first looking at a fragment of the print, and it is totally within the subjectivity, the subjective discretion of a fingerprint analysis or examiner to decide whether there is enough information on that print to even go ahead and compare it.

So just think about that, right, That's kind of scary because it's up to the judgment call of one analyst on that particular day, and I'm quite sure that another analyst looking at the same portion of a print might come up with the opposite conclusion. So it turns out that the A in a c V, the very first step um is problematic and pretty flawed. So the next letter is the C for comparison, where you're taking a print left at a crime scene and comparing it to

a suspect's print. So tell us a little bit about what that process entails, Mary, So once you make the decision to go forward, then you are onto the sea or comparison, and you're comparing the fully rolled print to the fragment of a print. So, Josh, you might look and compare those two fingerprints and say, you know, I see enough here. I see twelve points of comparison. That's enough for me to say that this is the same person. I might look at it and say, oh, I see

five points of comparison. I think that's enough to declare that it's a match. So once again, it is completely subjective, right, and and saying, well, sometimes we think ten points that look the same between a rolled print and a fragment of a print are enough similarities to declare match, and sometimes we think five is enough. And that just doesn't seem scientific, seemed very reliable, And so Mary, something we've been addressing a lot on this podcast is the two

thousand nine n a S Report. Tell us a little bit about what the n AS report said about fingerprints. The National Academy of Science is the most prestigious scientific body in the United States and they advise Congress on issues of science, medicine, pretty much anything you can think of when it comes to sciences, and the National Academy of Science was asked to examine the comparative forensic sciences. It was a groundbreaking report and it was very in depth.

They took testimony, they solicited research, and it rocked the forensic science community. One of the things that you realize when you look at the report, if you are a scientist, you know that there are certain tenets of science, like you have to be able to replicate the process. When a scientist does an experiment, they document what they do. And the National Academy of Science was very clear that fingerprint examiners, as well as any other comparative forensic examiners,

do not provide documentation. And I found this to be true. You would order, you would ask for a fingerprint examiner's file, and you wouldn't really see many notes. You wouldn't know what they were actually looking at. You might have a picture of a fingerprint with some circles on it, but you wouldn't know what they were looking at, so you there was no way to replicate the process that they actually used. There was no basis for saying that it

came from the same source. And most of the people who did fingerprints um and probably still do in some places, are not scientists. They are not recruited because of their scientific background. They are often police officers who were apprenticed into this position because the police officer who examined the print was going to retire. And then there's the evaluation where you're actually making the decision about whether this comes from the same source, and there's a lot of controversy there.

Fingerprint examiners used to come in and say that they had certainty, they were a certain that this print from the crime scene came from this particular client, and there was no basis for that. In fact, that's not even allowed anymore. And why is there no basis for it? You would have to have population statistics, right, I mean, that's what DNA has, That's why they come up with these numbers. It's one in a million that it came

from this person. There are no population statistics regarding fingerprints. Okay, so we're seeing that there are a lot of flaws with both analyzing and comparing prints, the A and the C and ACE that neither of these steps are actually rooted in the scientific methods. And now we're onto E, right, A C E. So the E is evaluation where they

decide if it's a match or not. And so it seems that if analyzing and comparing the brinds aren't scientifically proven to work, the evaluation of those prints and deciding whether or not it's a match can't be done to any degree of certainty either. That just seems like common sense. So this is purely subjective. Um. But there's one last letter in these steps that examiners follow, and that's the

V for verification. Right, it's ACE V. And I'm already skeptical because the first three steps of the process are flawed, So how could the results be verified? Imagine this, A fingerprint examiner would decide that this fragment of a print came from this particular person, and then they would hand it off to another fingerprint examiner for verification. But the

issue was it was never blind. So, Josh, let's say you and I were fingerprint examiners in the same office, and I would make a decision about a print, and then I would ask you to verify what I had done. And the problem with that is you already knew what

I had done. It wasn't blind. In science, they do blind verifications, so that the person who's actually attempting to verify or replicate what the first person did it doesn't know what the result was actually, So the fact that the verification wasn't blind led to what people call confirmation bias,

which is a huge problem. Alright. So once the n AS basically said that the ace V process is really a recipe for wrongful convictions, this should have been an explosion in the criminal justice system in the courts, and it just wasn't. And that's, I guess, a different issue altogether.

We have to keep pushing in that are But you are still trying to push and challenge the admissibility of fingerprints in the criminal justice system, and I have to tell you, it just seems like it must be so difficult, Mary, because this is not like any kind of scientific analysis. But it just feels to me that everyone believes fingerprint evidence works. Um, it's so ingrained in pop culture and and just like the intrinsic belief that people have that

we've grown up with. So tell me, what are some of the problems you've run into when trying to call in question this so called science when you're in court litigating this. You're absolutely right, that is one of the things you hear from prosecutors and you hear from judges. Of course, this is reliable. It's been coming into court for decades and decades, and nobody has ever challenged it before. So that is a big hurdle to get over, much more so than other things like bite marks, blood spatter

and that sort of thing. The court system always lags behind science, and it was an uphill climb to convince judges and prosecutors that there were problems with fingerprints, or if you could convince them that there were problems, you certainly couldn't convince them that they should exclude that evidence. In fact, judges and I heard this quite a bit, it's like, well, you know, let's just let the jury decide.

But then you get back to the problem of jurors thinking that fingerprints are you know, they've been with us forever. They're embedded in popular culture, and you have to get over all of that history to convince jurors that there are indeed issues. Essentially, the presumption is that prints are

are infallible. In a case where your client is supposed to be presumed innocent and the prosecution or the government has to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt, a significant piece of evidence is presumed to be infallible, and you have a lot of work to do to try to educate them that that's not the case, right, Because it turns out the judges are really no different than jurors.

I mean, in some instances they're more sophisticated, not always, um, they certainly have less time and frankly sometimes less patients, and but they're sort of not immune to, you know, the impact of pop culture and precedent. But look, some people may be listening to this and thinking, I don't have a law degree, but I want to help I want to do something about this. So do you have any ideas for what our listeners can do to help

I do? And I wanted to go back, just for a moment um to talk about precedent because where I went in my mind, are are courts saying that actual innocence of a client on death row doesn't matter because procedure was followed. So that should alert your listeners. How um, how much courts adhere to press it and are deferential to previous findings to the point where they would authorize that somebody received the death penalty because the process was followed.

Anyone in the public wants the law enforcement, the system to get things right. And the only way we can get things right is if we understand the limitations of these forensic sciences. So people can be writing letters, calling their prosecutors, their policymakers, county commissioners, city council members. What are you doing to make sure that police officers um

that crime lab examiners understand this information? And that would be really helpful because people really do listen more to constituents and people in the public than they do potentially defense lawyers. You know, I've said this before, and I really do think it bears repeating. Pressure breaks pipes. What you all can do, as listeners of this podcast is take action. You're on here because you want to learn something,

but you also want to do something about it. The way that we stop this junk signs from making it into our courts is to shine a bright light on it. Google the n a S Report that we've continually talked about during this season. That report details how so many of these disciplines of forensic science, including fingerprints, are really problematic. The problem is judges don't know about it. Find out who your local criminal court judges are and send them

the n AS Report. Highlight the section on fingerprint analysis and send to your local criminal court judges. It's only by educating our judges and speaking truth to power that we can really make change happen. And if you don't think that your voice matters, just take a look around the country right now. It's the collect the voice that is causing change to happen, and we can do it one step at a time in our criminal justice system.

Thank you for listening to wrongful conviction junk Science. We're gonna be taking a little break, but our next episode will be out on October seven. In the meantime, we will be keeping a critical and close eye on our criminal justice system. We would love to hear how you're doing that along with us, so please leave us a comment and let us know what you've been up to and stay on the Wrongful Conviction podcast feed as Jason Flam will continue to release episodes between now and October seven.

Wrongful Conviction Junk Science is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Thanks to our executive producer Jason Flom and the team, it's Signal Company number One executive user Kevin Wardas and senior producers Kara Cornaber and Brit Spangler. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram at

dubin dot Josh. Follow the Wrongful Conviction podcast on Facebook and on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Twitter at wrong Conviction