he fact is that, i te UK, prior to this case, FEs were not cross-examined, they did not illustrate the evidence on which they based their findings and they declared that they were 100% certain.
I took some time to read portions of the Fingerprint Inquiry Report, and I came away with a slightly different impression. Apparently there were court procedures for challenging fingerprint evidence, but apparently the use of the procedures was quite rare.
From the report with reference to Ms. McKie's trial for perjury. Mostly from chapter 11.
quote:
The defence position changed dramatically when Mr Wertheim examined the mark on 24 March 1999. That was less than three weeks before the start of the sitting of the High Court when the trial was scheduled to take place. From that point both
prosecution and defence were dealing with a situation that was unique, at least in Scotland.
Also
quote:
Equally, there can be no criticism of the Crown failing to instruct an external review of the fingerprint evidence at that stage. The conflict among the fingerprint examiners for the prosecution and the defence was a matter for the jury
It seems that there were procedures for challenging fingerprint evidence, but that the prosecution was utterly unprepared for the reality that someone might actually want to do so.
What I find fascinating about the perjury trial is that in the US, government witnesses are almost never tried for testimony that is demonstrated in court to be false. In cases where the evidence is primarily fingerprint evidence, among the more obvious lines of defense must be a bad identification.
quote:
It is unlikely that, even with the benefit of more time to prepare, the SCRO witnesses would have been able to present their evidence in a more effective manner. The SCRO examiners were ill-prepared to meet the challenge. Fingerprint evidence having been for so long treated as routine evidence the SCRO examiners had neither the training nor the experience to equip them to justify their opinions.
My impression is that the treatment of fingerprint evidence in Scotland may have become atrophied and sloppy through the lack of vigorous challenges, to the point where Ms. McKie was subjected to a trial based on accusations generally aren't even pursued. If my impression is a fair assessment, then perhaps we should be grateful that left leaning, bleeding heart lawyers here in the US put DA's through the wringer while defending people we'd consider to be criminal scum.
The report doesn't challenge the idea that fingerprints are unique, but rather the idea that people are actually performing fingerprint analysis for the state are actually able to give relevant testimony on the identification based on their comparisons of fingerprint exemplars to non-ideal, perhaps incomplete and distorted impressions found at crime scenes. The two ideas are markedly different.
I'd recommend reading Chapter 12 of the report which deals with the testimony and cross examination at trial.
Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.