FINGERPRINTS ARE NOW "JAILING" THE INNOCENT

FINGERPRINTS ARE NOW "JAILING" THE INNOCENT


The CHICAGO TRIBUNE on January 3, 2005 reports that digitized prints can point finger at the innocent.

Deep inside a sprawling complex tucked in the hills of this Appalachian town, a room full of supercomputers attempts to sift America's guilty from its innocent.

This is where the FBI keeps its vast database of fingerprints, allowing examiners to conduct criminal checks from computer screens in less than 30 minutes--something that previously took them weeks as they rummaged through 2,100 file cabinets stuffed with inked print cards.

But the same digital technology that has allowed the FBI to speed such checks so dramatically over the last few years has created the risk of accusing people who are innocent, the Tribune has found.

Across the country, police departments and crime labs are submitting fingerprints for comparisons and for entry into databases, using digital images that may be missing crucial details or may have been manipulated without the FBI knowing it.

Not unlike a picture from a typical digital camera, a digital fingerprint provides less complete detail than a traditional photographic image. That matters little with pictures from the family vacation. But when the digital image is of a fingerprint, the lack of precision raises the specter of false identifications in criminal cases.

An FBI-sponsored group of fingerprint examiners was concerned enough about the quality of digital images that in 2001 it recommended doubling their resolution. Three years later, though, the vast majority of police agencies still use equipment with the lower resolution.

Equally troublesome, the most commonly used image-enhancement software, Adobe Photoshop, leaves no record of some of the changes police technicians can perform as they clean up fingerprint images to make them easier to compare.

This seemingly esoteric issue is crucial because it raises questions about a bulwark of the criminal justice system: chain of custody. If authorities cannot prove that a fingerprint is an accurate representation of the original and show exactly how it was handled, its validity can be questioned.

FBI officials recognize the resolution problem but say it leads to overlooking guilty people, not falsely accusing the innocent. (Ask the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, if you don't believe the FBI.)

from "Planet of the Chimps" http://chimpplanet.journalspace.com/