I guess law enforcement doesn't pay attention to stuff like this:
"A new American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) working group report on the quality of latent fingerprint analysis says that courtroom testimony and reports stating or even implying that fingerprints collected from a crime scene belong to a single person are indefensible and lack scientific foundation."
Wrong way to use fingerprints: "We have a crime and no suspects, but we have a fingerprint. We ran that through our database, and got a single match. That must be the person who left the print".
Right way to use fingerprints: "We have a crime and several suspects that we know were deeply involved in the matter that the crime was part of, but we don't know which were actually there during the crime. We also have this fingerprint left during the crime, and it matches exactly one of the suspects, which shows beyond a reasonably doubt he was there".
It's really no different from hair color, skin color, sex, height, weight, age, or DNA--the evidentiary value of a match on any of those depends on how that thing is distributed in the population that you can show by other means includes the correct person. The more you can narrow down that population, the better the evidentiary value.
Take sex for an extreme example. A woman reports that a man assaulted her in New York. There are a lot of men in New York, so if that's all you have to go on it is pretty worthless. But suppose an officer saw the attack, got a good enough look to see that the attacker is a man but nothing else, and saw that man run into a women's restroom to hide. The officer enters the restroom, and finds that it is occupied by two women and a man, and there is no way out of the restroom except the door the man entered by, which the officer had under observation continuously from the time the man entered to the time the officer entered and saw the three occupants.
Convicting that man for assault would be quite reasonable on the above evidence, even though it is largely based on the fact that he is male and the assailant was male. That's because other good evidence narrowed the population of possible assailants down to just three, and so if you can conclude that the assailant must be in that group, then the assailant being male does show that he was the assailant.
>that while latent fingerprint examiners can successfully rule out most of the population from being the source of a latent fingerprint based on observed features, insufficient data exist to determine how fingerprint features really are unique
>>This makes it scientifically baseless to claim that an analysis has enabled examiners to narrow the pool of sources to a single person.
While it doesn't narrow it down to a *single person, Fingerprints are still evidence. The litmus is to convince a jury of your peers.
You could also have an evil twin brother that you don't know of that might have committed the crime, thus let's throw out photographic evidence.
Somebody might also put on a fake license plate number matching your own on an car with the exact model as your own. Thus let's throw out witness accounts of car type/plate number.
Seems like you'd need to prove the pills in question were the alleged substance?
Just linking a picture of alleged narcotics to someone via their fingerprint doesn't seem like it should rise to the level of reasonable suspicion. I don't know what the standards are for the UK though, so I may be applying assumptions.
His sentence in the end was for conspiracy to supply cannabis. The suspicion to search was contextual, given that the image was obtained from another arrested person (presumably for a drug offence) along with other messages implying he was dealing to them, such as "what do you want to buy?".
Although I'm not sure how the fingerprint comes into this, given that they didn't find him by it, but rather "officers had an idea who they believed was behind the drugs operation", and he was convicted of a different crime, with evidence from his home search.
I don't think the pills matter. I think someone was caught with drugs, said "Here's the whatsapp conversation I had with the person that sent them to me" and received the fingerprint. I think they already had the drugs.
I seriously doubt that photo had enough of the fingerprint in it to get a match. I'm not saying this can't be done - I just don't see how that particular photo offers enough data points to uniquely identify someone.
But if anyone has more details on the technical analysis they did, do tell!
Quick heads up to everyone who hasn't apparently read the article: This case is from the UK, where the evidentiary rules are different. It wouldn't pass muster in the US as there is an additional procedural hurdle the prosecution would have to clear to establish that the fingerprint(s) at issue could have been reliably extracted from the image. If the image in the article is the actual image in the case, it wouldn't satisfy US guidelines for fingerprint analysis.
Interesting use of neural networks right there. Putting someone else's fingerprints on the hand of someone in a photo to make it look like they were the subject of the photo.
I think I'd be much more concerned about digital fingerprints that come from the lenses and sensor than physical finger prints. Anyone smart would hide revealing details. Sites who offer services like this should introduce noise to the images that distorts at least the digital artifacts.
[+] [-] JosephRedfern|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robterrell|8 years ago|reply
"A new American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) working group report on the quality of latent fingerprint analysis says that courtroom testimony and reports stating or even implying that fingerprints collected from a crime scene belong to a single person are indefensible and lack scientific foundation."
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news-stories/2017/october/...
[+] [-] tzs|8 years ago|reply
Wrong way to use fingerprints: "We have a crime and no suspects, but we have a fingerprint. We ran that through our database, and got a single match. That must be the person who left the print".
Right way to use fingerprints: "We have a crime and several suspects that we know were deeply involved in the matter that the crime was part of, but we don't know which were actually there during the crime. We also have this fingerprint left during the crime, and it matches exactly one of the suspects, which shows beyond a reasonably doubt he was there".
It's really no different from hair color, skin color, sex, height, weight, age, or DNA--the evidentiary value of a match on any of those depends on how that thing is distributed in the population that you can show by other means includes the correct person. The more you can narrow down that population, the better the evidentiary value.
Take sex for an extreme example. A woman reports that a man assaulted her in New York. There are a lot of men in New York, so if that's all you have to go on it is pretty worthless. But suppose an officer saw the attack, got a good enough look to see that the attacker is a man but nothing else, and saw that man run into a women's restroom to hide. The officer enters the restroom, and finds that it is occupied by two women and a man, and there is no way out of the restroom except the door the man entered by, which the officer had under observation continuously from the time the man entered to the time the officer entered and saw the three occupants.
Convicting that man for assault would be quite reasonable on the above evidence, even though it is largely based on the fact that he is male and the assailant was male. That's because other good evidence narrowed the population of possible assailants down to just three, and so if you can conclude that the assailant must be in that group, then the assailant being male does show that he was the assailant.
[+] [-] Blackthorn|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supercanuck|8 years ago|reply
>>This makes it scientifically baseless to claim that an analysis has enabled examiners to narrow the pool of sources to a single person.
While it doesn't narrow it down to a *single person, Fingerprints are still evidence. The litmus is to convince a jury of your peers.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] justaguyhere|8 years ago|reply
My guess is, they probably know but ignore it?
[+] [-] 21|8 years ago|reply
Somebody might also put on a fake license plate number matching your own on an car with the exact model as your own. Thus let's throw out witness accounts of car type/plate number.
[+] [-] wavefunction|8 years ago|reply
Just linking a picture of alleged narcotics to someone via their fingerprint doesn't seem like it should rise to the level of reasonable suspicion. I don't know what the standards are for the UK though, so I may be applying assumptions.
[+] [-] gnode|8 years ago|reply
That may be true in order to convict him of dealing the ecstacy, but he wasn't. From the BBC article:
> It [the dealer's house] was raided and large quantities of 'gorilla glue' - a type of cannabis - was recovered.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-43711477
His sentence in the end was for conspiracy to supply cannabis. The suspicion to search was contextual, given that the image was obtained from another arrested person (presumably for a drug offence) along with other messages implying he was dealing to them, such as "what do you want to buy?".
Although I'm not sure how the fingerprint comes into this, given that they didn't find him by it, but rather "officers had an idea who they believed was behind the drugs operation", and he was convicted of a different crime, with evidence from his home search.
[+] [-] giarc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meesterdude|8 years ago|reply
But if anyone has more details on the technical analysis they did, do tell!
[+] [-] TomK32|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamblor956|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olskool|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] test6554|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itakedrugs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liquidify|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] anf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnode|8 years ago|reply
https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/21/12247370/police-fingerpri...
[+] [-] ataturk|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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