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.
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