|
AntiPolygraph
| Reid technque for
extracting confessions | Scenario
stings | DNA | CSI
Effect | Reid
technique for extracting false confessions | Bullshit
Bullet forensics | RCMP Confession tricks
exported to Australia | A
forensic science
internet portal is run by Ben Joseph, a Canadian forensic
scientist. He has links to related news clippings and runs a
forum to discuss related issues.
Forensics
Justice reviewing use
of fingerprint evidence, citing recent mistakes
BY FLYNN MCROBERTS AND STEVE
MILLS, Chicago Tribune, March 4, 2005
CHICAGO - (KRT) - Four years after scuttling
a study into the reliability of fingerprinting, the research
arm of the Justice Department is seeking answers to fundamental
questions about the grandfather of forensic science.
The National Institute of Justice
recently called for researchers to explore such crucial issues
as how to measure the quality of fingerprints lifted from crime
scenes and the accuracy of comparisons made by law-enforcement
examiners.
The research solicitation seeks
to "provide juries with increased information about the
significance and weight of fingerprint evidence" and also
to create tools "to improve the fingerprint examination
process," said Catherine Sanders, spokeswoman for the Office
of Justice Programs, which includes the institute.
The agency's decision is the
latest example of an unmistakable shift in the previously defiant
world of fingerprint experts. Until recently, they had pointed
to nearly a century of convictions in U.S. courts to dismiss
calls for a closer examination of their discipline.
The institute's solicitation
is "very significant because it's recognizing that there
is an area that needs to have research done, and they're willing
to step up to the plate and fund it," said Ronald Singer,
president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
"What I think NIJ is hoping
is that they can fund the research that will validate the process
and answer a lot of the questions that have come up over the
last couple of years."
Across the nation, law-enforcement
and forensic officials are beginning to acknowledge the need
to show whether science supports the expert witnesses whose opinions
have long been accepted as gospel in American courts.
The broader reassessment of
fingerprint comparison is largely being driven by a series of
high-profile errors committed by examiners, including their role
in the wrongful conviction of Stephan Cowans, a Boston man imprisoned
for six years after a false match linked him to the shooting
of a police sergeant.
A few months after Cowans'
release last year, an even more embarrassing mistake occurred
when the fingerprint world's elite - examiners at the FBI lab
- falsely connected Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, to Madrid
train bombings in 2004 through a print found near the scene.
For several years, the National
Institute of Justice has sought to walk a fine line over fingerprint
comparisons, seeking to bolster the scientific foundation of
a time-honored discipline without admitting it has weaknesses.
Calling for research gives
ammunition to defense attorneys who can suggest that the need
for such a study shows that the discipline is not entirely reliable.
Robert Epstein, a defense attorney
in Philadelphia, did that several years ago when his client was
charged in a robbery. In one of the only cases in which a judge
has told prosecutors to prove the scientific validity of fingerprint
comparison, the FBI asked crime labs across the country to help
the bureau convince the judge, in part by examining fingerprint
evidence from the case.
While most examiners agreed
with the FBI's conclusion that the defendant's prints matched
those found on the getaway car, 17 examiners in nine states were
unable to make an identification, underscoring that the discipline
is much more subjective than many fingerprint experts have acknowledged.
After receiving the conflicting
responses, one of the FBI's top fingerprint experts asked the
dissenting examiners to take another look, with the help of some
FBI enlargements of the prints in question.
"These enlargements are
contained within a clear plastic sleeve that is marked with red
dots depicting specific fingerpint characteristics," wrote
Stephen Meagher, chief of the FBI lab's latent print unit, in
a June 1999 letter. "Please test your prior conclusions
against these enlarged photographs with the marked characteristics."
Three months after Meagher's
letter, the National Institute of Justice approved a call for
research into fingerprinting, only to eventually let it die amid
uproar from police and prosecutors.
Contacted last month, the FBI
declined to elaborate on the letters, saying they were part of
the public record.
But continuing questions about
the reliability of fingerprint comparison and the experts who
practice it helped spur the new request for research and prompted
crime labs to re-evaluate how they do their work.
The FBI, for instance, has
long left it up to individual examiners to determine whether
they have enough points of comparison - among the loops, whorls
and arches that make a fingerprint - to identify a match.
The bureau is now considering
imposing guidelines on them, including the hundreds of examiners
who evaluate tens of thousands of prints a day at the FBI's fingerprint
database headquarters in West Virginia.
"Probably within the next
year, we're going to set our own standards, a minimum number
of points needed to declare a match," said Charles Jones
Jr., a fingerprint examiner instructor at the FBI's West Virginia
facility.
Asked why the bureau was considering
the change, Jones explained, "I guess the Mayfield case
was an eye-opener for everybody."
Noting that the examiners at
the FBI lab outside Washington, D.C., have "always been
the cream of the crop," he added, "If those guys can
make a mistake, so can we."
In Boston, Cowans' exoneration
has forced the police department to shut its fingerprint unit
and rebuild it.
Six years after authorities
used a fingerprint match to implicate him in the shooting of
a Boston police sergeant, DNA tests excluding Cowans forced them
to recheck the print. The re-examination last year revealed that
his print wasn't even close to a match of the one found at the
crime scene.
Six years into a 35- to 50-year
prison sentence, Cowans was released from prison last winter.
The disclosure prompted prosecutors
to seek perjury charges against Dennis LeBlanc, a veteran examiner
with 18 years in the fingerprint unit who had falsely matched
Cowans' print to a glass mug.
A state grand jury chose not
to indict LeBlanc. But according to an outside consultant's report
obtained by the Chicago Tribune, he "discovered his mistake"
before he testified in Cowans' 1998 trial "and concealed
it all the way through the trial."
A second report on the entire
Boston fingerprint unit found that "excellence (was) not
expected, therefore not achieved, " with supervisors failing
to provide proper training for examiners.
The report also said that a
"never ending stream" of work exceeded the "perceived
abilities" of the unit's examiners, and that testing showed
they made false identifications.
After receiving the second
report last October, Boston police shut the fingerprint unit.
Deciding the unit was fundamentally flawed, the department has
gone "back to ground zero," in the words of Capt. Detective
Thomas Dowd, who was named to reform the unit.
Dowd said the department wants
to replace the sworn officers who had made up the six-person
fingerprint group with civilian employees led by a respected
forensic expert, whom Dowd still is trying to find.
One of the improvements, he
said, will be to ensure that examiners who review their colleagues'
work do so without knowing the other's opinion. Such blind reviews
could solve a recurring problem, like that of the Mayfield case.
Though LeBlanc's false comparison
played a key role in convicting Cowans, LeBlanc's mistake wasn't
the only flawed part of the prosecution. The sergeant who was
injured, for instance, falsely identified Cowans as his assailant.
"The system failed me,"
LeBlanc said in a recent interview in his modest Boston-area
home, contending he made an honest mistake. "And the system
failed Cowans."
LeBlanc, 53, who is on paid
administrative leave because of the case, reluctantly discussed
his role in it, fearful his bosses would fire him.
Cowans, a petty thief and burglar,
insisted on his innocence in the police shooting even as a judge
sentenced him in 1998. In prison, Cowans sought to earn money
for DNA testing by volunteering for "biohazard" duty,
which paid him $3 a day to clean up blood and whatever else was
left after prisoner fights and other violence.
His attorneys, meanwhile, pushed
for DNA testing on a hat found near the home where the police
sergeant's attacker fled and saliva on the mug from which LeBlanc
claimed to have found the print match.
In the fall of 2003, a forensic
lab said its tests showed that Cowans could not have been a contributor
of the DNA.
Faced with the test results,
prosecutors fell back on the fingerprint evidence as proof that
Cowans committed the crime. But in January 2004, when the state
rechecked the fingerprint on the mug, it determined the print
didn't match Cowans'.
Authorities have yet to find
who shot the police officer.
- FBI apologizes to lawyer
held in Madrid bombings
Man feels he was singled out because he's Muslim
The Associated Press, May
25, 2004
PORTLAND, Ore. - Offering a
rare public apology, the FBI admitted mistakenly linking an American
lawyer's fingerprint to one found near the scene of a terrorist
bombing in Spain, a blunder that led to his imprisonment for
two weeks.
The apology Monday came hours
after a judge dismissed the case against Brandon Mayfield, who
had been held as a material witness in the Madrid bombings case,
which killed 191 people and injured about 2,000 others.
Mayfield, a 37-year-old convert
to Islam, sharply criticized the government, calling his time
behind bars "humiliating" and "embarrassing"
and saying he was targeted because of his faith.
"This whole process has
been a harrowing ordeal. It shouldn't happen to anybody,"
said Mayfield. "I believe I was singled out and discriminated
against, I feel, as a Muslim."
Karin Immergut, the U.S. attorney
in Oregon, denied Mayfield had been a target because of his religion
and maintained that the FBI had followed all laws in the case.
Court documents released Monday
suggested that the mistaken arrest first sprang from an error
by the FBI's supercomputer for matching fingerprints and then
was compounded by the FBI's own analysts.
FBI promises to review practices
"The FBI apologizes to Mr. Mayfield and his family for the
hardships that this matter has caused," the bureau said
in a statement. The agency also said it would review its practices
on fingerprint analyses.
"We need to know more
about how this happened. All of us in this country need to know
more about how this type of mistake can be made," said U.S.
Public Defender Steve Wax, Mayfield's attorney.
Mayfield, a former Army lieutenant,
was released last week. But he was not altogether cleared of
suspicion; the government said he remained a material witness
and put restrictions on his movements.
Those restrictions were lifted
Monday.
U.S. District Judge Robert
Jones said all property that had been seized from the Mayfield
residence should be returned, and all copies of Mayfield's personal
documents held by the federal government were to be destroyed.
The case began when FBI fingerprint
examiners in Quantico, Va., searched for possible matches to
a digital image of a fingerprint found on a bag of detonators
the day of the Spanish bombings on March 11.
The system returned 15 possible
matches, including prints belonging to Mayfield, on file from
a 1984 burglary arrest in Wichita, Kan., when Mayfield was a
teenager.
Three separate FBI examiners
narrowed the identification to Mayfield, according to Robert
Jordan, the FBI agent in charge of Oregon. A court-appointed
fingerprint expert agreed.
Spain doubted any connection
The FBI maintained its certainty even as Spanish authorities
said by mid-April that the original image of the fingerprint
taken directly from the bag did not match Mayfield's, Wax said.
Last week, Spanish authorities
said the fingerprints of an Algerian man were on the bag. Jordan
said FBI examiners flew to Spain, viewed the original print pattern
of the fingerprint on paper, and agreed that it was not Mayfield's.
As additional evidence in support
of Mayfield's arrest, the FBI pointed to Mayfield's attendance
at a local mosque, his advertising legal services in a publication
owned by a man suspected to have links to terrorism, and a telephone
call his wife placed to a branch of an Islamic charity with suspected
terrorist ties.
They also noted that Mayfield
represented a man in a child custody case who later pleaded guilty
to conspiring to help al-Qaida and the Taliban fight U.S. forces
in Afghanistan.
According to court documents,
FBI agents began their surveillance of Mayfield two weeks after
the attacks in the Spanish capital. Under a provision of the
U.S. Patriot Act, they entered his home without his knowledge
- but aroused the family's suspicion by bolting the wrong lock
on their way out and leaving a footprint on the rug that didn't
match any family members.
During a later raid, FBI agents
took Mayfield's computers, modem, safe deposit key, assorted
papers, as well as copies of the Quran and what they classified
as "Spanish documents" - apparently Spanish homework
by one of Mayfield's sons.
Mayfield, who runs a small
Portland law office, was never facing any formal charges. He
was arrested as a material witness, and held in the Multnomah
County Detention Center on the chance that he might have information
about the Spain bombings.
At a press conference, Mayfield
talked about his time behind bars, initially in solitary confinement
and then in the jail's mental ward. Mayfield feared for his safety
when inmates began to recognize him on the nightly news.
"The climate of fear of
terror makes this a cautionary tale about the way in which that
fear can ensnare an innocent person in the type of abuse to which
Mr. Mayfield was subjected," Wax said.
© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This
material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5053007/
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell
