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Author | Topic: Is Fingerprint Analysis a Science? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Trixie Member (Idle past 3735 days) Posts: 1011 From: Edinburgh Joined: |
The Scottish Fingerprint Inquiry reported yesterday and one of it's findings was that the identification of fingerprints was opinion, not fact and suggests that it can't be considered scientific.
For those of you who know nothing about this case, briefly, a fingerprint at a murder scene was identified as belonging to a police officer attached to the case. Said police officer denied ever having been in the murder house. On this basis, the officer was tried for perjury, but cleared when experts from the USA discovered the fingerprint never belonged to the officer in the first place and a terrible mistake had be made. Meanwhile, David Asbury was sentenced to life in prison for murder on the basis of yet another erroneous fingerprint identification in the same case!!!!! The Inquiry has determined that the police officer did not make the fingerprint in question and that the fingerprint which led to Asbury being convicted was similarly misidentified. The whole debacle took place in the 1990s, but we're only getting it cleared up now. The finding of the Inquiry that fingerprint identification is not science, but opinion, and should be stated as such in court proceedings will raise howls of indignation from fingerprint experts around the world. It's akin to declaring that DNA analysis is not science because someone made a mistake. So where do we draw the line between science and opinion? I've always held that in writing research papers, the only place for opinion is in the discussion of the results and said opinion has to be backed up by data from the paper or previously published data. Coffee house probably, but not very sure since it's nowt to do with evolution or creation, but does concern the validity of science in general. Edited by Admin, : Change title.
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Admin Director Posts: 13044 From: EvC Forum Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Thread copied here from the Science or opinion? thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.
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Percy Member Posts: 22505 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.9 |
I've heard rumblings over the past decade or so that fingerprint analysis isn't as reliable as is commonly thought, but I haven't paid much attention. I just took a look at the Wikipedia article on fingerprints and found this quote from an editor of a fingerprint periodical:
Sandy L. Zabell writes: In 1995, the Collaborative Testing Service (CTS) administered a proficiency test that, for the first time, was designed, assembled, and reviewed by the International Association for Identification (IAI).The results were disappointing. Four suspect cards with prints of all ten fingers were provided together with seven latents. Of 156 people taking the test, only 68 (44%) correctly classified all seven latents. Overall, the tests contained a total of 48 incorrect identifications. This doesn't seem surprising where people are involved. Latent prints and especially partials probably leave a lot of room for human interpretation. --Percy
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Trixie Member (Idle past 3735 days) Posts: 1011 From: Edinburgh Joined: |
The Inquiry report goes into detail with regard to confirmation bias and circular reasoning. It's very interesting to see how this sort of thing manifests itself. I see a sort of equivalence in carrying out scientiic experiments without the inclusion of adequate controls. For example, the fingerprint examiners (FE) supposedly worked to a 16 point standard, i.e., they had to find 16 points in agreement and sequence and no unexplained differences before they could call it a identification. However they admitted that sometimes by the time they had found 7 or 8 points in agreement, they had alreay made up their minds and any differences they subsequently encountered must have an explanation, even if that explanation was unknown.
A case was also made by one of them that he would examine only a target area and if the target area had 16 points in agreement he would disregard any differences outwith the target area. Now that worries me greatly because it doesn't matter how many similarities there are, a single, obvious difference precludes identity. That's exactly the same as evidence supporting a scientific theory - it doesn't matter how much corroborative evidence you have, a single piece of evidence contradicting that theory is enough to kill the theory. My contention is that fingerprint identification is science if it is practiced scientifically. What happened in the McKie case happened because the FE lost sight of that basic requirement of science. Declaring that all fingerprint identification is not science is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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Straggler Member (Idle past 95 days) Posts: 10333 From: London England Joined: |
Trix writes: So where do we draw the line between science and opinion? Well (as a starting point) scientific conclusions are necessarily based on scientific evidence whilst opinions have no such restriction. One can have an opinion that is based on evidence, but one can equally hold an opinion that isn't based on evidence or even an opinion which contradicts evidence. Conclusions based on fingerprint analysis would seem to qualify as scientific conclusions rather than opinions on this basis. The fact that the analysis was done poorly in this particular example shouldn't detract from that.
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Jon Inactive Member |
Sandy L. Zabell writes: In 1995, the Collaborative Testing Service (CTS) administered a proficiency test that, for the first time, was designed, assembled, and reviewed by the International Association for Identification (IAI).The results were disappointing. Four suspect cards with prints of all ten fingers were provided together with seven latents. Of 156 people taking the test, only 68 (44%) correctly classified all seven latents. Overall, the tests contained a total of 48 incorrect identifications. This doesn't seem surprising where people are involved. Latent prints and especially partials probably leave a lot of room for human interpretation. According to Wiki, polygraphs are even said to have a better accuracy rate, at about 61%:
quote: It's disturbing that such horribly inaccurate identification methods are allowed in court, where they can be used to completely alter another person's life. Jon Edited by Jon, : No reason given.Love your enemies!
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Of 156 people taking the test, only 68 (44%) correctly classified all seven latents. Overall, the tests contained a total of 48 incorrect identifications. This seems to be a carefully worded conclusion, and I can certainly imagine some situations where a large number of reasonably good technicians would fail to get a perfect score on a test of this sort, while the percentage of correct identifications of finger prints would still be quite high. Let's also recall that in an adversarial proceeding, we would expect sloppy fingerprint determinations to be challenged by other fingerprint experts. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 314 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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Let's also recall that in an adversarial proceeding, we would expect sloppy fingerprint determinations to be challenged by other fingerprint experts. ... if you can afford them.
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
According to Wiki, polygraphs are even said to have a better accuracy rate, at about 61% I think your estimation of the accuracy rate for fingerprinting is off, 156 people were to identify 7 fingerprints so there were presumably ~1092 identifications potentially made, of which 48 were incorrect. Only 68 of the respondents correctly identified all the samples, meaning that 88 respondents didn't, but since only 48 incorrect identifications were made the remaining ones are presumably instances where the respondent chose not to make an identification. There are no figures provided in Percy's quote for how many times the respondents who didn't get all 7 right declined to make an identification, but unless it is very high the chances are slim that the accuracy was below 61%. CTS appear to run tests like this on a regular basis, see here, and several of these have results where ~90% of the respondents got all of the identifications correct. So perhaps the first year was just an outlier. TTFN, WK
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4046 Joined: Member Rating: 7.6
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It's disturbing that such horribly inaccurate identification methods are allowed in court, where they can be used to completely alter another person's life. Eyewitness testimony is roughly as bad. Trial by jury sounds like a great idea, but frankly juries terrify me because the average person will often weigh the least reliable evidence as the most damning. Having been on a jury once served only to make that fear worse. The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
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NoNukes Inactive Member |
Eyewitness testimony as a whole is far less accurate than is circumstantial evidence.
In my experience, fingerprint evidence has been extremely reliable. The implication that it is unreliable 44 per cent of the time appears to be a flawed one. Almost every bad finger print ID I've ever read about was based on fraud rather than scientific error. Dr. Adequate points out the truth that it can be expensive to challenge finger print evidence. I can agree with that, but generally, indigent defendants can force the state to foot the bill for challenging finger print evidence.
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Jon Inactive Member |
Eyewitness testimony is roughly as bad. And I don't think eyewitness testimony should be allowed in court. There was, I think, a thread about a similar topic on the short-lived spin-off forum Politicus Maximus... but the Wayback Machine doesn't seem to recognize the name. But the issue here, I guess, is the status of fingerprint analysis as a science or not. I think the whole thing is a bunch of match-up and puzzle-doing; more of a hobby, really, and so even if practiced scientifically, probably not overly reliable since it depends on the abilities of the analysts more than on some rigorous standards that are harder to screw up. JonLove your enemies!
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Straggler Member (Idle past 95 days) Posts: 10333 From: London England Joined: |
Jon writes: I think the whole thing is a bunch of match-up and puzzle-doing; more of a hobby, really, and so even if practiced scientifically, probably not overly reliable since it depends on the abilities of the analysts more than on some rigorous standards that are harder to screw up. Surely this is just a question of technology. A sufficiently advanced pattern matching algorithm could surely allow computers to do all the matching required and to rigorously determine the statistical likelihood of error based on the quality of any given fingerprint. If the premise of fingerprint matching is sound but human involvement in matching is the failing here then that can be technologically overcome.
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Rahvin Member Posts: 4046 Joined: Member Rating: 7.6 |
Surely this is just a question of technology. A sufficiently advanced pattern matching algorithm could surely allow computers to do all the matching required and to rigorously determine the statistical likelihood of error based on the quality of any given fingerprint. If the premise of fingerprint matching is sound but human involvement in matching is the failing here then that can be technologically overcome. I wonder at the actual training received by the fingerprint analysts, and whether they themselves are actual trained scientists. But I think the real problem is how fingerprints are presented to juries. Like with DNA, a typical jury member is going to just say "well, his prints were there, so he did it," without understanding the relative probabilities involved when dealing with fingerprint analysis. The print card may have a nice set of prints, but the prints you leave on an object through normal contact aren't nearly so clear. When the jury hears "it was a match," I'm not sure that they are actually told how much of a match the prints are. A positive match on 25% of a thumbprint is useful information, but it's not as significant as a match to multiple different full prints ( > 80% latents for both thumb and forefinger, for example). I don't think the average jury member thinks along those lines unless the defense has an expert who specifically directs them that way.The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
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Jon Inactive Member |
A sufficiently advanced pattern matching algorithm could surely allow computers to do all the matching required and to rigorously determine the statistical likelihood of error based on the quality of any given fingerprint. Perhaps. As I said, though, even if we find a way to practice fingerprint analysis scientifically, can we ever consider the analysts to be reliable? I brought up polygraphs earlier. Reading the Wiki article further, we find this:
quote: How does the testimony of finger print analysts compare? Even when we make the practice scientific, how reliable, really, are the 'experts' giving the testimony? JonLove your enemies!
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