Lucille Johnson Fingerprints Case Study
Fingerprints
Since the beginning of the 19th century, criminalists have been using fingerprints to identify and capture criminals. It has proved that so far, fingerprints are unique and nobody will ever have the same exact print. With this as a fact, fingerprints have helped police and investigators solve many crimes including the case of Lucille Johnson(1), the Stratton Brothers case(2), and the Carroll Bonnet case(3).
Although fingerprints have been used to solve many cases, people question the authenticity of using fingerprints to link a person as a suspect of a crime because mistakes can occur. Examples of a case where the wrong person was convicted is in the case of Lana Canen(4). She was wrongly convicted for the murder of her neighbor and was spent to prison for 55 years. Eventually, she was proved innocent after the fingerprint analyzer admitted that he only examined the fingerprint at a 1st level analysis. So the question is, should we really depend on fingerprints as definite proof of a crime? …show more content…
Fingerprints are very useful to identify people, but in order for it to be more admissible in court and in claims, it should be examined more carefully.
Instead of having all of the fingerprint analyzers work together, it should all be anonymous to prevent anybody from being biased against each other's’ work. (5)Laura Spinney says that, “the problem lies not so much with the individual examiners, but more with the ACE-V identification procedure they follow in most countries,” meaning that the examiners were following unsystematic rules and protocols, relying on their friends and fellow workers to double check for them. This is not acceptable because this is where biased feelings occur. In order to prevent this carelessness, fingerprint examiners should not be able to know who checked which print and instead rely on their own judgments to make a real accurate match with the latent
print.
By doing this, fingerprints will be a lot more reliable as well as more accurate with more people double checking the prints.
Since the beginning of the 19th century, criminalists have been using fingerprints to identify and capture criminals. It has proved that so far, fingerprints are unique and nobody will ever have the same exact print. With this as a fact, fingerprints have helped police and investigators solve many crimes including the case of Lucille Johnson(1), the Stratton Brothers case(2), and the Carroll Bonnet case(3).
Although fingerprints have been used to solve many cases, people question the authenticity of using fingerprints to link a person as a suspect of a crime because mistakes can occur. Examples of a case where the wrong person was convicted is in the case of Lana Canen(4). She was wrongly convicted for the murder of her neighbor and was spent to prison for 55 years. Eventually, she was proved innocent after the fingerprint analyzer admitted that he only examined the fingerprint at a 1st level analysis. So the question is, should we really depend on fingerprints as definite proof of a crime? …show more content…
Fingerprints are very useful to identify people, but in order for it to be more admissible in court and in claims, it should be examined more carefully.
Instead of having all of the fingerprint analyzers work together, it should all be anonymous to prevent anybody from being biased against each other's’ work. (5)Laura Spinney says that, “the problem lies not so much with the individual examiners, but more with the ACE-V identification procedure they follow in most countries,” meaning that the examiners were following unsystematic rules and protocols, relying on their friends and fellow workers to double check for them. This is not acceptable because this is where biased feelings occur. In order to prevent this carelessness, fingerprint examiners should not be able to know who checked which print and instead rely on their own judgments to make a real accurate match with the latent
print.
By doing this, fingerprints will be a lot more reliable as well as more accurate with more people double checking the prints.