@mre5765

Yes I am quite familiar with the FBI’s 50K study. If anything the 50K study showed that a human being trained to competency as a latent print examiner is a vital cog in the system of identification via fingerprints. A few of the more recent famous erroneous identification cases (Shirley McKie in Scotland, Brandon Mayfield (Madrid train bombing), Richard Jackson) all involved rather poor quality latent impressions which while one expert identified another expert reviewed and pointed out the dissimilarities. I don’t disagree with you that when it comes to identifying a “smudge” or a poor quality latent that my personal threshold to be convinced of somebody’s guilt would also be rather high. If I were a juror I would also like to see the latent impression charted against the exemplar of the suspect, this is not always done in US courts. On the same token, if the only evidence that you have in a burglary case is a beautiful latent left on a window at the point of entry and it’s individualized to a known burglar who lives in the same neighborhood I would comfortably vote guilty.



Nobody will ever be able to prove that no two people have the exact same pattern of friction ridge detail because it will never be possible to obtain a recorded set of the finger, palm, and foot prints of everybody that ever has, is, or ever will be. There is movement within the latent print community to start testifying in statistical terms like DNA analysts. I would wager that I have a wee bit of experience in this arena and we could go on and on about distortion, unexplainable differences between fingerprint impressions, etc, etc, etc, but it would be off topic for this thread.