Fingerprint Evidence is Not Proof of Guilt
Yesterday in my article Admission of Guilt Means Nothing I promised my readers an article showing how direct evidence is very often fabricated by overzealous police and prosecutors against the innocent accused.
Although confessions are considered direct evidence, the article above already proved that such admissions are worthless in establishing someone's guilt. As for other types of direct evidence, I spoke too hastily - since there are many types of direct evidence: eyewitness identification (proven 75% unreliable), surveillance videos, audio tapes, and in some situations, forensic evidence such as fingerprints, blood, hair, fiber, shoe or tire impressions, and DNA evidence - it will require a number of articles to show how all of these are completely worthless as proof of guilt.
For this article I will focus on fingerprint evidence (I will cover the other types of direct evidence in future articles) since almost everyone has the belief that if the defendant's fingerprints, and no one else's, are on a bloody knife used in a murder, and he cannot explain how his prints got on the knife, then he is certainly guilty. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, fingerprint evidence may be either direct, circumstantial, or negative evidence depending on the situation.
For example, fingerprint evidence is direct evidence when used to show that someone was at the scene of the crime and circumstantial evidence when used to show that he committed the crime. The problem of course is that under United States law (1) both direct and circumstantial evidence carry the exact same weight and importance; that is, there is no legal distinction between circumstantial and direct evidence.
Now consider the following:
The New York Times, 4 Mar 1993, An Officer's Guilt Casts Shadow on Trials
The first evidence-tampering scandal in state police history has cast a shadow over criminal trials in central New York State, making prosecutors' jobs more difficult, lawyers and law-enforcement officials say.
The scandal broke last fall, when a state police investigator with Troop C, David L. Harding, admitted fabricating fingerprint evidence in four cases, including the murder of a family of four. Another officer, Robert M. Lishansky, has also been charged with tampering with evidence.
...
Mr. Harding, who is serving 4 to 12 years in prison, has said that when he fabricated fingerprint evidence he acted "because of a stern belief the defendant was a danger to society." But prosecutors and state police officials said he was seeking glory.
If I were on a jury, fingerprint evidence would not leave me with any more moral certainty that the defendant is indeed guilty than any other evidence. While the totality of all the evidence might induce me to vote to convict someone of murder, I certainly would not do so if the death penalty were on the table. I don't care that the defendant confessed, that the victim before dying implicated the defendant, that the defendant had motive, had no alibi, and that the victim's blood was on the defendant (and yes, I will report on this case - the defendant, after years in prison, was exonerated by DNA).
ENDNOTES
(1):
Legal Information Institute, Holland v. United States, 348 U.S. 121, 75 S. Ct. 127, 99 L. Ed. 150 [1954]
Marion L. HOLLAND and Ethel E. Holland, Petitioners, v. UNITED STATES of America.
...
Circumstantial evidence in this respect is intrinsically no different from testimonial evidence. Admittedly, circumstantial evidence may in some cases point to a wholly incorrect result. Yet this is equally true of testimonial evidence. In both instances, a jury is asked to weigh the chances that the evidence correctly points to guilt against the possibility of inaccuracy or ambiguous inference. In both, the jury must use its experience with people and events in weighing the probabilities. If the jury is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, we can require no more.
