Why your fingerprints may not be unique

[Locutus]

Nobody has yet proved that fingerprints are unique and families can share elements of the same pattern.

Fingerprint evidence linking criminals to crime scenes has played a fundamental role in convictions in Britain since the first forensic laboratory was set up in Scotland Yard in 1901.

But the basic assumption that everyone has a unique fingerprint from which they can be quickly identified through a computer database is flawed, an expert has claimed.

Mike Silverman, who introduced the first automated fingerprint detection system to the Metropolitan Police, claims that human error, partial prints and false positives mean that fingerprints evidence is not as reliable as is widely believed.

Nobody has yet proved that fingerprints are unique and families can share elements of the same pattern.


elementary dear watson



Why your fingerprints may not be unique - Telegraph

 

[tay]

Here's an interesting read on how DNA can go wrong....................




The strange case of the 'time travel' murder




A woman had been brutally murdered in London and biological material had been found under her fingernails, possibly indicating that she might have scratched her attacker just before she died.

A sample of the material was analysed and results compared with the National DNA database and quickly came back with a positive match.

The problem was, the "hit" identified a woman who had herself been murdered - a full three weeks before the death of her alleged "victim".

The killings had taken place in different areas of the capital and were being investigated by separate teams of detectives.

With no sign of a connection between the two women and nothing to suggest they had ever met, the most "likely" scenario was that the samples had been mixed-up or contaminated at the one obvious place that they had come together - the forensic laboratory. A complaint was made by the senior investigating officer.

It was 1997 and I was the national account manager for the Forensic Science Service at the time, so it was my responsibility to find out if a mistake had been made at the laboratory.

My first thought was that perhaps the second victim's fingernail clipping had been mislabelled and had actually come from the first victim all along. As soon as I started to look at the samples, I could see this wasn't the case.


The victim had painted her nails with a distinctive leopard skin pattern and the cuttings that had been taken bore the exact same pattern. There was no doubt that they were the correct ones.

I then checked through the laboratory records to see if there was any way the samples could have been accidentally mixed-up.

This too turned out to be a non-starter as the two sets of samples had never been out of the lab's exhibit store at the same time. In any event, several weeks had passed between the analysis of the first and second clippings and different members of staff had been involved.



more


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26324244