Ed. Note: Chris Halkides has been kind enough to try to make us lawyers smarter by dumbing down science enough that we have a small chance of understanding how it’s being used to wrongfully convict and, in some cases, execute defendants. Chris graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and teaches biochemistry, organic chemistry, and forensic chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
From the perspective of the defense, excluding the defendant does not require that the person who made the fingermark (an unintentionally made impression) be identified. However, when they point to an alternate suspect, they gain value as evidence. The location or medium in which fingermarks are made occasionally give probative value, for example when a medium such as blood localizes the time period in which the fingermark was made. There are over 160 million fingerprints (deliberately made impressions) in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). Therefore, an automated searching system, followed by manual checking, is used to identify the source of fingermarks. Continue reading →